为人父母永无止境
2024-09-05 22:57阅读：
如果你是几十年前的一名美国大学生，你很可能会有一种半定期的仪式：费劲走到最近的校园付费电话，投几枚硬币，给父母打个电话。在我撰写本文时，这个画面不断闪现。州立韦伯大学历史学家苏珊·马特回忆说，她每周会去学生休息室打一次电话，但她的父母不想总接到她的电话。美国天普大学心理学家劳伦斯·斯坦伯格记得会每周日下午打一通“10分钟的敷衍电话”。他告诉我：“要是我一天跟父母联系五次，那可太奇怪了。”
亲子关系更加持久
现在，斯坦伯格是一名教授，他的学生似乎一直都会跟父母保持联系。他说，学生们甚至开玩笑说，在期末考试期间必须关掉手机，因为家人总是打断他们学习。
皮尤研究中心去年进行的一项调查显示，孩子年龄在18岁至34岁之间的受访者中，超过70%的人表示每周至少跟孩子通几次电话，近60%的人在过去一年里为孩子提供经济帮助。接受调查的成年子女大多表示，他们会向父母寻求职业、金钱和健康方面的建议。阿里斯调查公司2023年的一项调查发现，约45%的18岁至29岁年轻人自述与父母同住。自大萧条以来，这是与父母同住首次成为该年龄组最常见的居住安排。
这并不意味着成年孩子不离开原生家庭去独自生活，也不意味着他们的父母舍不得孩子离开。相反，我们的社会理解抚养孩子的方式正在发生变化。以前的任务是养育独立自主的孩子，让他们去闯荡世界；现在的任务则是培养一种深厚而持久的关系。
担忧依赖父母的年轻人是出于这样一种假设：长大就需要离开原生家庭。但这在美国并不总是常态。长期以来，年轻人通常与父母或其他亲戚住在一起，或住在附近。在进入20世纪之前，婚姻的意义主要是集中家庭劳动力和资源。家族企业很常见。直到第二次世界大战后，才有《退伍军人福利待遇法》等联邦计划鼓励年轻人购买自己的房子，因而情侣们脱离原生家庭，结婚独立生活。这
种文化现在开始转变。
马特对我说：“心理学家、育儿专家和商界领袖过去严厉指责那些想要依恋原生家庭的人，给他们贴上不成熟和不能适应环境的标签。”她说，我们现在看到的是某种程度的回归——几乎算不上“美国历史上奇怪的新篇章”。
见证彼此生活点滴
至少以传统的成熟里程碑和标志来衡量，现在向成年过渡的时间更长了，人们结婚生子的年龄越来越晚。这些年轻人需要卡伦·芬格曼所说的“有保障的关系”——他们自然认为有人会守候他们。芬格曼是得克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校人类发展学教授，芬格曼告诉我，父母开始为他们的孩子打气，或者充当知己。
几代同堂的生活方式再次变得越来越普遍，部分原因是高昂的住房成本。19世纪的年轻人可能会帮助父母打理农场，而现在的模式不太以劳动为中心，看起来可能更温暖、更随意：上午边喝咖啡边聊天，休息一下吃午饭，晚上一起看喜欢的节目。
即使成年的孩子搬出去或找了伴侣，这种亲密关系形成的纽带也会加深。美国珀杜大学社会学家J·吉尔·休托告诉我，现在人们的平均寿命比前几代人要长，许多父母和孩子有相当长的时间可以彼此欣赏。
用芬格曼的话说，发短信带来无穷无尽的“连接流”。家庭成员可以在逛杂货店、与朋友外出、附近散步时发送照片或随感。这是一种见证彼此生活点滴的方式，而这种方式即使在早先的多代同堂家庭中也不容易做到。那时候一旦他们搬出去，就真的离开了。
能把彼此视为家人和朋友的父母和孩子是最幸运的。几十年来，亲子关系在某种程度上是一种交易：父母让孩子茁壮成长，成年的孩子最终反过来承担看护人的角色。在这种模式下，人们在两种角色之间的生活状态——他们的小奇遇和幻想，他们的小牢骚和忌讳——在很大程度上发生在彼此的视线之外。
但为什么所有这些日常琐碎只能是同伴和伴侣享有的领域呢？如果人们不再担心新型亲子关系成为“危机”，也许他们会看到家庭成员相互索求和接受更多东西是多么美好。
The New Age of Endless Parenting
More grown kids are in near-constant contact with their family.
Some call this a failure to launch—but there’s another way to look
at it.
By Faith Hill
If you were a college student in America a few decades back,
chances are you engaged in a semi-regular ritual: You’d trudge to
the nearest campus payphone, drop in some coins, and call your
parents. That image kept cropping up as I reported this story.
Susan Matt, a Weber State University historian, recalled walking to
the student-lounge phone once a week; even if she’d had the pocket
money, her parents wouldn’t have wanted to hear from her any more
than that, she told me: “You were supposed to be becoming
independent.” Laurence Steinberg, a Temple University psychologist
and the author of You and Your Adult Child: How to Grow Together in
Challenging Times, remembers “a perfunctory 10-minute phone call”
every Sunday afternoon. “The idea that I would have been in touch
with my parents five times a day,” he told me, “would have been
bizarre.”
Now Steinberg is a professor, and his own students seem to be in
touch with their parents … all the time. They even joke that they
have to turn off their phone during finals period, he said, because
their folks keep interrupting their studies.
It’s not just the technology that’s changed—it’s the relationship.
In a Pew Research Center survey conducted last year, more than 70
percent of respondents with children ages 18 to 34 said they talk
with their kids on the phone at least a few times a week, and
nearly 60 percent had helped their kids financially in the past
year. A majority of adult children polled said they turn to their
parents for career, money, and health advice. And a 2023 Harris
poll found that about 45 percent of young adults ages 18 to 29
reported living with their parents—making it the most common living
arrangement for that age group for the first time since just after
the Great Depression.
Some people find those numbers alarming, evidence of a quietly
mushrooming overdependence among a generation of hapless grown
babies, and of caregivers who can’t, for God’s sake, stop giving
care. But that’s not necessarily right. Today’s average
parent-child bond does seem to involve near-constant
communication—yet it also comes with an intensified emotional
closeness of the kind once reserved for friends and romantic
partners. This doesn’t mean that adult kids are failing to launch
or that their parents are suffering. Rather, the way our society
understands child-rearing is evolving. The assignment, which was
once to raise an independent child and set them off into the world,
is now to foster a deep, lasting relationship.
The panic about dependent young adults rests on an assumption: that
growing up requires you to leave family behind. But that’s not
always been the norm in the United States. For a long time, young
adults typically lived with or near their parents or other
relatives. Until the turn of the 20th century, the point of
marriage was largely to pool household labor and resources. Family
businesses were common. It was only after World War II that federal
programs such as the GI Bill gave young people the incentive to buy
their own house, which led to couples marrying earlier and striking
out on their own. The culture started shifting in turn:
“Psychologists, parenting experts, and business leaders roundly
condemned people who wanted to stay attached to home, labeling them
immature and maladjusted,” Matt told me. What we’re seeing now, she
said, is in some ways a return to form—hardly a “strange new
chapter in American history.”
Except that in some sense it is strange, or at least unprecedented,
a time of unique enmeshment between parents and adult kids, driven
by a confluence of societal trends. The transition to adulthood is
taking longer, at least by the traditional milestones and markers
of maturity; people are marrying and having children at later ages.
Yet these young adults still need what Karen Fingerman, a
human-development professor at the University of Texas at Austin,
calls a “guaranteed relationship”—someone they automatically know
will be there for them. Thus, parents, Fingerman told me, are
beginning to take on roles a spouse previously might have, cheering
on their kids or acting as a confidant.
Read: When are you really an adult?
Multigenerational living has also been growing more common
again—partly because of the high cost of housing—which means that
many young adults are eating, working, and hanging out with their
parents every day. Whereas young adults in the 19th century
might’ve been helping their parents work a farm, the current model
is less centered on labor and might look warmer and more casual:
chatting over morning coffee, breaking for lunch, watching a
favorite show together in the evenings.
The bonds forged from that kind of intimacy can deepen even when
adult kids move out or find a partner. Now that people are living
longer on average than they did in previous generations, many
parents and children have a significant stretch of time to enjoy
each other as autonomous individuals, J. Jill Suitor, a Purdue
University sociologist, told me. And texting enables an endless
“stream of connection,” as Fingerman put it; family members can
send pictures or stray thoughts from the grocery store, from
outings with friends, from a walk around the neighborhood. It’s a
way to witness the minutiae of each other’s lives to a degree that
wouldn’t have been easy even in earlier multigenerational
households: Back then, people lived and worked and relaxed
together, but when they were out, they’d really be gone.
Adult kids might have leaned less on their parents in the recent
past, but that doesn’t mean they were ever standing on their own.
“It’s not like 19-year-olds didn’t get advice,” Fingerman told me.
“It’s just that they got that advice from another 19-year-old who
might be hungover.” Now, she said, they’re “getting that advice
from a 48-year-old who’s incredibly invested in them and knows
their life and cares about their future in a way that nobody else
does.” Ultimately, the question of whether this new dynamic is
healthy for grown kids comes down to whether a parent’s help is
more stifling than anyone else’s.
Read: Americans can’t decide what it means to grow up
Steinberg said he was especially concerned about young adults who
get financial assistance from their parents, who might feel
beholden to their parents’ vision of the adults they should become.
“The proportion of people in their late 20s who rely on their
parents for paying at least half of their income has doubled,” he
told me. “That makes it a lot harder to roll your eyes when your
parents make a suggestion.” And even for those not taking a cent,
advice can rankle when it comes from your folks. “Young adults need
to prove that they’re capable of handling adulthood without their
parents handling it for them,” Steinberg said. “And I think that
that is a lot more difficult because of the increased closeness
between kids and their parents.”
Such a dynamic, it’s true, is rarely free of friction. But Jacob
Goldsmith, who along with his mother runs a therapy practice
focusing on young adults and their families, told me that this is a
good thing. Because people are marrying later or not marrying at
all, young adults don’t always have opportunities to learn the
tricky interpersonal skills they might have practiced in a
relationship with a spouse—say, how to work through conflict or
take responsibility for their actions. People need familiarity and
understanding to safely figure those things out. “That happens in
marriage,” Goldsmith said. “It happens in really deep, meaningful
friendships. Mostly it happens in families.”
That might sound like a lot of strain on parents, but the support
doesn’t go only one way. Most often, Fingerman has found, “it’s a
very interdependent relationship.” Of the “boomerang kids” who’ve
moved back home, “a lot of these young adults are involved in
caregiving for older relatives. They’re contributing to household
income and household labor.” Having a close and present adult kid
might be especially nice for single parents (the U.S. has the
world’s highest rate of children living with one parent). Overall,
Fingerman said, the tight ties seem to be great for both parties.
When she started researching these relationships just over a decade
ago, “we really thought it would be bad to be that involved with
your parents,” she said. “And we kept trying to find it in the data
… and we couldn’t.” Each side was benefiting.
Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. As Suitor reminded me, one of
the best predictors of parents’ and adult children’s psychological
well-being is the quality of their relationship. So many people in
American society are stuck on the idea that too much closeness gets
in the way of growth—when in fact closeness can help build a
future. “If I develop my identity as a person simply by sort of
rejecting my affiliation with family and other systems,” Goldsmith
said, “I’m sort of developing myself in a vacuum. And that’s not
actually desirable.”
If 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. “If we’re living in a society where the
parents are a huge safety net,” Fingerman said, “where is that
safety net” for people whose parents aren’t present, emotionally
equipped, or alive? Some people have friendships—chosen family—so
unconditional that they really are “guaranteed.” Not everyone
does.
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.
