Most adult children can name the pattern from memory: the unsolicited opinion about the job offer, the follow-up question about the apartment asked twice, the

My father has never once told me he worries about becoming less necessary in my life, but I’ve started noticing how much lighter he seems

A particular kind of surprise shows up on the faces of certain people in their mid-sixties — people who, somewhere in the background of their

You see a colleague’s email at 9:47 in the morning and decide whether the tone you instinctively want to use is fair, or whether the

A 73-year-old woman is walking down a high street when she catches her reflection in a shop window. She stops, briefly. The woman in the

Drive safe. Get home okay. Text me when you land. Don’t forget your jacket. Have you eaten today? Did you sleep? Make sure you eat.

A study that recorded long-married couples hashing out an actual grievance found the older ones weren’t calmer because they’d run out of things to fight about. The disagreement was still there. What had thinned out was the contempt, and what remained was the affection.

There is a name for the pull older adults feel toward the generation coming up — and it tends to travel with how content they are with their own lives.

A body of research in developmental psychology has built up gradually around an uncomfortable observation: children begin forming a coherent sense of themselves, as capable

Every extended family seems to have one person who holds it together. Decades of research keep finding the same thing about who that person is, and what their work is worth.

Two large analyses conducted decades apart, using different populations and different methods, arrived at the same broad conclusion: people who attend religious services regularly live

Human beings need two different things from other people, and we tend to confuse them. One is to be respected — admired, judged competent, taken