Study: Parent, adult child ties are mutually beneficial
American parenting has become more involved — requiring more time, money and mental energy — not just when children are young, but well into adulthood.
The popular conception has been that this must be detrimental to children — with snowplow parents clearing obstacles and ending up with adult children who have failed to launch, still dependent upon them.
But two new Pew Research Center surveys — of young adults 18 to 34 and of parents of children that age — tell a more nuanced story. Most parents are in fact highly involved in their grown children’s lives, it found, texting several times a week and offering advice and financial support. Yet in many ways, their relationships seem healthy and fulfilling.
‘POSITIVE SUPPORT’
Nine in 10 parents rate their relationships with their young adult children as good or excellent, and so do 8 in 10 young adults, and this is consistent across income. Rather than feeling worried or disappointed about how things are going in their children’s lives, 8 in 10 parents say they feel proud and hopeful.
“These parents, who are Gen X, are more willing to say, ‘Hey, this is good, I like these people, they’re interesting, they’re fun to be with,’” said Karen L. Fingerman, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies adults’ relationships with their families.
As for the adult children, she said, “You get advice from a 50-year-old with life experience who is incredibly invested in you and your success.”
Also, these close relationships don’t seem to be holding back young people from reaching certain milestones of independence. Compared with their parents as young adults in the early 1990s, they are much more likely to be in college or have a college degree, Pew found. They are somewhat more likely to have a full-time job, and their inflation-adjusted incomes are higher. (They are much less likely, though, to be married or have children.)
Experts say contemporary hyper-intensive parenting can go too far — and has only gotten more hands-on since the young adults in the survey were children. Young people say their mental health is suffering, and recent data shows they are much more likely to say this than those before them. Some researchers have sounded alarms that one driver of this is children’s lack of independence, and that overparenting can deprive children of developing skills to handle adversity.
The new data suggests that, indeed, young adults are more reliant on their parents — texting them for life advice when older generations may have figured out their problems on their own. But the effects do not seem to be wholly negative.
Fingerman and her colleagues have found close relationships between parents and grown children protected children from unhealthy behaviors, and young adults who received significant parental support were better able to cope with change and had higher satisfaction with their lives. It was a finding “we just couldn’t believe the first time,” she said, because of the assumptions about overinvolved parents.
Both things can be true, said Eli Lebowitz, director of the Program for Anxiety Disorders at the Yale Child Study Center — “that they do rely a lot on their parents, and they do get a lot of positive support from them.”
FEELING CLOSER
In previous research, parents often expressed ambivalence about their continued involvement in their adult children’s lives. But the Pew study suggests that has changed, Fingerman said, perhaps a sign they have come to embrace it.
Among parents, 7 in 10 say they are satisfied with their level of involvement in their grown child’s life. Just 7% say they’re too involved, and onequarter would like even more involvement. Young adults say the same.
Adriana Goericke, from Santa Cruz, California, texts with her daughter, Mia, a college sophomore in Colorado, a few times a day. They share pictures of their food, workouts or funny selfies.
When her daughter asks for advice, mostly about navigating friendships and dating, her mother said she sees her role as a sounding board: “She knows I’m not going to try and run her life, but I’m always there if she needs me.”
Mia Goericke has seen friends who can’t solve problems or make small decisions on their own, but she said that’s different from asking her mother for help. “She will usually ask me what my goals are and try to understand my thinking rather than just tell me what to do,” she said. “It’s like an incredible resource I have at my fingertips.”
When baby boomers were growing up, there was a belief, rooted in the American ideal of self-sufficiency, that children should be independent after age 18. But that was in some ways an aberration, social scientists said. Before then, and again now, it has been common for members of different generations to be more interdependent.
Cathy Perry, 66, said she has a very different relationship with her sons, 32 and 36, than she had with her parents when she was that age. They all live in the St. Louis area and text on a family group chat several times a week. Her older son shares updates on his children, and asks for advice on his career, finances and home remodeling.
As a young adult, she lived an 11-hour drive from her parents, and calls were charged by the minute. “I feel that I have a much closer and more open relationship with my kids, where they are more free to express their opinions on things I might not agree with,” she said.
MUTUAL RELIANCE
Open, emotional conversations have become more of a priority for parents, research shows: “They may be the first generation of adults who have parents who actually grew up with the mindset of talking about this kind of stuff,” Lebowitz said.
In the survey, 6 in 10 young adults said they still relied on their parents for emotional support, and a quarter of young adults said their parents relied on them for the same, including 44% of daughters who said their mothers did.
About 7 in 10 parents of young adults said their children ask them for advice, especially about finances, careers, physical health and parenting (among those with children). That’s a change from when they were young — half said they rarely or never asked their parents for advice.
There were gender differences: Young adults were somewhat more likely to say they had a good relationship with their mother than their father. Young women communicated with their parents more frequently than young men.
Cultural and policy factors play a role in parents’ involvement in their grown children’s lives. In the United States, parents and children often rely on one another for child care and elder care. In many immigrant families, it is common for multiple generations to live together or support one another. And technology has made it easier to stay in regular touch.