NONNORMATIVE PARENTING IMPACTS IN MIDLIFE AND OLD AGE

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This research builds on the progress of a small grant and uses the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) to investigate the long-range effects of non-normative parenting. Parents who have either a child with a developmental disability (DD) or schizophrenia, or who have experienced the death of a child, will be compared with unaffected parents with respect to parental attainment and well being as the parent?s transition from midlife to the early retirement years. Using a new set of screening measures, parents in these groups will be identified in the WLS cohort. Affected WLS parents will be compared with unaffected parents, controlling for differences among the parent groups before the non-normative parenting event occurred. The analyses will include within group ssessments of heterogeneity among WLS parents who experienced a nonnormative parenting challenge, cross-sectional group comparisons at various points in the life course, and longitudinal analyses of the effects of non-normative parenting experiences on the life course trajectories and outcomes. The study has four specific aims: (1) to investigate how parents of children with DD or schizophrenia and parents who have lost a child to death differ from parents of unaffected children in midlife and in the transition to retirement; (2) to investigate the effect of the timing of these non-normative parenting events on parental life course trajectories and well-being; (3) to examine the differential impact on mothers versus fathers of having a child with a disability or experiencing the death of a child; and (4) to replicate these analyses using data from the NSFH survey in order to compare the WLS findings to those obtained in a national sample with a broader age range. The proposed research integrates the life course perspective with models of process and change from the stress and coping framework to understand life-long patterns of adaptation associated with non-normative parenting experiences. The WLS provides an unprecedented opportunity to study the effects of non-normative parenting for a sample that was recruited and assessed before the events occurred, and is thus less vulnerable to the self- selection biases that constrained previous research.