ABSTRACT
The study of stress in later-life families has focused on a wide array of issues that have challenged researchers and theorists who are concerned with the stressors facing older adults and their family members and with how these individuals cope with such difficulties. Early chapters in this volume have emphasized the kinds of stressors that older adults frequently encounter and how such experiences affect them and the family system in which they are embedded. Later chapters have emphasized helping interactions as a means for coping, both for the older adult whose personal resources may be inadequate to meet the demands of a stressful situation, and for the family as its primary response for coping in such situations. Some chapters have focused on the ways in which help is given and how it is received within such families, and others have emphasized the ways in which giving help on a continuing basis can alter family functioning. What is clear from these chapters is that stressful events and attempts to cope with them do not occur in a vacuum. Rather, they occur within a family network in which members are inextricably linked to one another in such a way that what happens to one family member will in some way affect all others in the family unit. Thus coping efforts, as well as stressors themselves, are often highly interpersonal and complex phenomena and, as such, their impact is necessarily multifaceted.
