Family ties in the 'empty nest' phase: relations between parents and their adult children across Europe

Eva Bernhardt, Stockholm University
Kenneth Aarskaug Wiik, Statistics Norway

In the proposed paper parents’ relationship to adult non-coresident children, from the parent’s perspective, will be studied using comparable data from the first wave of the Generation and Gender Survey. Building on earlier studies, we will contrast ‘relationship quality’ and ‘contact frequency’ (controlling for ‘proximity’), investigating how various dimensions of family complexity are associated with the strength or the weakness of family ties for the different dyads (mother-daughter, mother-son, father-daughter, father-son), expecting stronger impact of divorce and cohabitation in countries where these phenomena are less common.