The study authors interviewed 381 older mothers with at least two living adult children. They also recorded demographic information about the children and mothers, looking for factors predicting the strength of emotional bonds between mother and child. The strongest predictor of closeness, they found, was whether a child shared the mother’s values — things like religious beliefs, for example, or an aversion to divorce. Shared values even beat out considerations like a child’s education level, geographic distance, and whether a child had cared for a mother when she was sick.
“[They might say] ‘I’m the one who finished college,’ ‘I’m the one who went to law school,’ or ‘I’m the one who just made partner,’” says lead study author Jill Suitor, a sociologist at Purdue University. “Conversely, a child might drop out of high school. But moms put up with a lot in adult children, and it doesn’t affect who moms are emotionally close to.”
The team also uncovered a special relationship between mothers and daughters — mothers were almost three times as likely to identify a daughter, rather than a son, as the child they were emotionally closest to. But they were also twice as likely to say they had the most conflict with a daughter, which Suitor says could be explained by gendered parental expectations: Daughters are more often conditioned to view themselves as part of their parents’ family, even in adulthood, while sons might be conditioned to emphasize adult independence. Daughterly closeness, in turn, could precipitate more conflict.
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