There is a particular kind of family visit that adult children in their thirties, forties, and fifties conduct regularly, and that the wider cultural conversation has tended to absorb in considerably more judgmental terms than the underlying situation warrants. The visit is the one the adult child makes not because they are particularly looking forward to it, not because it is going to produce the kind of deep connection they might, in principle, want from a visit to their parents, but because the visit is the thing one does. The parents are alive. The parents live wherever they live. The adult child makes the visit, with whatever frequency the available logistics permit, and the visit is what the visit is.
The standard cultural framing of this has tended to treat it as a kind of small moral failure on the adult child’s part. The framing suggests that the adult child should, in principle, be visiting their parents because of the deep love that adult children are supposed to feel for the people who raised them, and that the absence of that feeling is evidence that the adult child has somehow fallen short of what they were supposed to be.
The framing is, in practice, considerably less attentive to what is actually happening in these families than the situation warrants. It assumes the absence of the deep feeling is the result of a moral or emotional failure. The more accurate framing is more specific. The absence is, in most cases, not the result of failure on anyone’s part. It is the product of how the relationship gradually settled into its current shape, across years that nobody in the relationship was particularly attending to.
How the shape actually settled
It is worth being precise about how the shape settled, because the standard account tends to absorb the process in vaguer terms than the underlying mechanism warrants.
It settled, in most cases, through the slow accumulation of small facts that nobody in the relationship was, in any single moment, deliberately producing. The adult child left home at eighteen or twenty-two. The geographical distance was established. The small daily contacts that had constituted the texture of the family relationship were, by necessity, no longer available. Phone calls happened. They were, in most cases, pitched at the surface-level register that long-distance family contact tends to settle into. The substantive material that the in-person daily contact had been carrying was, more accurately, no longer being carried by anything.
The adult child built their adult life. The parents continued in theirs. The two lives diverged, in the way adult lives are designed to diverge, across the decades that followed the adult child’s departure. The divergence was not, in itself, a problem. It was what adult life is. It did, however, produce a particular condition that nobody in the relationship was equipped to address.
The condition was that the parents, by the time the adult child was thirty-five, were no longer fully familiar with who the adult child currently was. The adult child, by the same point, was no longer fully familiar with who the parents currently were. The relationship was operating, in most cases, on the residual model each party had constructed of the other during the years when the in-person contact had been continuous. That residual model was, by necessity, outdated. The relationship was operating on outdated information, and the substantive connection that had been available during the years of continuous contact was no longer available at the same level.
Nobody decided this. Nobody chose the configuration. The configuration settled itself, across years that everyone involved was busy with their own lives, and by the time anyone in the relationship was in a position to notice what had happened, the shape was already in place.
What the visits actually consist of
By the time the shape has settled, the visits consist of a particular kind of small structured contact that the standard account has not adequately named. The adult child arrives at the parents’ house. The parents are pleased to see them. The standard small talk occurs. Meals are eaten. Surface-level conversations about work, weather, the news, and the other adults the family knows are conducted. The visit ends. The adult child goes home.
What does not occur, in most of these visits, is any substantive engagement with the actual interior life of any of the participants. The adult child does not, in most cases, disclose what is actually going on in their interior to the parents, because the disclosure would require the parents to have access to information about who the adult child currently is, and the parents are, by necessity, operating on the residual model that does not include this information. The parents do not, in most cases, disclose what is going on in their interior to the adult child, for similar reasons. The conversation is pitched at the level of detail the residual models on each side can handle.
The visit produces, in the adult child, a particular kind of small ongoing low-grade exhaustion that the adult child has typically been registering, across decades of conducting these visits, without quite naming what it is. The exhaustion is not the exhaustion of difficulty. It is the exhaustion of performing presence at a level the current relationship is not, by its design, capable of supporting at any deeper register. The adult child is doing more emotional work than the visit can absorb.
The parents are typically doing the same work, on their own side, without quite naming it either. Both parties are operating in good faith. Both are doing what the configuration permits them to do. Neither is, in any meaningful sense, failing at the relationship. The relationship is operating at exactly the level its current design permits it to operate at, and that level is considerably below what either party would, in principle, want.
Why the obligation framing is partly inaccurate
The standard account has been calling this configuration obligation, with the implication that the adult child is conducting the visits without the deep love that should, in principle, be motivating them. The framing is partly accurate. The deep love that the standard account expects is not, in most cases, what is motivating the visits. They are being conducted on the basis of a different kind of motivation that has not been adequately named.
The different motivation is the small ongoing recognition that the parents are the people who raised the adult child, that the parents are getting older, that the parents will eventually die, and that the adult child does not, in any adequate way, want to be the kind of person who fails to show up during the available years. The recognition is not the same thing as the deep love the standard account expects. It is also, by any honest measure, not nothing. It is, more specifically, its own form of love, shaped to the realities of the current configuration rather than to the substantive intimacy the configuration no longer supports.
This is what the obligation framing obscures. It implies that the adult child who is visiting out of obligation is somehow not loving the parents. The accurate framing is that the adult child is loving the parents in the only way the current configuration makes available. The configuration does not make substantive intimacy available, because that kind of intimacy requires conditions the relationship has not maintained across the decades since the adult child left home. The configuration does make showing up available. The showing up is, more modestly, what the love currently consists of.
Why the showing up is not nothing
The showing up is not nothing, for several reasons the standard account has not adequately registered.
The first is that what the parents actually receive from it is considerable. The parents do not, in most cases, particularly need or want the substantive intimacy the standard account expects. They need the small ongoing evidence that they have not been forgotten, that the adult child continues to count them as part of the texture of their life, and that the holidays and birthdays and Sunday afternoons will continue to include them. The showing up provides this. It is, in most cases, exactly what the parents need at the stage of life they are currently in.
The second is that what the adult child is producing is real labor. The adult child is taking time away from their own life, traveling to wherever the parents live, conducting the small interactions the visit requires, and absorbing the ongoing emotional work the visit imposes. The labor is not trivial. It is the expression of the recognition the adult child has of what the parents mean to them, even when the deep feelings the standard account expects are not currently available.
The third is that the showing up preserves the possibility of those feelings returning. The adult child who continues to show up across the decades of distance is keeping the relationship available for whatever future shape might develop. The adult child who stops showing up forecloses that possibility. The continuing-to-show-up is the mechanism through which the relationship remains a relationship at all, available for whatever the future of it might turn out to be.
The acknowledgment this article wants to leave
Adult children who visit their parents out of obligation rather than out of the deep love the standard account expects have not, in most cases, done anything wrong. The relationship settled into its current shape across years that nobody was particularly attending to, on the basis of how adult lives diverge from family environments after the adult child leaves home. Nobody chose the configuration. The configuration settled itself.
Showing up the way the adult child currently shows up is its own kind of love. It is shaped to the realities of the current relationship rather than to the substantive intimacy the standard account expects. It is not, in itself, the version of the relationship the adult child was promised when they were a child. It is, more modestly, the version that is actually available given how the relationship has developed across the intervening decades.
The available version is not nothing. It is what most of the visible family-relationship sustenance the standard account has been admiring across the decades of adult life is actually built on. The standard account would benefit from absorbing this with considerably more seriousness than it has so far. The absorbing would, among other things, allow the adult children currently conducting these visits to stop blaming themselves for not feeling the version of the relationship they had been promised. The not-blaming is the precondition for the recognition that what they are doing is exactly what the current configuration permits them to do, and that the doing is the expression of a real love the standard framing has not been built to recognise.
