https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2024/07/modern-parenting-grown-children/678942/
Americans should worry about anyone in this cultural shift, it’s not the adults who rely on parents—it’s the adults who don’t have a parent to rely on at all.
Parents and kids who can count each other as family and friends are the luckiest of all. For decades, the parent-child relationship has been somewhat transactional: A parent keeps a child alive and healthy until adulthood, and eventually the grown kid comes back to take on the caregiver role. Under that model, the lives people lead in between—their silly exploits and daydreams, their minor grievances and pet peeves—happen largely out of each other’s sight. But why should all those everyday fragments be the province of only peers and partners? If people could stop worrying about whether the new parent-child closeness is a “crisis,” perhaps they’d come to see how beautiful it is for family members to ask—and receive—more from one another.
