Later Life Families

Timothy Brubaker (1983; 1990) suggests that later life families are delineated by the fact that they have completed the child-rearing stage. In contrast, Ingrid Connidis (2001) asserts that definitions of the later life family should allow for the diversity of individual experience by focusing on familial relationships rather than a particular life-course stage or chronological age. Connidis (2001) points out that older childless couples do not fit Brubaker's definition of the later life family. Similarly, age is not always an accurate means of defining later life families as individuals may become grandparents in their twenties and thirties (Burton and Bengtson 1985). Undoubtedly, the term family implies a different set of meanings and relationships for each individual (Holstein and Gubrium 1999). Victoria Bedford and Rosemary Blieszner (1997) offer the most helpful means of defining later life familial relationships as they state:

A family is a set of relationships determined by biology, adoption, marriage, and, in some societies, social designation and existing even in the absence of contact or affective involvement, and, in some cases, even after the death of certain members (526). Thus, familial relationships derive from biologically and socially defined relationships that transcend the finality of death and the exclusiveness of blood and marital kinship relationships.