Life Course Impacts of Nonnormative Parenting

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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 respect to the parents' attainment and well-being as they 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 took place. The analyses will include within- group assessments of heterogeneity among WLS parents who experienced a non-normative 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 life course trajectories and outcomes. The research questions will (1) investigate how the life course in educational, occupational, marital, and childbearing domains diverges when parents have long-term caregiving responsibilities for a child with DD or schizophrenia, or when they experience the death of a child, (2) contrast the resources and well-being of four groups of parents (those who have a child with DD, schizophrenia, experience the death of a child, and a normative comparison group), (3) examine how divergent life course trajectories and unmet aspirations affect the parents' well- being, (4) analyze the extent to which social and psychological resources moderate parental adaptation during midlife and the early retirement years, and (5) investigate the effects of newly- experienced non-normative parenting events between midlife and the early retirement years. This 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 before the events occurred, and is thus less vulnerable to the self-selection biases that constrained previous research.