Modern Parenting Never Ends
8 min read
If you were a college student in America a few decades back, chances are you engaged in a semi-regular ritual: You’d trudge to the nearest campus payphone, drop in some coins, and call your parents. That image kept cropping up as I reported this story. Susan Matt, a Weber State University historian, recalled walking to the student-lounge phone once a week; even if she’d had the pocket money, her parents wouldn’t have wanted to hear from her any more than that, she told me: “You were supposed to be becoming independent.” Laurence Steinberg, a Temple University psychologist and the author of You and Your Adult Child: How to Grow Together in Challenging Times, remembers “a perfunctory 10-minute phone call” every Sunday afternoon. “The idea that I would have been in touch with my parents five times a day,” he told me, “would have been bizarre.”
Now Steinberg is a professor, and his own students seem to be in touch with their parents … all the time. They even joke that they have to turn off their phone during finals period, he said, because their folks keep interrupting their studies.
It’s not just the technology that’s changed—it’s the relationship. In a Pew Research Center survey conducted last year, more than 70 percent of respondents with children ages 18 to 34 said they talk with their kids on the phone at least a few times a week, and nearly 60 percent had helped their kids financially in the past year. A majority of adult children polled said they turn to their parents for career, money, and health advice. And a 2023 Harris poll found that about 45 percent of young adults ages 18 to 29 reported living with their parents—making it the most common living arrangement for that age group for the first time since just after the Great Depression.
Some people find those numbers alarming, evidence of a quietly mushrooming overdependence among a generation of hapless grown babies, and of caregivers who can’t, for God’s sake, stop giving care. But that’s not necessarily right. Today’s average parent-child bond does seem to involve near-constant communication—yet it also comes with an intensified emotional closeness of the kind once reserved for friends and romantic partners. This doesn’t mean that adult kids are failing to launch or that their parents are suffering. Rather, the way our society understands child-rearing is evolving. The assignment, which was once to raise an independent child and set them off into the world, is now to foster a deep, lasting relationship.
The panic about dependent young adults rests on an assumption: that growing up requires you to leave family behind. But that’s not always been the norm in the United States. For a long time, young adults typically lived with or near their parents or other relatives. Until the turn of the 20th century, the point of marriage was largely to pool household labor and resources. Family businesses were common. It was only after World War II that federal programs such as the GI Bill gave young people the incentive to buy their own house, which led to couples marrying earlier and striking out on their own. The culture started shifting in turn: “Psychologists, parenting experts, and business leaders roundly condemned people who wanted to stay attached to home, labeling them immature and maladjusted,” Matt told me. What we’re seeing now, she said, is in some ways a return to form—hardly a “strange new chapter in American history.”
Except that in some sense it is strange, or at least unprecedented, a time of unique enmeshment between parents and adult kids, driven by a confluence of societal trends. The transition to adulthood is taking longer, at least by the traditional milestones and markers of maturity; people are marrying and having children at later ages. Yet these young adults still need what Karen Fingerman, a human-development professor at the University of Texas at Austin, calls a “guaranteed relationship”—someone they automatically know will be there for them. Thus, parents, Fingerman told me, are beginning to take on roles a spouse previously might have, cheering on their kids or acting as a confidant.
Multigenerational living has also been growing more common again—partly because of the high cost of housing—which means that many young adults are eating, working, and hanging out with their parents every day. Whereas young adults in the 19th century might’ve been helping their parents work a farm, the current model is less centered on labor and might look warmer and more casual: chatting over morning coffee, breaking for lunch, watching a favorite show together in the evenings.
The bonds forged from that kind of intimacy can deepen even when adult kids move out or find a partner. Now that people are living longer on average than they did in previous generations, many parents and children have a significant stretch of time to enjoy each other as autonomous individuals, J. Jill Suitor, a Purdue University sociologist, told me. And texting enables an endless “stream of connection,” as Fingerman put it; family members can send pictures or stray thoughts from the grocery store, from outings with friends, from a walk around the neighborhood. It’s a way to witness the minutiae of each other’s lives to a degree that wouldn’t have been easy even in earlier multigenerational households: Back then, people lived and worked and relaxed together, but when they were out, they’d really be gone.
Adult kids might have leaned less on their parents in the recent past, but that doesn’t mean they were ever standing on their own. “It’s not like 19-year-olds didn’t get advice,” Fingerman told me. “It’s just that they got that advice from another 19-year-old who might be hungover.” Now, she said, they’re “getting that advice from a 48-year-old who’s incredibly invested in them and knows their life and cares about their future in a way that nobody else does.” Ultimately, the question of whether this new dynamic is healthy for grown kids comes down to whether a parent’s help is more stifling than anyone else’s.
Steinberg said he was especially concerned about young adults who get financial assistance from their parents, who might feel beholden to their parents’ vision of the adults they should become. “The proportion of people in their late 20s who rely on their parents for paying at least half of their income has doubled,” he told me. “That makes it a lot harder to roll your eyes when your parents make a suggestion.” And even for those not taking a cent, advice can rankle when it comes from your folks. “Young adults need to prove that they’re capable of handling adulthood without their parents handling it for them,” Steinberg said. “And I think that that is a lot more difficult because of the increased closeness between kids and their parents.”
Such a dynamic, it’s true, is rarely free of friction. But Jacob Goldsmith, who along with his mother runs a therapy practice focusing on young adults and their families, told me that this is a good thing. Because people are marrying later or not marrying at all, young adults don’t always have opportunities to learn the tricky interpersonal skills they might have practiced in a relationship with a spouse—say, how to work through conflict or take responsibility for their actions. People need familiarity and understanding to safely figure those things out. “That happens in marriage,” Goldsmith said. “It happens in really deep, meaningful friendships. Mostly it happens in families.”
That might sound like a lot of strain on parents, but the support doesn’t go only one way. Most often, Fingerman has found, “it’s a very interdependent relationship.” Of the “boomerang kids” who’ve moved back home, “a lot of these young adults are involved in caregiving for older relatives. They’re contributing to household income and household labor.” Having a close and present adult kid might be especially nice for single parents (the U.S. has the world’s highest rate of children living with one parent). Overall, Fingerman said, the tight ties seem to be great for both parties. When she started researching these relationships just over a decade ago, “we really thought it would be bad to be that involved with your parents,” she said. “And we kept trying to find it in the data … and we couldn’t.” Each side was benefiting.
Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. As Suitor reminded me, one of the best predictors of parents’ and adult children’s psychological well-being is the quality of their relationship. So many people in American society are stuck on the idea that too much closeness gets in the way of growth—when in fact closeness can help build a future. “If I develop my identity as a person simply by sort of rejecting my affiliation with family and other systems,” Goldsmith said, “I’m sort of developing myself in a vacuum. And that’s not actually desirable.”
If Americans should worry about anyone in this cultural shift, it’s not the adults who rely on parents—it’s the adults who don’t have a parent to rely on at all. “If we’re living in a society where the parents are a huge safety net,” Fingerman said, “where is that safety net” for people whose parents aren’t present, emotionally equipped, or alive? Some people have friendships—chosen family—so unconditional that they really are “guaranteed.” Not everyone does.
Parents and kids who can count each other as family and friends are the luckiest of all. For decades, the parent-child relationship has been somewhat transactional: A parent keeps a child alive and healthy until adulthood, and eventually the grown kid comes back to take on the caregiver role. Under that model, the lives people lead in between—their silly exploits and daydreams, their minor grievances and pet peeves—happen largely out of each other’s sight. But why should all those everyday fragments be the province of only peers and partners? If people could stop worrying about whether the new parent-child closeness is a “crisis,” perhaps they’d come to see how beautiful it is for family members to ask—and receive—more from one another.
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