Prolonged Parenting in an Era of Extended Longevity

*This article was sponsored by AARP. All views, language, and endorsements expressed in this are solely those of Julie Miller, PhD, MSW (Director of Thought Leadership, Financial Resilience, AARP) and do not necessarily reflect the views or endorsements of the Financial Health Network.

We are living longer than the generations that came before us – a privileged reality that changes practically everything. Longevity is changing how we anticipate and prepare for major turning points and transitions in life. It’s changing the timing and order in which we learn, work, and play. And perhaps most profoundly, it’s changing parenting.

The implications of what I call “prolonged parenting” are important for households, policymakers, and industry leaders – especially those in financial services and fintech.

In the age of increased longevity, there are several trends fundamentally shaping the experience of parenting:

We are parenting later.

AARP’s recent “Revelations Through Data” series shows that “the distribution of maternal and paternal age at childbirth has evolved from one dominated by people in their teens and twenties to a new normal in which older parents account for an increasingly large fraction of births.” The numbers paint a clear picture of this shift: In 1972, only 17% of births were to mothers were over 30. By 2022, that figure had risen to the majority of births (51%). On the paternal side, the figures have flipped from less than a third of new fathers being over 30 in 1972 to almost two-thirds over 30 in 2022.

As illustrated in the article, parents with young, dependent children are more likely to be working beyond age 65 than those without, suggesting that they are making different decisions about retirement timing. In fact, the social and economic impacts of later-onset parenting – while not yet fully realized – will likely reverberate widely across all of our social institutions, including those related to fundamental services like housing, transportation, and healthcare.      

We are parenting longer.

As parenting has been starting later, it also has been stretching longer. Roughly a century ago, the average U.S. life expectancy was just shy of 60, which meant seeing children through their 30s or 40s. Disparities in life expectancy notwithstanding, average life expectancy in the United States is hovering just below 80, and the majority of parents can now expect to parent adults age 18 or older far longer than they parented children age 17 or younger.

In other words, for many people the longest stage of parenthood is now one in which they are parenting adults rather than children. While most would agree that parenting is an important job, the reality is that few parents receive any formal training in how to do it and that most of this training is on the job. Like workers who want to remain agile and competitive in the labor force across long careers, parents who want to maintain active involvement in their adult children’s lives need to both know about and be able to take advantage of opportunities to reskill over time.

We are parenting more intensively.

According to a February 2024 AARP survey, many parents of adult children feel that the support they find themselves providing – from emotional, educational, and spiritual counsel to career advice and logistical support around finances, housing, and childcare – is more multifaceted and intensive compared with what they received when they were their adult children’s ages. Almost 40% of parents of adult children agreed that the experience “feels like a bigger task than it was for my parents.”  

There are reasons behind that shift that go beyond changes in cultural norms. A recent brief written by Economist Impact and commissioned by AARP found that the COVID-19 pandemic, rising education prices, cost-of-living increases, and the shifting labor market, among other factors, all play a role in the intensity of parenting young adults today.

That’s not to say that parenting more intensively means parenting more begrudgingly. AARP’s 2024 survey data saw approximately 50% of respondents saying that “the benefits of parenting my adult child(ren) outweigh the challenges.” Most also appear to view support today with positive expectations for the future. More than half (53%) of respondents agreed with the statement, “I can imagine a time when I will rely on my adult child(ren) more than they will rely on me.”

We are parenting more expensively.

In a recent Pew Research Center analysis, 59% of U.S. parents reported giving financial support to adult children aged 18 to 34 in the past year. AARP’s February 2024 survey found that more than 70% of parents provide more (44%) or similar (28%) levels of financial support to their adult children than their own parents did for them.

Financial support can take many forms. Not surprisingly, common examples include housing and education, where prices have steadily increased in recent years. Rates of co-residence between parents and adult children are higher than they have been in decades, often with parents directly or indirectly subsidizing housing costs for adult children. Parents are also contributing higher proportions of their children’s college tuition payments than they have in the past. Financial support from parents might take active and conscious forms, such as transferring money to children via payment apps or digital wallets for needs like groceries or gasoline, or making yearly contributions to children’s retirement accounts. In other instances, financial support to adult children may be more incidental through the combined product of inertia and auto pay, such as when adult children stay on parents’ cell phone plans or car insurance policies and just don’t leave.

There is no road map for the longest stage of parenthood.

It’s clear that parenting is happening later, longer, more intensively, and more expensively than before. So now what?

While parenting itself may be a time-worn role, society arguably has yet to develop a whole constellation of language, services, and products to support parents through the new “longest stage of parenting” − that is, parenting adult kids.

The shifting landscape of parenting presents a wide range of financial implications for longevity preparedness- from delayed or deferred entry into parenthood itself squeezing retirement savings; to the relative intensity of parenting adult children’s influence on parents’ employment and housing situations; to greater financial interdependence (for better or for worse) between parents and adult children over time. Together, implications of later, longer, more intensive, and more expensive parenting represent an opportunity for financial services and fintech industries to meet the shifting needs and desires of parents of adult children.    

Broad shifts in economic and social realities in the U.S. mean that more and more parents can expect to remain intricately financially involved in their children’s lives through retirement age and well into their later years. This marked shift toward greater financial interdependence within families is important not just for households but for commerce and policy as well. Industry leaders − especially those in financial services and fintech − have as great a need and opportunity as ever to understand the evolving needs and desires of parents supporting adult children, not just because it’s a benevolent thing to do but because it’s smart business.

AARP’s Policy, Research, and International Affairs unit powers insights and analyses that put longevity squarely in conversation with other powerful social phenomena defining our lives today. Coming up, AARP will continue to explore the intersections of longevity and parenting, taking a multicultural and equity-focused lens to explore nuances and implications of prolonged parenting across diverse groups and elevate solutions.

To learn more about the ways in which parenting and longer lifespans tie together, check out:

• Parenting Later and Longer Impacts Parents 50-Plus
• Parenting Young Adult Children in the United States          
• The Parents are Alright… Or are They? Exploring Well-Being of Parents Living with Adult Children
• Longevity Plus: Understanding Evolving Lifespans
• Delayed Childbearing and its Implications for Older Working Parents