Abstract
This study aimed to investigate theories on elder care, traumatic past, and intergenerational solidarity within psychology, gerontology, sociology, and philosophy to gain a broad theoretical understanding of adult children’s elder care decision and inner struggle. Adult children, exemplified by three vignettes, report their decision of wanting to contribute to the welfare of all elders except their own parents. They describe their inner struggle as the wish to overcome the burden of shame while remaining silent over their decision. Since decision as well as inner struggle appeared different from revenge, theoretical understanding on intergenerational solidarity was examined.
A comprehensive multidisciplinary literature review and a two-stage analytic procedure was employed in order to meet the novelty and challenge of the topic. The challenge comprise the broad context of the matter (i.e., elder care and solidarity) and the simultaneously high level specificity and complexity of the situation (i.e., early trauma and later care). The procedure provided a different and new perspective on the highly investigated topic of elder care as it included philosophical principles guiding intergenerational duties. As the specificity as well as the generality of both decision and inner struggle reflected a serious problem for theories across the disciplines, analysis revealed that no conclusive explanation for such a real-world topic exists.
For the inner struggle, diverse theoretical understandings pointed overwhelmingly to the explanation of revenge once the long-term dynamics of early trauma were considered. However, theories conflicted when promoting care or no care dependent on the discipline’s stance. Theories also disagreed on understanding elder neglect as a form of abuse. Advancing the ethics of care position into a trump card helped explaining the inner struggle’s silence over the shame of not caring. Advancing the exchange model towards a balance between present and past care uncovered that a presumed balance between the generations leaves open what kind of care will ever be able to ‘repay’ care. Advancing betrayal theory into the adult years of traumatic relationships brought up new questions about trauma blindness, attachment needs, and a possible alternative to revenge. Since no theory found suffcient explanation for the inner struggle’s silence and shame, open questions remain about revenge. Importance: While theoretical understanding signifies revenge as ought to happen, this study found two indicators that might classify revenge: (1) the different roles earlier victim and perpetrator occupy, and (2) the silence that concerns either past or present shameful traumatic events.
For the decision, theories revealed a puzzling state of a air. There was no consensus on a lack of care or solidarity. A multitude of perspectives with conflicting interpretations and definitions gave no clear understanding on the decision. Two major gerontological theories were only able to explain some aspects of adult children’s decision, leaving an explanatory gap. Importance: The study argues that it is essential to differentiate commitments of potential carers on different levels (personal vs. societal) as individuals are part of both personal and societal level networks. Secondly, it appears important to integrate both the intrapsychic and the interpersonal (ambivalence and solidarity). A tentative operationalization for future research is established. These propositions may help explaining the decision making process of a yet unexplained real world phenomena.
For both inner struggle and decision the philosophical baseline understanding of intergenerational duties revealed that all philosophical ideas indicated revenge when no care was considered. As the utilitarian consequentialist thinking unfolded the main interpretation of ‘giving back of what has been received,’ it became apparent that the consequential idea of ‘the greater good for all’ has the potential to coerce adult children into caring. The consequentialist logic of ‘the end justifying the mean’ revealed that both inner struggle and decision needed to be understood internally as well as externally as the social interactional dynamics appear important to be considered. Importance: If theory continues to provide an argument that is primarily based on utility and/or reciprocation, then we seem to have a problem because we start labeling and typecast each other already in the midst of theoretical knowledge seeking and expertise. And this appears to be an issue worth for further investigations.