A new study has proven something that has long been widely acknowledged - that the emotional well-being of parents is linked to the successes and struggles of their children, even if they are grown up. Yet researchers also found that the link between the emotional wellbeing of parents and their children is even deeper than ever suspected.
While researchers expected parents to suffer if their grown children struggled through crises such as divorce or unemployment, they believed that having children who were successful would bring parents’ joy and improved emotional well-being. However, it seems that the effects of successful children are not enough to mitigate the effects of problem children. Just one unhappy child among other successful children is enough to lead to symptoms of worry and depression in parents.
The researchers were surprised to find mothers and fathers were only as happy as their least happy child, said study leader Karen Fingerman, a professor in human development and family sciences at the University of Texas in Austin.
The study was published in the ‘Journals of Gerontology: Psycological Sciences,’ and stated that:
“We had expected that a successful child might mitigate the negative impact of having a child who suffers problems. The successful child might give the parent something positive to focus on. But parents still seem to suffer even when one of their grown children does.
“It could be the case that parents empathize with their children’s distress, they are embarrassed that their relationships with these grown children suffer, or that grown children who have problems may place excessive demands on the parents,” she said.
“Any one or all of these factors may contribute to parental worry and depression.”
Fingerman believes that parents are sensitive to positive and negative events in their children’s lives because it reflects on their own achievements in parenting.
“Parents have a distinct investment in grown children reflecting decades of child-rearing,” she said.