Counseling the Contemporary Woman. Suzanne Degges-White
probably isn’t a surprise, but researchers found that if a woman is caring for only one other generation, it is less stressful to provide childcare than it is to provide eldercare (Halinski et al., 2018). With children, parents have much more authority than they might with their own or their partners’ parents.
Caregiving for others when a woman has reached a point in her life at which she believed she might finally have time for herself can be an emotionally charged challenge. For more information on working with clients who are caregivers, please refer to chapter 20. In addition to caregiving role changes, other family relationships may also shift.
Family Relationship Changes
Midlife is a time when relationship roles and boundaries take on more of an elastic nature as new people move into the circle and others move out. The traditional trajectory of a woman’s life was to go from youth to bride to parent to grandparent. Although these transitions are considered part of the normal cycle of life, the transition from parent to grandparent or mom to “mom-in-law” can bring emotional challenges that may be unexpected. Some clients may welcome these new roles, while others may feel that their place in their children’s lives is being usurped by their children’s partners or in-laws. Grandparenthood—or longing for it but not having it occur—may challenge some individuals as well. Every individual responds differently to life events and “nonevents.”
Some women have difficulty letting go of their children and wrestle with the “empty nest” that is often faced at midlife. This period can be a time of bereavement as the primacy of the role of mother may shrink in size. If married, some women may feel that their partners are strangers—this is common when childrearing has been the focus for the past couple of decades. Encourage clients to reacquaint themselves with their partners through “dates” or shared activities. Invite clients to explore hobbies or interests that were “put on the shelf” once their children arrived on the scene.
Other family roles that can cause upset include clients becoming the mother-in-law to disliked spouses of their children. Some women resent a child’s changing allegiance from their parents to their partner. If your client is having difficulty accepting a child’s partner, invite your client to discuss her concerns as well as her fears about the changing relationship with her child. Encourage her to reflect on how her relationship to her own mother changed when she became half of a couple herself. Enlarging a client’s perspective on the transition as well as helping her expand her own vision of what “family” means as children grow up can help her shift her beliefs and decrease her distress.
The role of grandmother can be difficult for some women as they feel that this transition is a further marker of advancing age. Validate your client’s fears and normalize her concerns by noting the wide range of feelings that entry into grandparenthood can bring. Help your client brainstorm the positive aspects to grandparenting and ways she might be different with the grandchild than she was with her own children.
Wanting to be a grandparent, but not getting that opportunity, can also be distressing for some clients. The “fear of missing out” may be especially strong if your client’s social support system is peopled with friends who are already grandmothers. Again, normalize your client’s feelings and then encourage her to share ways she might be able to fill the time she “thought” might be taken up by the grandmother role.
Although research suggests that women no longer feel the need to conform to specific timelines for transitions (Degges-White & Myers, 2006), any transition has the potential to create difficulties that motivate a woman to seek a counselor’s support. Counselors working with midlife women should avoid preconceived notions about what midlife “used to” or “should” look like, as the experience is unique to each individual woman.
Friendships and Social Support Networks
For many women, midlife can offer the opportunity to explore new activities, let go of old responsibilities, and, potentially, enjoy the freedom to edit their social relationships as they desire (Degges-White & Borzumato-Gainey, 2011). As midlife brings a new awareness of the finiteness of time (Neugarten et al., 1965), women may be more selective in the relationships in which they invest time and energy. Women often become more discerning in their choices and are comfortable prioritizing the friendships that are the most authentic and rewarding. Although it is normal for the number of friendships a woman maintains to decrease over time, it can be especially difficult for midlife women to find new friends due to the often shrinking social circles in which people move over time.
If a woman’s social connections and support life have revolved around their children and their children’s friends’ families, midlife can be a lonely time as children grow up and those parent-to-parent friendships fade. If a marriage or long-term partnership dissolves at this period in life, a woman may also experience a crumbling or rearrangement of her social support network, if other couples made up the majority of her friendscape. These two situations can be especially challenging for midlife women, as they will be coping not only with the “empty nest” their children leave behind, or the loss of a life partner, but also the loss of their primary support system.
Working with clients who are experiencing this type of complicated social loss requires counselors to encourage the client to seek out new friendships while taking care to ensure that you, as the counselor, are not put into the position of “standing in” as a friend for a client or being perceived as the client’s primary support. Help your client brainstorm opportunities she could use to meet new people. Ask her to make a list of activities that she used to engage in that she could pick back up so that she can build new relationships with potential friends. If she is feeling the losses that accompany a newly “empty nest,” encourage her to volunteer for a cause she cares about to provide a place to invest her “caretaking” energy if that’s an aspect of motherhood that she misses. For some women, just starting small and joining an online support group or attending informational sessions at the local library or “Y” might be the most appropriate “first steps” in building up a friendscape. In addition to individual client factors, social dynamics must also be considered in light of cultural considerations.
Cultural Considerations
Cultural backgrounds greatly influence the ways an individual views and experiences development over the lifespan. Expectations about the weight and meaning of transitions varies across cultures. For instance, while regular physical activity is empirically proven to have strong physiological and psychological benefits for many of the concerns and symptoms for which midlife women seek treatment, a woman’s ethnic identity influences her attitude toward exercise and activity engagement (Im et al., 2013). Both Caucasian and Asian women felt that engagement in fitness activities would positively affect their appearance and their ability to meet cultural standards of beauty, while both African American and Hispanic women noted that they did not feel the same pressure and voiced acceptance of their own individual appearances.
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