Emotional bond of children and mothers on the decline, study finds

with academic excellence only defining happiness; Study of UoH reveals children believe that scoring good marks is enough to make mothers happy

Is good academic performance the only parameter that defines the emotional attachment of youngsters with their mothers and the concern they need to show as children as the mothers age?

Youngsters, these days believe strongly that getting good academic grades is the only way to make their mothers happy and unfortunately they aren’t even aware of necessity to understand the emotional needs of mothers.

A two-year-long study by a team of psychologists from the University of Hyderabad among the 10-20-year-olds has revealed this disturbing trend and rings an alarm about the possibility of children distancing from their mothers in middle-class Indian society.

“One could make the mother happy or unhappy only with the academic performance and children across the ages could not think beyond this about mother’s happiness,” said Prof. Meena Hariharan, who led the team of researchers - Dr. Meera Padhy, Sumalavanya and Sandra Roshni Monteiro from the Centre for Health Psychology, University of Hyderabad.

“Is Indian society working enough towards sustaining the family bond-particularly between the parents and children?”, was the question that prompted them for the study while noticing the increasing number of nuclear families and parents pushed into old-age homes. The research looked into the aspect that mothers understand the children best but do the children understand the mother equally?

The team prepared a tool with 37 questions related to the mother covering basic facts such as age, birthday, qualification etc to the intricate aspects such as health issues, likes and dislikes, emotions, aspirations, achievements and leisure. This tool is for the mother to fill up with all the information about herself.

A parallel tool was prepared for the children, where they were asked to give the same information about their mother. The sample was middle-class families with children in the age group of 10 to 21 years. A total of 162 mothers and their children participated in the study.