Change and stability on identity and family self indicators, first studied in 1989, are documented among 54 women aged 47.26 (SD=8.44) years; 26 of these women were interviewed in 1997 as well. The present study examined daughters' perceptions of relationships with parents and their influences on women's identities, self-perceptions, and vulnerabilities to distress. Categorizing women by parents' alcoholism status and respondents' concurrent therapeutic activities explained a modest proportion of variance on identity and family self in 1989. By 1997 there were no longer significant differences between alcoholics' daughters and nonalcoholics' daughters. Variance attributable to 1989 group categorization was considerably reduced. Phenomenological themes revealed among daughters' reflections included the importance of parents' time and attention with striking differences on relating with parents in alcoholics' families and nonalcoholics' families. Essential features of perspective taking experiences explain similarities and differences in daughters' felt closeness to parents influencing women's identities, self-perceptions, and therapeutic activities. Incongruity between sociocultural ideals and lived experience evidently exacerbate women's existential struggles. / Ph. D.

Previous family researchers have found that parents who share different demographic backgrounds construct unique parenting styles and beliefs. Although such studies contribute to understanding how parenthood is socially constructed, the information about how parents internalize cultural information and everyday experiences to raise children is missing in the extant literature. To fully comprehend the social construction of parenthood, the linkage between the mind and the behavior of parents within specific social structures needed to be studied. I thus conducted conjoint interviews with 24 Japanese couples and 24 American couples who were raising four-to-six year old daughters and sons to examine how culture and cognition produce parental philosophies and family relationships. By using cognitive sociology as a theoretical framework and grounded theory methods as a mode of analysis, I found that the parents’ construction of parenting beliefs and practices basically depended on how they thought about four analytically distinct relationships: (1) their relationship to their parents; (2) their relationship to their children; (3) their relationship to their marital partner; and (4) their relationship to other people in society. Although fathers and mothers in Japan and the United States talked in general about these four aspects, in the process of doing so they offered unique views on each aspect. Japanese parents tended to view their parents as role models, believe that children and parents teach and learn from each other, consider gender ideology to be the foundation of parental partnership, and rank understanding others' feelings as the most important skill for children. Thus, their parenting philosophies were manufactured through reciprocal relationships with other people. In contrast, American parents tended to want to become better parents than their own parents, prefer to influence and control their children’s lives, consider equality to be the foundation of their parental partnership, and encourage their children to become independent. Therefore, their parenting philosophies were manufactured through self motivation. Through the cross-national comparisons of parents’ cognitive processes, I also discuss: the levels of parental expectations and pressures; the issues around the gender relations within a family; and the roles of international parenting books in a globalizing world.