What Would Your Parents Say? The Impact of Cohabitation Among Young People on Their Relationships with Their Parents

There is a long-standing debate about the impact of adult children’s life styles and status attainment on the quality of family relations and family members’ life satisfaction (Pillemer and Suitor 2002; Proctor et al. 2009). In particular, researchers have stressed the role of the sometimes contradictory norms and expectations that adult children are expected to fulfil in order to maintain a good relationship with their parents. Recent literature has emphasised that when young people make partnership choices that clash with social attitudes and norms, a deterioration in their relations with their parents may occur (Rosina and Fraboni 2004; Di Giulio and Rosina 2007; Schröder 2008). Both the general social expectations regarding the transition to adulthood and the specific norms concerning union formation may be of importance.

Many societies have certain norms regarding the status a person is expected to achieve after reaching some specific age in order to be regarded as an adult. In general, young people are usually expected to complete their education, find a stable job, leave the parental home and establish an independent life; and, ultimately, to become a potential source of support for their parents. These social expectations may also include getting married and forming their own family (Liefbroer and Billari 2010). This norm applies specifically to the countries where marriage is very strongly valued. In such countries, young adults who remain unmarried may be regarded as avoiding responsibility and commitments, and their unmarried status may have a negative impact on their relationship with their parents.

The norms that condition adulthood and maturity on marital status may overlap with social attitudes towards living arrangements that are an alternative to marriage, such as cohabitation. These attitudes can be related to religious influences, such as the belief that living in a non-marital relationship is a sin. In societies where, from a moral point of view, marriage is considered the only “proper” route to family formation, and cohabitation is not regarded as an acceptable living arrangement, adult children who cohabit might be seen as failing to respect the rules their parents tried to teach them (Maslauskaitė 2011).

Importantly, from a conceptual point of view, the discrepancy between social expectations and the life choices of young adults does not necessarily affect the behavioural aspects of family cohesion. In other words, cohabitation may not translate into a lower frequency of meetings or a decrease in intergenerational support, even if it does produce some ambivalence in relationships. First, behavioural aspects of family cohesion may reflect the impact of norms and social expectations, rather than genuine affection (Kalmijn and Dykstra 2006). Young people may feel obliged to meet with their parents frequently, even if the quality of their relationship with their parents is rather poor. Moreover, the divergence between the norms regarding status attainment by young adults and the actual life course transitions experienced by young people may cause parents to feel more obliged to get involved in their adult children’s lives (Pillemer and Suitor 2002). Second, face-to-face meetings are not the only means of maintaining contact; recently developed technologies make it easier for family members to stay in touch, and these communication tools are playing an increasingly important role in these relationships as mobility rises and the pace of life becomes faster. Thus, it can appear that young people meet with their parents only sporadically, when in fact they have frequent contact and a good relationship with their parents. Summing up, even if their partnership form has not been accepted by their parents, the behavioural aspects of family cohesion will not reveal any cleavage or ambivalence in the relationship between adult children and their parents. Still, choosing cohabitation may affect the degree of satisfaction young people derive from their relationship with their parents, and may thus have an impact on their quality of life.

In some recent international comparisons, Poland has stood out as a country with a low level of social acceptance for cohabitation. For example, Soons and Kalmijn (2009) showed that the average level of social acceptance of a couple living together “under the same roof” without being married is lower in Poland than the European average. Similarly, Vanassche et al. (2012) showed that Poland belongs to the group of countries with a relatively high level of disapproval of alternative family types like cohabitation, and a marked attachment to the institution of marriage. While in many European countries cohabitation has already become a viable and widely accepted alternative to marriage (Kalmijn 2007a; Kiernan 2004), in Poland the onset of the processes that lead to the adoption of more positive social attitudes towards cohabitation has been very recent.

To provide a more detailed picture of the level of social acceptance for cohabitation, we can look at data from the European Values Survey 2008, which showed that the share of respondents who said they consider it acceptable for a couple to live together without being married was around 61 % in Poland. Clearly, cohabitation is not condemned by the vast majority of Polish society. The share of people in Poland who indicated they accept cohabitation was close to the proportion observed in most Central and Eastern European countries. Nevertheless, the share was definitely smaller than in Western Europe, where it ranged from 75 to 90 %; and in Scandinavian countries, where about 95 % of the population surveyed said they consider it acceptable for couples to live together without being married.

The limited degree of social acceptance of cohabitation and the high value placed on marriage may be largely ascribed to the influence of the Roman Catholic Church. According to the teachings of the Church, getting involved in intimate relations of any form that are not “legitimated” by a marriage can be regarded as a sin. According to data collected in the International Social Survey Programme 2008, over 90 % of Poles were raised in the Catholic Church, compared with an average of 49 % in other European countries. Hence, the perception of cohabitation in Polish society may be to some extent related to the teachings of Catholic priests. Another factor that may negatively affect social attitudes towards cohabitation is related to the fact that, in Poland, this living arrangement has until recently been most common among the lower social strata and among people with adverse partnership experiences (Mynarska and Bernardi 2007). The negative gradient in socio-economic status may have created a negative image of cohabitation in Polish society. Indeed, the colloquial expressions describing cohabitation—“to live at a cat’s paw” or “to live together with a cycling license”, which are the Polish counterparts of the British expression “living over t’brush”—have rather negative connotations, and seem to imply that these relationships are insecure and “not serious” (Mynarska and Bernardi 2007).

While in general the level of social acceptance of cohabitation is lower in Poland than in other European countries, it has been gradually increasing. Younger generations tend to have more positive attitudes towards such living arrangements (Mynarska and Bernardi 2007). Moreover, they are engaging in this form of partnership with increasing frequency. The results presented by Mynarska and Matysiak (2010) showed that, while cohabitation amounted to about 12 % of all unions formed in the first half of the 1,990 s, this percentage had tripled by 2004–2006. Thus, even though younger generations were still more likely to form their first partnership by marrying rather than by cohabitation, the tendency towards the deinstitutionalisation of union formation was evident. Still, it remains an open question whether choosing this form of relationship is neutral with respect to the quality of the relationships young people have with members of the older generation in their families.

Our analyses draw on data from the Polish GGS carried out in 2010. The survey was conducted by means of face-to-face interviews in a nationally representative sample. The questionnaire was based on the guidelines formulated by the international committee that set up the Generation and Gender Programme (Vikat et al. 2008). The GGS provides very detailed information on life course transitions, particularly on union formation processes, and it is also a valuable source of data on intergenerational relations.

For the purposes of this study, we used a subsample of the GGS data made up of cohorts born in 1970–1993, i.e. the cohorts who entered adulthood after the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Previous generations might have made different life choices (including choices about the type of union) based on the specific institutional conditions of the socialist regime. For example, housing was subject to state regulation in socialist countries (Matysiak 2011; Horowitz 1991; Szelényi 1987). In the state-controlled distribution of housing units, married couples were given preference relative to unmarried couples or single people (Zeman 2003). Hence, the fact that marriage conferred certain privileges may have affected the partnership choices of older cohorts.

We restricted our attention to those individuals who had formed their first union by the time of the survey, with a union being defined as living together with the partner (regardless of whether the couple were married). Based on information on the formation of the first union, we divided young people into two groups: those who married directly and those who decided to cohabit. Hence, rather than focusing solely on the current marital status of the adult children, we considered the impact of the key life course transition, i.e. the formation of the first partnership. We excluded young people whose parents were no longer alive, because for this group we have no information about their relationship with their parents. Data on respondents with missing information on any of the control variables were deleted to keep the sample sizes consistent across models. In the final sample, there were 2,764 observations available for use in our analysis.

The dependent variable is the self-rated level of satisfaction derived from relationships with parents, as measured by responses to the following a question: “How satisfied are you with the relationship with your father/mother?” The assessments of adult children were coded on a scale from zero to 10. In the multivariate analysis of this outcome, we used a number of control variables that correspond to the individual characteristics of the young people and to the characteristics of their parents.

First, we controlled for the cohort in which a young person was born (or, in other words, we controlled for the impact of age). We did this for two reasons. First, previous research has shown that the degree of closeness between children and their parents may decline as children get older (Grundy and Shelton 2001). Second, people’s level of satisfaction with their relationship with their parents may change as parents reach more advanced ages and need more support from their adult children. Over the course of children’s lives, there is a period of disengagement from parents in early adulthood when children become adults and establish their own lives, followed by a period of increasing closeness in mid-life (Rossi and Rossi 1990).

We also controlled for the impact of gender, because previous studies have shown that women place greater importance on close emotional bonds with family members and are more compassionate and altruistic (Lye 1996). As Maslauskaitė (2011) has emphasised, because female identity is socially constructed around sustaining kinship, daughters tend to have more frequent and intense contact with their parents than sons. Hence, the gender of adult children may affect the degree of satisfaction they derive from their relationship with their parents.

According to previous studies, lower socio-economic status (as measured by educational attainment and income) is associated with lower levels of satisfaction with family relations (Komter and Knijn 2006). This could be related to the ambiguity of parent-adult child relations when adult children fail to attain the status that is expected of them, i.e. if they fail to become financially independent (Pillemer et al. 2007). Therefore, our set of control variables includes young people’s educational attainment (with the following categories: tertiary, upper secondary, lower secondary, primary and in education).² For similar reasons, we also included a variable indicating whether respondents were employed, as well as a measure of how young people rated the financial standing of their household (we placed responses to the question of whether the household is able to make ends meet on a six-point scale, which allowed us to distinguish between those who were doing well and those who were experiencing difficulties). Adding the latter measure was important given the high proportion of low-wage workers in Poland (Casali and Alvarez 2010).

In most religious belief systems, there are norms that children should respect their parents. Hence, religious people may be more likely to maintain high-quality relations with their parents. Indeed, empirical research has shown that people who are more religious also claim to have better family relationships (Komter and Knijn 2006). In the Roman Catholic Church, which dominates in Poland, the norm that children should respect their parents is explicitly stated in one of the Ten Commandments. Therefore, we introduced measures of individual religiosity into the models (we distinguished between those who indicated that religion played a “very important” or an “important” role in their lives, and compared them with those who stated that religion was “neither important nor unimportant”, “unimportant” or “totally unimportant” to them).

The proximity of the parental home to the current place of residence of a young person is one of the strongest factors affecting intergenerational relations (Maslauskaitė 2011). Proximity facilitates frequent contact and the exchange of support, which may also have a positive impact on the overall level of satisfaction with the relationship on both sides (Bengtson and Roberts 1991; Grundy and Shelton 2001). Therefore, we controlled for the time that was needed to commute between these two locations. For young people who actually lived in the same household as their parents, we did not impute a distance amounting to zero, but instead included a separate dummy for this category. The other categories are as follows: a commute of less than 15 min, a commute of between 15 and 30 min and a commute of half an hour or more.

Finally, we controlled for the time that had passed from age 15 until the union formation, the time since the formation of the first union until the date of the interview and the current union status. The timing of the union formation needs to be considered in the analysis because partnerships that are formed early in life, among people who are still heavily dependent on their parents, may have a different meaning and impact than unions that are established among more mature adults. Partnerships formed early in life may be regarded as resulting from premature decisions, and are less likely to have parental support. The time since the union formation may also moderate the impact of the partnership on the quality of the relationship with the parents. As was noted in (Nazio and Saraceno 2012), individuals in a newly formed partnership may need time to define their own social space, couple-specific customs and social relations; and may therefore have looser contact with their parents. However, once a partnership is well established, these individuals may find this boundary-setting less necessary. The current union status must be controlled for because changes in the marital status of children may change the quality of the relationship with the parents (for example, a transition from cohabitation to marriage may alleviate the conflict with the parents that emerged when the adult child was cohabiting).³

Regarding parental characteristics, we included the educational attainment of the parents (with the following categories: tertiary, upper secondary, lower secondary and primary) because numerous theoretical and empirical studies have emphasised the importance of the socio-economic status of parents. First, better educated parents tend to be more involved in caring for their children (King 2003; Lye 1996; Wilcox 2002), which may result in better relations after children have become adults. Second, education approximates social capital, which encompasses the ability to maintain good relationships with family members. Thus, incidences of family conflicts and the severing of family ties may be lower among better educated parents (Kalmijn and Dykstra 2006). Finally, parents with higher socio-economic status are more likely to be able to provide material and non-material assistance to their children (Semyonov and Lewin-Epstein 2001), which may increase feelings of gratitude and thus positively affect the relationship.

We also controlled for parental divorce. There is very well-established evidence on the negative effects of divorce on the relationships between children and parents, especially when it comes to relationships between fathers and their adult daughters (Kalmijn 2012; De Graaf and Fokkema 2007; Tomassini et al. 2004). The effect of divorce has been shown to depend on its timing: a late divorce has a less negative impact than a separation that occurred early in the child’s life (Kalmijn 2007b). We therefore distinguished between individuals who were under or over age 15 when their parents divorced.