Bernice continues her discussion of Life Stages from the perspective of the only-child adult. After the Young adult life -stage, which is concerned with making relationships and settling down, we move into the middle-adult, life-stage. Middle adulthood is the time when we are actively involved in generativity. This is about helping the next generation and could be through raising children or contributing to the welfare of future generations through paid or voluntary work, or even perhaps in some other way. However it is also at this stage that many only children and non onlies, find themselves caring for elderly parents. My research suggests that this phase of caring for elderly parents is particularly challenging for onlies, who often have strong feelings of responsibility toward parents’ and at the same time no siblings to share these feelings with. It also means that for some only-children the projected responsibility of elderly parents [...]
