Parents usually feel closer to their grown children than their children feel to them, and it isn't a sign something went wrong but proof something went right, because a child who needs you a little less is exactly what you spent 20 years raising

Picture a woman telling a pollster that her relationship with her 27-year-old son is excellent. Now picture the son getting the same call. Very good, he says. Maybe just good. Both of them mean it. They're just standing at opposite ends of the same bond.

Pew Research Center put numbers on this in late 2023, with two surveys run side by side. Among American parents of 18- to 34-year-olds, 77% rated the relationship excellent or very good. Among young adults that age, 59% said the same about their parents. Both surveys counted only people still in touch with a parent or grown child, so fully estranged families aren't in these numbers. Pew also asked parents who leans on whom. When asked about one particular son or daughter, 41% said that child relies on them for emotional support at least a fair amount. Only 18% said they lean on their kids that heavily in return. By the parents' own account, the support mostly flows downhill.

My favorite number is smaller. Asked about keeping in touch, 36% of parents said they communicated with that child less often than they'd like, and 3% said more. Somewhere out there is a small, somewhat weary club of parents being texted too often. I'd love to know what their kids are like.

I don't have kids, so I only know this from one seat. My mom is remarried and lives in a different country, and we don't see each other or talk as often as we once did. She has her own life: tennis, Costco, happy hour with friends, the occasional trip to Rome. But when I do reach out, the tone in her voice tells me it means a lot to her. That's those Pew numbers playing out in my own family, and neither of us has done anything wrong. If the pollsters asked her that communication question, I suspect I know which answer she'd pick.

So the gap is real. The idea that it proves something went right sounds like a line from a greeting card, but I think there's a good argument for it.

The developmental stake, or why Mom scores it higher

None of this is new. In 1971 the sociologist Vern Bengtson and his colleague Joseph Kuypers gave the pattern a name in a paper called "Generational difference and the developmental stake." Their idea, as later researchers have summarized it, is that parents see their children as continuations of themselves, while children want independence and care more about the ways they differ. Each side is guarding a different project. The mother on the phone is protecting the thing she built. Her son is busy building something else, ideally with a different color scheme. In this account, his lower score is partly his own project showing up in the numbers.

Pew caught the parents' stake in one blunt figure: 71% said their children's successes and failures reflect on the job they've done as parents. That's a lot of weight to hang on someone who still calls home to ask how long you boil an egg.

There's a catch in Pew's methods. The parents and the young adults weren't from the same families, so the 77% and the 59% come from two separate groups of strangers. Maybe cheerful parents just like filling out surveys more. Asking both sides of the same family offers a more direct comparison, and that's what Kira Birditt at the University of Michigan and her colleagues did with the Family Exchanges Study. It recruited 633 middle-aged parents around Philadelphia. Many of their grown kids and their own parents joined in too, though not every family brought all three generations.

In their 2012 analysis, grandmothers reported warmer and less fraught ties with their middle-aged children than those children reported back. One generation down, between the 633 and their own grown kids, the imbalance showed up only as friction: the parents reported less negativity than their kids did, but the difference in warmth wasn't statistically significant. So the gap survives the family dinner test, only in a quieter form than Pew's headline suggests.

The researchers are careful about why. Their data are a single snapshot, and they note the difference could partly have a duller explanation, such as people getting better at managing their emotions with age. Less romantic, but fair.

A bigger and more recent check comes from the Netherlands, and it's clearer. In a 2020 study, Kirsten van Houdt, Matthijs Kalmijn and Katya Ivanova analyzed more than 4,600 matched pairs from a Dutch survey. Adults aged 25 to 45 and their parents or stepparents were approached separately and asked the same plain question: how close is your relationship? Parents of every kind tended to rate it closer than their children did.

Among biological parents, the mismatch was wider for fathers than for mothers, and stepparents showed it just as much as anyone. The sample deliberately overrepresents people who grew up with separated parents or a stepparent, so it isn't a portrait of every Dutch family. Still, that stepparent result is the one I'd underline. Whatever the gap is, it isn't only about blood.

Same person, different seat

The result I find most convincing goes back to Birditt's 633 middle-aged parents. In a 2015 paper, her team used the fact that each of them was somebody's parent and somebody's child at once. On average, they rated their relationships with their grown kids as more important than those with their own parents. But mattering more didn't make those ties feel any warmer. Any difference in positive feeling could easily have been chance. They also rated the ties with their kids as slightly more negative.

The fact that people rank their kids above their own parents should make the gap feel a lot less personal. A 50-year-old can be the devoted mom and the slightly distracted daughter in the same week. The difference follows the seat rather than the person, which makes it hard to read as a verdict on anyone’s family.

The extra friction with kids is harder to explain. The authors float the idea that irritation can be a sign of caring more. If so, caring and getting irritated go hand in hand, and I suspect a few parents just nodded.

People whose feelings ran the other way, more invested in their own parents than in their children, reported more depressive symptoms. I'd hold that one loosely. It comes from a single snapshot, depressive symptoms were the only well-being outcome measured, and all it shows is that the two things turned up together. The authors think the link probably runs both ways. They also wonder whether a parent's health problems pull some people's investment back up the family tree. If that's what's going on, the symptoms and the shift could both come from the same hard stretch of life.

Aristotle saw it coming

More than 2,300 years before Pew, Aristotle described the same lopsidedness in the Nicomachean Ethics. In Book VIII, in W. D. Ross's translation, parents love their children "as being a part of themselves," while children love their parents as the place they came from. He gives three reasons. Parents know the child is theirs better than the child knows they are its parents. Parents love from birth, whereas children come around only later, once they've gained some understanding. And the maker owns the made thing more than the reverse, "e.g. a tooth or hair." It may be the least cuddly comparison anyone has ever made about children.

He goes further in Book IX, where he asks why people who do someone a favor love that person more than they're loved back. The popular answer in his day was a grubby one: benefactors are like lenders, keeping an anxious eye on whoever owes them. Aristotle doesn’t buy it, and that matters for parents, because the lender model is the guilt-trip version of the job: I raised you, so you owe me. On that view, a child who needs you less is a debt going unpaid.

His answer is craftsmanship. Every maker, he says, loves his own handiwork "better than he would be loved by it if it came alive," and poets dote on their poems "as if they were their children." The reason, he argues, is that we exist through what we do, so the thing we made is, in a sense, us in action. Which means part of what a parent loves in a grown child is twenty years of their own effort, now walking around with its own opinions.

I think this is brilliant, and slightly off. A poem stays put. Nobody writes a sonnet hoping it will one day move to Brooklyn and get a bit vague about Sunday phone calls. Parenting is the odd craft where the handiwork is supposed to come alive and walk out the door, and where a job done well can look, from the maker's chair, a lot like being left. Aristotle's account explains why the parent's side runs deeper. What the craftsman image understates a bit is that this particular piece of handiwork is meant to need its maker a little less every year.

So did something go right?

Put the studies together and the gap looks ordinary. Versions of it turn up when researchers compare generations within the same families, and nothing in the data says a family has failed.

Then there's what the gap is made of. On the developmental stake account, the child's half of it is the push for independence, and independence is the whole point of raising someone. A grown child who rates the relationship a notch below you is rating it from inside a life of their own. That's my case for calling the gap proof that something went right. No survey has measured that, and other things probably play a part too, such as the mellowing with age that Birditt's team raised. But independence fits best. You can't end up with a child who needs you a little less without first raising one who can manage without you. None of this speaks for every kitchen table, and a child who keeps away because things went badly wrong is another story.

One more Pew figure fits that picture. Only 9% of young adults said their parents were too involved in their lives, while 22% said they weren't involved enough. Those figures cover everyone, not only the kids handing out lower ratings, but they hardly describe a generation trying to escape. My guess is that many have simply moved Mom and Dad from the center of their lives to somewhere close by, which is roughly what a parent packing school lunches would have hoped for.

Aristotle also had a view on which side of all this gets the better deal. Friendship, he wrote in Book VIII, seems to lie "in loving rather than in being loved." His example was mothers whose children were raised by others, who didn't seek love in return and "seem to be satisfied if they see them prospering." He meant it as praise: in his scheme, loving is the virtue of friendship. The parent who feels closer hasn't come off second best. By Aristotle's reckoning, they got the better half.