Illness of aged parents and children relationships with them: case study of aged parents of Sabzevar City-Iran

Shafieh Ghodrati, Hakim Sabzevari University
Hossein Ghodrati, Hakim Sabzevari University
Dariush Boostani, Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman

This paper investigates the relationships of children with their old parents with an emphasis on illness of parents. Data were collected from a sample of 400 old men and women aged 60+ through multi-stages cluster sampling in Sabzevar city. Parents were asked to answer four questions: are you generally satisfied with your children?; Do they have affable and warm relations with you?; Do they meet you?; Do they help you generally?.Dependent variable was formed through computing the four questions. Findings shows that there is negative correlations between independent variables of age, income as well as number of children with dependent variable. Furthermore parents who are ill, attain significant higher scores in first three questions than healthy parents. However there is not significant difference in the score of last question between two groups. Test of mean difference according to gender of parents indicates that old mothers are more satisfied with their children than old fathers and also they recieve more help from their children compared with old fathers. It is notable that there is no significant relationship between age and illness. Stepwise regression analysis indicated that three variables including respondent’s income, age and illness were used in the equation in order and explained the variance of dependent variable. We can conclude that although normally old parents receive more helps in the condition of being sick however old mothers experience better life in relationships with their children than old fathers.