Parents, adult kids gain from close ties

Maintaining relationships past childhood doesn’t limit independence, studies show

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.

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, 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 that 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.