Little children

When a kid becomes an adult, a new, confusing stage of the parent-child relationship begins, yet there's little guidance to help families navigate it.

Even with these hurdles to overcome, maintaining a close relationship pays off for both adult kids and their parents. As adults move into their 30s, they usually begin to need less from their parents and conflicts such as these might grow less frequent. Parents and adult children are “essentially establishing a new relationship with unclear rules and uncertain boundaries,” which “can be a challenge for both generations,” Carr explained to me. Thirty percent of poll respondents agreed “that their parents are more involved in their life than they really want them to be.” But challenges are likely to reemerge as parents age and start to need support from their kids. Parents “realize how much harder it is to get started now than it was decades before, when they were starting off,” and try to give their kids every advantage, he told me. Of course, many parents today really do want to stay close with their kids as they grow up—an intimacy that can be complicated for some families. But the moral responsibility of helping one’s kids doesn’t just go away when they leave the nest, and many parents find themselves still enmeshed in their adult children’s lives, both emotionally and financially. During this period, parents and children also set new norms in their relationship that continue as the children grow into older adults running their own households and who ultimately may end up caring for their parents, according to Karen Fingerman, a human-development and family-sciences professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Adults are also [marrying later](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/07/case-against-marriage/591973/) than in earlier generations, meaning that, for many, “parents remain more important for longer as your main emotional touchstone,” Arnett told me. “There’s a perception that parents need help with little kids because that’s the time when everything is decided,” says Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a developmental psychologist and senior research scholar at Clark University, who co-wrote Getting to 30: A Parent’s Guide to the 20-Something Years, one of the few advice books I could find for parents of young adults. There’s now no shortage of guidance for raising children through early developmental milestones, from toilet training and getting your kid to sleep through the night to steering them through the turbulence of adolescence.