Mother-Child Religious Affiliation Discordance and Mother's Psychosocial Wellbeing in a Rural Sub-Saharan Setting

Considerable scholarship has investigated connections between religious belonging and intergenerational family ties in high-income contexts. Building and expanding on this scholarship, we use data from a survey of middle-aged women in a predominantly Christian rural setting in Mozambique to examine religious affiliation discordance between these women and their adolescent/young adult children. We describe the patterning of this discordance both at the dyadic (mother-child) and at the aggregate (mother-children) levels and analyze its relationship with mother-child emotional connectedness and with mothers' life satisfaction and perceived quality of life. Results show that children's exit from organized religion, but not their transition to a different church, is negatively associated with these psychosocial outcomes. Importantly, gender-specific analyses indicate that these associations are statistically significant for sons but not for daughters. We link these findings to the gendered social meanings of religious belonging and the patriarchal cultural and family norms in this low-income context.