Parents Are Highly Involved in Their Adult Children’s Lives, and Fine With It

We all need and benefit from mutual support, of all kinds.

"New surveys show that today’s intensive parenting has benefits, not just risks, and most young adults seem happy with it, too.

...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, not relying on their parents. 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.

Parents’ involvement in young adults’ lives began to grow in the 1970s. The transition to adulthood became longer, and less clear-cut: It was no longer necessarily the case that at 18 children left home for college, marriage or jobs. Parenting gradually became more intensive, as people had fewer children and invested more in their upbringings.

In recent years, that has also meant providing children with more emotional support, research shows: “They may be the first generation of adults who have parents who actually grew up with the mind-set of talking about this kind of stuff'..." nyt