Kim Mills: These days, many parents’ empty nests don’t stay empty for long. A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that half of adults ages 18 to 29 live with a parent. That’s down slightly from a high of 52% during the peak of the pandemic in 2020, but it’s still much higher than it was a generation ago. The decline of the empty nest is just one example of how the lives of young adults have changed in recent years. People in their 20s and 30s are taking longer to reach traditional milestones of adulthood, such as marriage and home ownership, which can put strains on their relationships with their parents. Meanwhile, advice is relatively scarce for parents and adult children who are trying to navigate their relationships during this stage of life. While there are scads of books devoted to parenting babies, toddlers, and teens, there’s not much about how to develop and maintain a good relationship with your grown child.
So what do parents need to understand about this generation of young adults? What do young adults wish their parents understood? How can parents and their adult children resolve the conflicts that will inevitably come up as adult children move back in, enter relationships and have children of their own? If you are a parent of a grown child, how involved should you be in your child’s life? How do you know when to speak up and when to bite your tongue? And finally, how can scientists’ growing understanding of how the brain continues to develop through young adulthood help parents to understand their young adult children better?
Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.
My guest today is Dr. Laurence Steinberg, a distinguished university professor and Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Temple University. Dr. Steinberg is author of the new book, You and Your Adult Child: How to Grow Together in Challenging Times. He is a leading expert on psychological development during adolescence and young adulthood, and his research has focused on topics including adolescent brain development, risk taking and decision making, the juvenile justice system, and parent-child relationships. He is author of more than 500 articles and essays and the author of or editor of six books, and he has spoken widely to the media about adolescent development, including to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and NPR.
Dr. Steinberg, thank you for joining me today.
Laurence Steinberg, PhD: Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
Mills: Let’s start by exploring the idea that young adulthood has changed in recent years. How is being a young adult today different from what it was a generation ago and what are the biggest challenges?
Steinberg: It takes young people longer to move into the conventional roles of adulthood today than was true in previous generations. And by that, I mean people are at a later age when they finish their post-secondary education, when they become financially self-sufficient, when they set up their own household, when they get married, when they become parents. All of those transitions have been shifted to a later age. I looked at government statistics and census data to try to compare how long it takes to become an adult today with how long it took during their parents’ generation. And just for the ability to compare across generations, I said, let’s mark the beginning of this transition to adulthood by the age at which you graduate from college, and let’s mark the completion of the transition to when you start your own family.
Now, I know not everybody graduates from college and not everybody becomes a parent, but these are pretty good markers that you can use to compare generations. Today’s young people accomplish this in about 13 years. Their parents’ generation did so in eight years. Now, five years might not sound like a large amount of time, but it’s 50% longer today than it took their parents to make the same transition. And I think that this is the cause of a lot of misunderstanding between young people and their parents. And I hope we get to talk about that during our conversation today.
Mills: I’m sure we will. Now, there are certain economic factors that play in as well, aren’t there? Can you talk about what those are?
Steinberg: Sure. There are two that I think are very important. The first is that the gap between housing costs and salaries has widened considerably, by about five times or so, the distance between them. And that means that young people need much more time to accumulate enough money to buy a home or even in some cities to rent an apartment on their own, and that makes them economically dependent on their parents for much longer, which has all kinds of psychological ramifications.
The second economic factor is that employers are asking for more and more education to do jobs today than they did for the same jobs a generation ago, which means that young people have to take more courses in college, which might mean that they graduated in five years or six years rather than four years, and then they carry student loan debt as a consequence of that. So those two economic factors have really prolonged adolescence and lengthened the transition into adulthood in ways that make being a 20-year-old or a 30-year-old, much, much harder today than in past generations.
Mills: People often talk about delayed adulthood or failure to launch in a disparaging way, implying that young adults today are somehow lazy or immature. But you make the point that given what we know now about young adult brain development, delaying some aspects of adulthood can actually be a good thing. Why is that?
Steinberg: We know that the brain needs novelty and stimulation and challenge in order to develop, especially in the prefrontal regions of the brain, which are important for advanced thinking abilities and for self-control. And it seems to me that delaying adulthood provides opportunities to continue to be exposed to novelty and challenge, that immediately taking the job or immediately getting married and settling down don’t. I think that when people settle down either in work or family life or both, they get into more of a routine where there’s going to be less novelty and less challenge. As I wrote in a previous book, there are only so many ways you can make a meatloaf. And after a while, I think you’re doing the same old, same old quite often. Whereas if you can extend adolescence, if you want to think about it that way, or delay going into the conventional roles of adulthood for a few more years, and if you can take advantage of that situation by staying stimulated and challenged, it’s probably healthy for your brain development.
Mills: Now, much of your research has focused on teens and you’ve written previous books with advice for parents of teens. What made you decide to turn your focus to young adults?
Steinberg: I wish I could say it was my idea, but it wasn’t. AARP, which is the organization that advocates for and supports adults who are 50 and older, began hearing from their membership that they were having trouble navigating the challenges of being a parent of a grown child. And I imagine, I don’t know exactly how many members they heard from, but it’s an organization that has 37 million members. And so it would take more than a handful, I think, to make them act. And AARP has a longstanding relationship with the publisher Simon & Schuster.
Now they called Simon & Schuster and said, “We need somebody to write a book for parents of adult children.” And just luckily for me, the person who answered the phone at Simon & Schuster happened to be my editor. And so he reached out to me and said, “Are you interested in doing this book?” And I said, “Yeah, in fact, I’ve been thinking a lot about the extension of adolescence into the mid-20s and how that has or hasn’t affected young people’s psychological development. But I haven’t really thought much about how this prolongation of adolescence has affected their parents.” And so it gave me an opportunity to learn about and to think about and to write about something that had been, I guess in the back of my mind, but not really in the forefront of it. So I learned a lot while writing the book.
Mills: So did you then go back and study adult development? Because I mean, a lot of people don’t think that we continue to develop as we get old and go through the various phases, but there certainly is development throughout the lifespan.
Steinberg: There is. I had always been studying people who were in their 20s, and in fact, my colleague and I are still involved in a cross-national study of people where we’ve been following the sample since they were 8 years old and now they’re in their early 20s. And we added a cohort of people in their mid- and late 20s to look at decision-making abilities and how those change after adolescence. So I’ve had a lot of experience looking at development between 10 and 30. I haven’t done much research on people who were older than 30 except when they were parents in studies that I was doing with younger children. So yeah, there is still a lot of development going on, and we know that there’s a lot of brain development going on during the decade of the 20s that hadn’t been really known or commented on until we began to do brain imaging studies that went beyond adolescence.
Mills: Well, let’s talk about some of the nuts-and-bolts advice that you give to parents in your new book, You and Your Adult Child. One of the first situations that you address is the increasingly common one I mentioned in the introduction. When an adult child moves back home, maybe after college or being in the workplace and living on their own for a few years, what’s your advice to parents and adult children in that situation to help it go as smoothly as possible?
Steinberg: Well, let’s first begin by asking both generations to understand and accept the fact that this is normal now in the United States. And I think one of the reasons that it gets so much attention and so much negative attention, as you mentioned in your introduction, you hear people talk about failure to launch. You don’t hear congratulations that you’re moving back home with your parents. But actually it’s a very common living arrangement in other parts of the world. It just has never been very common in the United States. It is now the most common living arrangement for people in their 20s in the United States, and it wasn’t that way at any point in time in the 20th century, even during the Great Depression. So because it’s unusual, I think that both parents and young people approach this with some trepidation.
Now, I teach, of course, people who are in this age range because I teach at a university. And interestingly for me, I teach courses on adolescence. So the students in my classes, they have a lot of firsthand experience with the topics that we’re talking about. And during the pandemic, like many professors I was teaching remotely. And in order to make it a better experience, I took a seminar that I was teaching that had 20 students in it, and I divided it into five groups that met separately over the course of the semester because it is very hard to do a Zoom conversation with 20 people in it where everybody’s going to be checked in and paying attention. And so I got to know the students extremely well, and many of the students were living at home. In fact, it was funny for me to see them on my screen taking class from their childhood bedrooms. Sometimes they would be sitting on their bed with their stuffed animals alongside them, and I would ask them what it was like moving back home and living with their parents.
And they all said, “It’s not what I hoped to be doing, but it’s fine. And in fact, I’ve gotten to know my parents much better now than I did before I went off to college.” And they talk about getting to know their parents as people, not just as parents. So I think there are opportunities for a lot of positive development for moving back home, it’s certainly not all negative. And my students’ experiences parallel what we’ve seen in national surveys, where young adults who are living at home say, “It’s not so bad, and my parents and I get along just fine.”
I think the key really is to have a conversation about what everybody’s expectations are because it’s a new situation. Neither the parents nor the child want to fall into the old dynamics that characterize their relationship when they were living at home as teenagers. And so they really need to talk about what the rules are, what the guidelines are. And one of the reasons I wrote the book is that this is completely new territory for families. And so they don’t know what the rules are, they don’t know what the expectations should be. And so I think the first order of business, if you’re going to be moving back in with your parents, is to talk about your expectations and their expectations so that you’re all on the same page.
Mills: So where are the common pain points? If I’m a young person who moves back home with my parents, where will conflict typically arise and how should both sides deal with it?
Steinberg: I think that most conflicts arise over issues of autonomy and independence because in many instances, we’re talking about moving back home. And so that the young adult has been on their own for some time, either living in an apartment or living in a dorm or living away from their parents regardless. And they may have ideas about how to live their life independently that conflict with their parents’ expectations. So for example, let’s say that they’re sexually active while they’re at college and their parents know about it, but their parents may not feel comfortable knowing that their young adult is sexually active just down the hall from them. And especially if their young adult is single and going out with different people and dating and perhaps being sexually involved with different people, and their parents don’t want to encounter a new person having coffee first thing in the morning. So I think they need to have some discussion about what the expectations and rules are.
I think another point of conflict is household chores and household responsibilities because you may have kept your dorm room in a way that’s not quite as neat as your parents expect you to keep your bedroom. And you may feel like, well, it’s my room. And your parents may feel like, well, we didn’t expect you were going to be moving back and using this room, and we have to have some understanding. I mean, somebody’s got to get in there and clean it. And when your clothes are all over the floor, that’s very, very difficult to do.
Another situation that I discussed in the book is what the expectations are for mealtimes. That is, are you expected to have dinner as a family the way that you did, let’s say when you were a high school student living at home? Or do you come and go as you wish? Now, I’m not saying that there’s a single right way to do this, but what I am saying is that it’s important to have a conversation so that you and your parents can get on the same page and have similar expectations and understandings.
Mills: In general, how much advice should parents give their adult children who have moved back in? For instance, when you see your adult child doing something you think is a mistake, how do you know when you should say something and when you should just keep silent?
Steinberg: I think that you have to see whether the mistake is going to have dire consequences and irreparable consequences. My advice to parents of adult children is, unless you’re asked for it, keep your opinion to yourself. Except in those situations where you think that the consequences are going to be very, very severe and irreversible. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t speak up if your child asks for your advice about something. And I think you should give your honest answer to those kinds of questions. But one of the themes in the book that I think will resonate with young adults who are listening to this podcast is that this is a period of time when autonomy is a very, very important issue. I think as a psychologist, I think about two periods when autonomy often is a challenge for parents and their children. One is toddlerhood, and we talk about the terrible twos and how oppositional little children can sometimes be. And another is adolescence, particularly early adolescence, when young people start to feel like I’m entitled to have my own opinion and I’m entitled to express it.
But I think there’s a third period during which individuals have a strong need for autonomy, a strong need to what we say in psychology is to individuate from their parents. And I think that parents often aren’t sensitive to this. And when they are frequently giving advice to their young adult children, their children may bristle at it not because of the substance of the advice, and not because there’s something that they don’t like about their parents, but because the young adult is still trying to establish themself as a competent, capable adult who doesn’t need mom and dad to rely on anymore. And I think that a lot of parents feel hurt when their young adult children either ask them to not express their opinion about things or when their young adult children don’t follow the advice that their parents give them. And what I write in the book to parents is don’t take it personally. It’s not about you. It’s about your young adult child’s need to establish a sense of autonomy to demonstrate to you and to themselves that they’re capable of handling adulthood without having to rely on their parents.
Now, this then raises an issue that we spoke about earlier, which is the prolonged economic dependence that young people have on their parents because of the changes in the economy and the labor force and the housing market that I mentioned earlier. So now you have a situation where young adults are feeling emotionally mature, but they’re feeling financially dependent and how parents and children work that out can often be quite a challenge for both generations.
Mills: Well, speaking of financial dependence and independence, when is it okay for a parent to help their adult child financially and what parameters should they lay out in order to navigate this potentially tricky situation?
Steinberg: I think that parents should help their adult children as much as they can without threatening their own wellbeing or retirement or health. I try to get parents to understand how difficult it is to be in your 20s or 30s today, and how expensive it is, and how it is very normal for young people to come to their parents and say, “I need your help in order to live.” And this is especially the case for young people who are living on the East and West Coast where the cost of housing is really very, very high and very high, particularly in relation to the salaries that people are earning. So for starters, I think that parents need to realize that it’s normal these days for young people to ask their parents for financial assistance.
Now, assuming that the parents can afford to help and do help, then I think the question that a lot of parents ask me is, how closely should I monitor how much child spends the money now that I’m contributing to what they have? And I think that this financial relationship has to be based on a sense of trust. And I tell parents, “Look, just because you’re helping your child out financially doesn’t give you the right to dictate how they spend the money that they have.” And I would really ease off on monitoring your children’s expenditures. But I think before parents and young adult children enter into this kind of financial relationship, there should be an explicit understanding that once the young adult no longer needs financial assistance or no longer needs as much financial assistance, they will tell their parents.
I tell the story in the book of two young women who are partnered and who receive a subsidy, a monthly subsidy from one of the women’s parents in order to help them live. And in the anecdote, the parents who have a vacation home in I think Upstate New York, invite the two women to come for a long weekend during the summer. And when they extend the invitation, the women say, “Well, we were planning on taking a vacation in Scandinavia this August, so that’s not a good time for us to come and visit.” And there’s no argument going on. But after the parent hangs up the phone, it happened to be the father, he goes to his wife and says “They’re going to Scandinavia in August, they can’t come and visit. I thought they were broke.” And his wife says, “Look, they haven’t taken a vacation in several years. We don’t know if they’ve scrimped on other things to save money to be able to go. And I don’t think we should say anything about it.”
It turns out that the young woman who wasn’t the daughter of these parents had received as a birthday present from her mother, plane tickets to go to Europe for a vacation, and so weren’t using the parents’ subsidy to take the vacation at all. So I think parents should not really question what their child is doing with the money that the parents are giving them unless they’re confronted over and over again with expenditures that they think are unreasonable. And then I think they can say something like, “It doesn’t seem like you need as much help from us as we’re giving you. Should we discuss this now and come to a different understanding” or something like that.
Mills: Yeah, that makes sense. Now, as a college professor, you have a front row seat to one aspect of parenting, which is the degree to which parents remain involved in their college students lives. Is there truth to the stereotype of helicopter parents who are still monitoring their college age children’s schoolwork and other aspects of their lives? Is this something that you are seeing a lot of among your students?
Steinberg: Yes. When I was director of graduate studies in our psychology department, I once got a call from a woman who said that she had questions about our clinical psychology program. And I said, “Oh, sure, and tell me about yourself and what you’re interested in.” And the woman said, “Oh, I’m calling for my daughter. She wants to apply. And I said that I would help in this process.” And I said, “Well, why don’t you have your daughter give me a call? And that way I can talk to her directly and ask the questions that I want to ask and give her the information that she needs.” And the mother fought me on this. And finally I said to her, “If your daughter doesn’t have time to do this or isn’t interested in doing this, then maybe she’s not ready for graduate school.” And the mother hung up the phone.
And when I began preparing to write this book, I emailed colleagues around the country and said, “Does anything like this ever happen to you?” And they all said yes. In fact, one said not only that, but one time I was interviewing somebody for our doctoral program and she brought her mother with her to the interview. And so there are a lot of parents, they’re very involved. I joked in the book that they’re not helicopter parents, they’re lawnmower parents. They’re not 10,000 feet above ground. They’re right down there kind of clearing the way so that their young adult child doesn’t face any obstacles. My advice to parents is provide your child with the financial assistance that you can afford to provide and visit them a couple of times a semester, but otherwise stay out of it. And I say this for two reasons.
The first is that most universities, mine certainly does, provide all kinds of services to students who need help, academic help, psychological help, medical attention, tutoring, you name it, it’s there. And you don’t need to worry as a parent that your child needs are going to be unmet on campus.
But I think more important than that is college is a time not only for academic learning, but it’s a time for personal growth. And it’s a very important time for the development of self-reliance and confidence in one’s abilities to navigate the world. And when parents step in and intervene, I think maybe interfere. But when they intervene even with good intentions, they’re depriving their child of opportunities to learn how to function independently. And that’s a really important outcome of a good college experience. And it’s also the case that parents don’t really understand how today’s colleges and universities work. And that’s understandable. They haven’t been college students themselves for quite some time.
I mean, even at my university, I can’t keep track of the changes that are constantly going on and requirements for graduation and requirements for majors. That’s why our university and most universities around the country have student office, offices for students where they can ask these questions and get good advice. You don’t want to find out in April of your senior year that there’s a course that you should have taken in order to graduate in June, and that’s why these offices are there. And your parents don’t know what the requirements are, and your parents don’t know what you need to do to graduate on time. So they may give you ill-informed advice. So I think that it’s great for parents to take an interest in what their college students’ education is, what they’re learning in class, what they’re discussing with their classmates, what they’re reading, what they’re thinking about, and so forth. But I would not give advice on what courses to take, what to major in and so on.
Mills: Which to my mind raises the question of the tendency, the impulse to say, “well, when I was your age, we did X.” And I think that’s an area where you have offered some good advice to parents.
Steinberg: Yeah, I think “when I was your age” is an expression that parents should just drop from their vocabulary because even though you may have been their age, you were their age under very different circumstances than your child is living with now. And you remember earlier I said that there’s about a five year difference in how long it takes to make the full transition into adulthood for when we compared the current generation with the previous generation. And so my advice to parents who can’t resist thinking when I was your age is don’t compare your child at the age of 30 with where you were when you were 30. Subtract five years from your life when you’re making the comparison. So let’s say if your child is 35 now, compare how your child is doing to how you were doing when you were 30. That’s subtracting the five years to make the comparison more accurate. And you may find actually that even though you had thought that your child wasn’t moving fast enough, that in fact they’re quite accomplished relative to where you were at the generationally appropriate comparison point.
Mills: Now, what happens when adult children get married or have children of their own? How do those new relationships tend to affect the parent-child relationship? And what can parents and children do to keep their relationship strong through those transitions?
Steinberg: Well, I think, let’s talk first about marriage and how your child’s marriage may affect the relationship that you have with them. You have this new person in your life and you didn’t choose this person and you didn’t raise this person, and that’s your child’s partner. And you’re going to have to find a way to get along with this person in order to keep your relationship with your child strong and healthy. And I think that if you’re blessed as I am—I have a daughter-in-law whom I’m quite close to and like very much, then that’s terrific, that makes life a lot easier for you. If on the other hand, you’re not so crazy about this person, you can have a cordial relationship with them and avoid having conflict arise because if conflict arises between you and your child’s partner, it is going to affect the quality of the relationship that you have with your child.
Let’s shift for a second and talk about when your child becomes a parent and you become a grandparent and you’re watching your child’s parenting behavior and you’re not wild about the way that they’re parenting their child. What I say in the book is to remember that childbearing advice, it changes with fads and fashions. And the advice that young people who are new parents today are getting from advice books, from their pediatricians, from their friends is very different than the advice that their parents got when they were new parents. And so you may see your child doing something that stuns you because it’s not the way that you raised them, and you may be tempted to comment on it. And I think you should just take a breath and remember that they probably have gotten very different advice about how to parent than you got when you were a new parent. And what I hear is that today’s new parents follow a very strict and rigid schedule for let’s say, feeding and sleeping than their parents did, who were much more relaxed.
I note in the book that my generation of parents followed Dr. Spock’s advice, and the first sentence in his book is “Trust yourself.” If that book were written today, the first sentence would be “trust the data.” Because new parents today enter data into their smartphones on their children’s eating, how many ounces of breast milk or formula they’ve taken at each point during the day, how many minutes of sleep they’ve gotten for each time they’ve put the baby down. In my generation, you looked for signs that your child was hungry and you fed them, you looked for signs that they were full and you stopped feeding them. You looked for signs that they were sleepy and you put them down for a nap and you let them sleep as long as they would sleep. That’s not the way it’s done today.
And so I think many parents in my generation are quite surprised at the way their children are parenting. But that doesn’t mean that their children are wrong because frankly, it probably doesn’t matter for the child’s development, whether they’re on a tight schedule or not. You need to remember as a grandparent that your child who’s now a parent perhaps for the first time, is often insecure and anxious and nervous about being a parent. They haven’t done it before. And the best thing that you can do as a grandparent is to make your child feel comfortable and confident, and criticizing their parenting is not going to do that.
Mills: Last question, is there one piece of advice you would like to give our listeners today, or maybe two pieces, one for the parents of adult children and one for listeners who are themselves adult children?
Steinberg: Yeah, I guess it’s the same advice for both, is to be compassionate and to try to look at the situation from the other generation’s perspective. I’ll tell one brief anecdote if I have time. When I was recording the audiobook of You and Your Adult Child, I was working with two young people in their late 20s, the producer and the audio engineer, and they had to listen very carefully as I narrated the book in order to stop me every once in a while and say, “Could you do that sentence over again? It didn’t sound right or there was background noise.” And for each of these young people, this was their first exposure to the book. Neither had read the book before, but they had to listen very carefully to my narration of it.
And after the first day, the young woman who was the producer took me aside and she said, “My parents have to read this book because they don’t understand me.” And three days later, the audio engineer took me aside and said, “I’ve got to get a copy of this book from my parents because they don’t understand what it’s like to be my age these days.” But I think there’s also a need for the young adult, the grown child, to be compassionate toward their parents and to understand that this is not such an easy situation for parents to be in either. So it’s a challenge. I think most families can get through it, but I think being understanding of what the other person is experiencing at this time is going to go a long way toward helping to strengthen the relationship between parents and their adult children.
Mills: Well, Dr. Steinberg, I want to thank you for joining me today. This has been very interesting and I’m sure it’ll be very useful to our listeners. Thank you.
Steinberg: Thank you. I hope it is.
Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, YouTube, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan.
Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.
Laurence Steinberg, PhD, is a distinguished university professor and the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Temple University. He is one of world's leading experts on adolescence, and his research has focused on topics including adolescent brain development, risk taking and decision making, the juvenile justice system and parent-child relationships. He is the author of nearly 500 articles and the author, coauthor, or editor of 16 books. His newest book is You and Your Adult Child: How to Grow Together in Challenging Times. He has been a featured guest on numerous television programs, including CBS Morning News, Today and Good Morning America, and has also written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and USA Today. Steinberg is an APA fellow and a former president of APA’s Division of Developmental Psychology.
