Jessica Parenting Journal

                                    I came across the AARP figure on a Tuesday morning and my first reaction wasn’t surprise. It was recognition. I thought of Karen and the phone plan. I thought of at least six conversations I’ve had in the past year with friends who are quietly covering rent, groceries, car insurance — things they don’t mention unless you ask directly. Seventy-five percent didn’t feel like a statistic. It felt like a description of most people I know. Then I read the second number. And that one landed differently. A 2025 AARP survey — nationally representative, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, 1,744 parents age 45 and up — found that 75% of parents are financially supporting at least one adult child. Most of us, in other words, are in this. But buried in the same report is a figure that reframes everything: 53% of those adult children are reportedly capable of m...

My sister-in-law Karen has been very patient about Hannah. That’s the word I’d use — patient. Hannah is 24, employed, living independently, and by most measures doing fine. She’s also still on Karen’s family phone plan, still on the health insurance, and still the recipient of what Karen calls “the occasional top-up” when something unexpected comes along. Karen doesn’t resent any of it. She calls it helping out. What she doesn’t call it — yet — is enabling. I say “yet” because that’s the question she asked me last month over coffee: “At what point does helping become the reason they don’t try harder?” I didn’t have a clean answer. But I’ve spent a lot of time since then trying to find one. Most parents helping an adult child aren’t enabling. They’re doing what loving parents do — filling a gap, cushioning a fall, buying a little time. The problem is that enabling feels identical to support from the inside. It comes from the same place, the same love, the same instinct to protect. T...

  My daughter came home from her first day of school, sat down at the kitchen table with her afternoon snack, and fell asleep sitting up. Half-eaten apple slice still in her hand. She was out before I could ask a single question. My immediate thought was that something must have gone terribly wrong. My second thought was that she was coming down with something. What I know now: nothing was wrong at all. Her brain had just done one of the most demanding things it had ever been asked to do — and it needed to recover. The first day of school looks, from the outside, like a social event. A bit overwhelming, a bit exciting, probably some tears at the gate. What it actually is, neurologically, is a sustained multi-system activation event that runs from the moment of goodbye to the moment of collapse on the kitchen floor. Understanding what’s happening inside that small head doesn’t just satisfy curiosity — it changes what you do at the gate, what you say after school, and what you stop...

  I still remember standing in the lobby of the third preschool open day in two weeks, brochure in hand, nodding along while the director explained their “child-centred, holistic approach to emergent learning.” It sounded wonderful. It sounded exactly like the brochure from the previous two schools. And I had absolutely no idea what any of it would look like on an actual Tuesday morning, with my actual child, doing actual things. That was the moment I realised I needed a framework before I could make this decision. Not more open days. A way of understanding what these methods actually mean in practice — and which one might suit the specific small person currently destroying my living room with remarkable efficiency. I spent the next several weeks reading, visiting, and talking to parents on the other side of the decision — parents whose children had been through each of these environments and were now in primary school. What I found surprised me: the differences between the met...

  My sister-in-law Karen has a daughter, Hannah, who is twenty-four now — employed, living independently, and, by her own cheerful admission, permanently one surprise expense away from disaster. She’s still on the family phone plan and the family health plan, and every month is a small financial cliffhanger. Here’s the thing I can’t stop thinking about: Hannah, whom I love dearly, once had the single most catastrophic bedroom in our extended family. I’m not saying the bedroom caused anything. I’m saying I’ve stopped believing it was a coincidence. This is the post where I connect two things I’ve been writing about separately for a year: the messy teenager and the boomerang young adult. Because the more I read, the more convinced I become that they’re not two topics. They’re one topic, ten years apart. The Boomerang Numbers, Revisited I wrote about the boomerang generation before, and the economic picture I described then has not improved. If anything, the newest numbers are m...