Dynamics of Adult Child-Mother Relationships in Emerging Adulthood by Gender and Race

Abstract

Despite the turbulence of emerging adulthood, past research has mostly overlooked within-person heterogeneity in adult children’s levels of contact and closeness with their mothers during this period. Research further obscures how such temporal relationship patterns may vary across sociodemographic categories. We identify unique trajectories of the adult child-mother relationship using sequence analysis on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979-Young Adult data set (N = 2,299). About one-third of mother-adult child dyads are characterized by consistently high levels of contact and closeness. The other two-thirds shift considerably over this life course stage, with differences in trajectory distributions by gender and race. For example, White sons are the least likely to be in the only socially positive group, whereas Black sons are the least likely to be in the low closeness group. We provide a social-psychological-informed perspective on intergenerational relationships during emerging adulthood, which highlights how social location shapes intergenerational dynamic ties during children’s emerging adult life course stage.