‘BFF’ Parenting Comes With a Price

ATTENTION parents: The magic number is 28. That’s the age when millennials finally say they’d be embarrassed to be living at home, according to a new survey from TD Ameritrade. It’s no secret, of course, that kids stay with their folks longer. But while many have focused on financial explanations, it may actually have more to do with the connection that young adults have with their parents these days. One 2015 poll found that half of millennials consider one or both of their parents to be their “best friends.” If that’s the case, what’s the incentive to move out?

The evidence seems to suggest that this generation has a radically different relationship with their folks than previous ones — but maybe not one that will serve them well in the long run.

The origins of the problem are traceable in part to the helicopter approach that many parents take with children at a young age. And parents spend hours volunteering at school and accompanying kids to birthday parties.

They intervene with coaches or teachers on behalf of their children. Everything about parents’ behavior tells kids that the world is not divided into adults and kids as it once was. It’s divided into our nuclear family and everyone else.

When kids enter adolescence now, there’s little need for rebellion. It’s probably hard for many young adults to believe that the sexual revolution actually required a revolution.

Parents increasingly accept questionable behavior and try to accommodate it. Despite warnings by local authorities, they host parties for high-school students with alcohol on the theory that they’re going to drink anyway so they might as well do it at home.

When it comes to sex, the thinking seems to go, why not just be realistic about our kids? A couple of years ago The New York Times ran a story about parents who allowed their teenagers’ boyfriends or girlfriends to sleep over or even move in for a couple of months. As one mother explained about her decision, “I didn’t want to think, ‘Where are they tonight?’ ”

Kids needn’t hide their misbehavior because parents, trying to be their friends, tolerate it. Indeed, even when kids do leave for college, they are in constant contact with parents.

In a 2012 essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Terry Castle, a professor of English at Stanford, asked her students about how often they were in touch with their parents. Just about every day, seemed to be the consensus.

“Finally, one student . . . confesses that she talks to her mother on the cellphone at least five, maybe six, even seven times a day: We’re like best friends, so I call her whenever I get out of class. She

wants to know about my professors, what was the exam, so I . . . give her, you know, updates.”

Technology has obviously aided in this relationship, but even when phones were only landlines in dorm rooms, it never would have occurred to me or to my friends 20 years ago that we should call our parents even once a day.

There are few families in America today where children act with the kind of total obedience to (or fear of ) parents that children growing up 50 or 100 years ago might have. Parents, reasonably enough, want a close, loving relationship with their young adult children.

But something is lost in this for- mulation. Like our best friends, parents are supposed to accept us — warts and all. But unlike our best friends, our parents are supposed to be role models as well.

Trouble is, when your mother is your best friend — when you talk to her six or seven times a day — it’s easy to lose sight of what to emulate. The relationship becomes more about gossip or what to have for lunch or what happened on “Scandal” last night.

It means young adults lose the sense that there’s someone more experienced and more serious looking out for them. And parents, reluctant to give up the best friend status, don’t want to offer too much guidance either.

As Sen. Ben Sasse wrote last week in an essay for The Wall Street Journal, “Too many of our children simply don’t know what an adult is anymore — or how to become one. Perhaps more problematic, older generations have forgotten that we need to teach them. It’s our fault more than it’s theirs.”

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.

‘ It’ s probably hard for many young adults to believe that the sexual revolution ’ actually required a revolution.