Families and Facilities: How the Parent-Child Relationship Changes Upon Institutionalization

Abstract

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.