Parents or Romantic Partners? Which Relationships Better Predicts Emotional Problems in Argentinean Adults?

ALICIA FACIO; FABIANA MICOCCI; SANTIAGO RESETT

Tucson

Conferencia; III Conference on Emerging Adulthood; 2007

In spite of differences with post-industrialized countries, emerging adulthood does exist in Argentina: the percentage of young people who do not consider themselves entirely adults is very similar to that of the United States. In first world countries, a substantial empirical literature suggests that parents and their adult children typically remain closely involved with one another over the life course. Argentina belongs to the Latin and Catholic cultural tradition that has a high regard for the collectivistic values, especially family ones. Nothwithstanding increase in individualistic values in the last decades, family ones have not diminished. Whereas higher closeness to parents -especially to mothers-, siblings and even members of the extended family than to friends and romantic partners had been found once and again in Argentinian adolescents as compared to North Americans and Northern Europeans a different scenario was found in the emerging adult years: emerging adulthood ?not adolescence- is the stage in which romantic partners become important members of the network of personal relationships for the first time. Nevertheless, at age 25 parents continued to be the persons they most admired and almost half of single emerging adults mentioned their parents as the most important aspect of their lives versus less than a quarter who placed their romantic partners first. A difficult bond with parents was associated with a higher level of internalizing problems (depression, global self-worth) across the different groups and the different measures of emotional problems here examined, with the sole exception of Anxiety among males having a romantic partner.