Older mothers and their difficult adult children: a life course exploration

ABSTRACT

Adult child to parent violence is a growing international social problem that needs to be better understood to develop clinical interventions. An exploratory study on the antecedents of early life adversity on adult child to parent violence/elder mistreatment was carried out using secondary analysis. Directed content analysis was used based on life course theory with a data set of older mothers all > 57 years old (J. R. Smith 2021, 2022). Measurement of instances of child abuse, domestic violence, and birth trauma among abused older mothers was conducted. All the older women had reported being negatively affected by their adult children’s problems and 56% reported being physically attacked. A case example is presented to illustrate how repeated incidents of abuse or neglect in early life might explain an older woman’s inability to take actions for her own safety.

KEYWORDS:

• Adult child-to-parent violence
• adult children
• adverse childhood experiences
• mothering

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.