Distant Parents

Climo considers distant relationships to be different from other relationships and to be a growing social problem. Distant living complicates communications by shaping and restricting both phone calls and visits. His description of the typical phone call and typical seasonal visit, with their patterns and limitations, will sound familiar to many of us. In addition to affecting communications, distance affects memories of past parent-child relationships in ways that influence present relationships. Most seriously, distance limits the kinds of assistance children can provide when their parents become ill, resulting in frustration, anger, guilt, and a sense of powerlessness.

Climo urges us to be more aware of distant living as a growing social problem. Once adult children acknowledge the challenges distance creates, they can learn to develop better communications and to deal with their feelings of ambivalence.

In the United States today, twenty million adult children live too far from their parents for frequent face-to-face contacts. Despite geographical separation, most of these children and their parents maintain intense family feelings and make great efforts to keep in touch. Jacob Climo focuses attention on the special problems of distant relationships by looking at the efforts of forty university professors, men and women, to maintain bonds with their parents, to provide assistance, and to communicate through visits and phone calls. In most ways the people profiled here are similar to the millions of other professionals whose careers have moved them away from their parents and home. We hear their voices as they speak frankly about the advantages, pains, and challenges of separation.

Climo considers distant relationships to be different from other relationships and to be a growing social problem. Distant living complicates communications by shaping and restricting both phone calls and visits. His description of the typical phone call and typical seasonal visit, with their patterns and limitations, will sound familiar to many of us. In addition to affecting communications, distance affects memories of past parent-child relationships in ways that influence present relationships. Most seriously, distance limits the kinds of assistance children can provide when their parents become ill, resulting in frustration, anger, guilt, and a sense of powerlessness.

Climo urges us to be more aware of distant living as a growing social problem. Once adult children acknowledge the challenges distance creates, they can learn to develop better communications and to deal with their feelings of ambivalence.

Publishers Weekly

In highly mobile America, not enough attention has been paid to the increasingly common relationship between parents and adult children who live far apart, argues Climo, an anthropologist at Michigan State University. While his study of 40 faculty members and their spouses turns up some useful information, it is hampered by turgid academic language and a preoccupation with the banal. He detects three types of children: the ``displaced,'' who wish they were physically closer to their parents, the ``well-adapted,'' who have a secure relationship with their parents and the ``alienated,'' who are happy to live far away from their parents because they lack emotional closeness. Using that typology, Climo analyzes his subjects' memories of leaving home, their communication via letters and phone calls, routine visits (he probes the five phases of a visit, including preparation and settling in) and their responses to their parents' health problems and to transitions such as death and remarriage. Finally, he advises ways children can improve the relationship: work on communication skills and believe that parents can change and grow through self-help. (Sept.)