What’s happening to parent-child bonds as kids become adults?
As they launch into their own more independent lives, most adult children are not trying to push their parents away, according to a new Pew Research Center study on the relationship that young adults ages 18-34 have with their parents. They generally love their parents and turn to them for both emotional support and advice, as well as concrete assistance with challenges.
That’s no surprise to Julie Hartman, of Temecula, California, who talks daily with her son Jake, 21, and her daughter Isabella, 19, though both are now enrolled in college.
Jake lives at home and commutes to California State University San Marcos, where he’s working toward an undergraduate degree in environmental science. Isabella is a couple of hours away at the University of California Santa Barbara, studying biology. Her mom thinks Isabella is considering becoming a physical therapist.
But here’s what Julie Hartman absolutely knows: Their family is tight-knit. Her young adult children get along great with each other and with their parents. They dote on their little brother Josh, who’s 11.
She and her husband, Ryan, never have trouble getting their sons to go along on family excursions, which often involve a road trip to see Isabella.
Their family relationships sound idyllic. And according to the report, released Thursday, the Hartmans are also pretty typical.
Kids are not trying to push their parents away as they go into adulthood, Kim Parker, Pew’s director of social trends research and co-author of the study, told the Deseret News. “It was interesting to see the degree of involvement and satisfaction with the dynamics,” she said, noting “parents and children alike are content with the degree of contact they have — lots of contact and financial and emotional ties.”
She added, “There’s some truth to the idea that parents are pretty wrapped up in their kids.”
Even young adult kids.
“We found that parents are highly invested in how life turns out for their kids, with most saying their children’s successes and failures reflect on the job they’ve done as parents,” said Rachel Minkin, a Pew research associate and report co-author.
When their parents were that age
The report is based on data from two surveys conducted from Oct. 24 to Nov. 5, using the Pew Research Center American Trends Panel. The first survey included 3,017 U.S. adults with one or more children ages 18 to 34, although it didn’t include them if their young adult was in high school. The second, conducted simultaneously, included 1,495 U.S. adults ages 18 to 34 with at least one living parent. Again, those still in high school were excluded. The report notes that the parents and the adult children were not in the same family units.
The report also compares the experiences of young adults today with those in that age range 30 years ago. The comparison included data on college enrollment, college completion, labor force participation, wages, marriage, family and living arrangements, all based on government data.
Parker said Pew hoped to get a clear sense of how young adults today are similar or different from young adults around 1993, which would be roughly when the parents of the adult kids they surveyed today were at that same starting-out adult stage. They hoped to see what had changed.
It was harder to pin down than expected, Parker said. Researchers specifically wanted to see how likely today’s parents had been to turn to their own parents when they were young for help with their jobs and finances, among other things.
But the world has changed in significant ways and the challenges are somewhat different, though they did get some insights. Minkin noted that, among differences, the adult children are marrying and having their own children later than their parents’ generation did.
Parker thinks it’s possible that ties between parents and adult children now are especially strong because the adult children have not yet formed their own families, so “the parent relationship may be the strongest bond they have.”
But on other fronts, they’ve surpassed their parents, those who are young adults now working more and earning more and getting four-year college degrees at higher rates. They found, though, that young adults today are more apt to have student loan debt.
Happy together
In the survey, the majority of young adults said they liked the level of involvement their parents have in their lives. Just over 1 in 5 (22%) said they would like their parents to be more involved. Fewer than 1 in 10 (9%) said their parents were too involved.
The survey found that both sons and daughters turn to their mothers more than their fathers for emotional support. For mothers and daughters, that flows both ways. Moms reportedly lean on their daughters for emotional support. Parker said that closeness may be because mothers are somewhat emotional, so children feel like they can be their true selves around their moms more than with their dads.
The survey found no difference in whether kids ask their moms or their dads for advice.
While the Hartmans talk every day, the survey found that three-quarters of the parents text or talk on the phone (54%) a few times a week or more.
Related
Today’s adult kids say they go to their parents for practical advice and they don’t see their parents as particularly meddlesome. ”They’re happy to get their input,” Parker said.
“It all seems like a pretty cheerful dynamic,” she said. “When asked how often do you disagree on a number of things, there didn’t seem to be a lot of clashing going on.”
As a counterpoint, just over half of parents of young adults say they rarely or never asked their parents for advice when they were young adults.
Preparing for adulthood
There’s one area where parents and their fledgling adults see things quite differently: The survey asked parents how well they thought they’d prepared their now-adult kids to be adults. And it asked the kids how well the parents did, too.
There’s a 20-point gap; 86% of parents say they did at least a fair amount of getting their kids ready for adulthood. Just two-thirds of the kids agree.
The Hartmans are helping their children while they’re in college. Letting Jake live at home saves him money and he isn’t asked to contribute to household costs. The survey found that in most families, adult kids at home (not all in college) may contribute some, such as paying for streaming services or helping with utilities. When Pew broke the respondents into age groups, it was clear, Parker said, that parental “financial support does diminish, but it hasn’t gone away by the time young adults are 30-34.” Just 1 in 3 in that older age group are completely financially independent.
Nearly 6 in 10 parents say they helped their young adult child financially in the past year.
“This ranges from 30% among those ages 30 to 34 to 68% among adults younger than 25. Young men and women are equally likely to say they received financial help from their parents,” the report said. That often involves household expenses and cellphones and streaming bills.
The Pew researchers didn’t have data from 1993 to compare, Parker said.
While Jake Hartman doesn’t pay household expenses, he helps his parents in other ways. Both Julie and Ryan work full time — she’s a nurse practitioner and he works for a restaurant company — so sometimes Jake helps get his younger brother Josh where he needs to go or hangs out with him. And he helps out at home.
Julie describes her kids as capable and quite independent.
Their daily conversations are sometimes talking through problem-solving tasks, but she describes it as “mostly listening to them so they can work it out.” When Isabella was trying to figure out her lease for the upcoming year, they talked through the steps, Julie said.
Julie Hartman told the Deseret News she thinks having young adult children is nice. “They’re real people that you can have real conversations with. It’s fun to watch them be an adult.”
Asked if Isabella would ever come to her for romantic advice, she said yes. Jake, she adds, would go to his dad. And there’s a pretty good chance that faced with a dilemma, the two young adult Hartmans would help each other figure things out. They are, after all, adults now. And they’ve always been very close.
Not much gender difference
Going in, the researchers expected to see that young men were having more trouble getting their footing. They didn’t find that to be particularly true, Parker said. They found sons no less likely to be completely financially independent than daughters. \
But when they asked the young adults who live at home — male or female — how it’s going, the news was pretty positive. It helps their finances and they’re “not too bothered about the impact on their independence or their social life,” Parker said. “They’re not suffering. They see benefits.”
Their parents generally like it, too.
Among the report’s other highlights:
Parents were asked if they monitor their adult children’s locations. About a quarter say they do, though maybe not often. They are a bit more likely to use an app to track younger adults than older ones. They check where their daughters are more than their sons.
Most young adults say they seek parental advice on work, finances and physical health at least sometimes. The young adults who have kids say they also sometimes seek parenting advice.
About 1 in 3 young adults live with at least one parent. Broken down by age, it’s 57% of young adults 18 to 24, while among the oldest, ages 30 to 34, it’s 11%.
Among those who do live with a parent, two-thirds say the arrangement has helped their finances and 55% say it’s been good for their relationship with their parents.
They’re “more divided” on how it impacts their independence and their social lives.
Most of the parents said they feel proud (83%) and hopeful (75%) about how their kids’ lives are going extremely or very often. Far smaller shares say they frequently feel worried (22%) or disappointed (4%).
Of young adults who never married, 69% say they want to get married someday. A smaller share of those who aren’t parents (51%) say they want to have children someday. Most who are single and childless say their parents aren’t pressuring them to marry or have kids.
Correction: An earlier version of this story said female young adults are more likely to live at home than young male adults. It should have said no more likely.
