AGING PARENTS WITH A MENTALLY ILL ADULT CHILD AT HOME

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This is a revised application that seeks support for a study on the mental health of aging parents who have an adult child with schizophrenia. The aging parents in these families face the dual challenge of continuing responsibility for an adult son or daughter with schizophrenia at the same time that they must deal with the manifestations of their own aging. The proposed study builds upon our research during the past 10 years on aging caregiving mothers of adult children with mental illness, and our comparative work contrasting these mothers with aging mothers of adults with mental retardation. We propose to conduct a three-wave longitudinal study of 300 aging families of adults with schizophrenia who have lived with their mother, age 60-85, for at least the past five years. The study will address the following questions, all within the context of Pearlin's stress process model: (1) What are the factors that contribute to positive and negative psychological well-being in mothers with an adult child who has schizophrenia? To what extent do mothers and fathers differ in the factors that affect their psychological well- being? (2) What are the antecedents to and consequences of the transition from parental to non-parental care? (3) How are the experiences of parents of an adult with schizophrenia similar to and different from those of aging parents of adults with mental retardation? The research involves multiple sets of comparisons driven by a single theoretical model to test the generalizability of the stress process in different caregiving contexts. This study will be the first large scale multiwave longitudinal study of aging parents of adults with schizophrenia and will thus provide new insights about the stress and coping process and implications for mental health policy development.