This thesis endeavors to trace how the relationships and of the mainstream American family unit, specifically between adult children and their parents, are altered by the process of age-related institutionalization in a nursing home. The family unit is both a basic building block of society and a vehicle of cultural transmission. Families act out wider cultural trends in small-scale interactions, allowing observers a close-up, highly detailed view of societal norms. If enough families successfully deviate from those trends, they can even change a culture’s norms, mores, and traditions. Thus studies of the family remain well within the purview of the anthropologist.