newsminer.com

I used to think I was closer to my three adult children than most other parents.

Sure, they’ll call me on Mother’s Day. But my children call me every Sunday.

My closeness to my adult children turns out to be nothing special.

Almost 45 percent of American adults, I was astonished to learn, see or talk to a parent (usually their moms) not just on Mother’s Day but every single day of the year.

Adult children are closer to their parents now than 20 years ago. Less than a third of adults in 1989 said they see or talk to a parent every day.

Advancements in technology and deregulation have changed family relationships in radical ways, finds a 2006 Pew Research Center Report — ”Families Drawn Together by Communication Revolution.” It’s based on a nationally representative sample of more than 3,000 adults.

We think of ourselves as an increasingly mobile society, especially those of us who have left home and moved far away to Alaska. We hear a lot about the breakdown of the American family, as children move away to pursue their own economic advancement.

But another surprising finding is how close geographically most adults still are to their parents.

Nearly two-thirds of people who have a living parent say they live within an hour’s drive, about the same percentage as in 1989.

Mom is still on her pedestal, the epicenter of emotional relationships in the family. Close to 90 percent of adult children with both parents living felt “close” to their mothers while only about 10 percent felt “distant.”

This may be why the telephone volume on Mother’s Day is higher than any other Sunday of the year.

Fewer children are as close to their fathers as they are to their mothers. This may be the reason Father’s Day is the heaviest day of the year for collect calls!

Still, adult children are surprisingly close to Dad too. Almost three-quarters of children said they felt “close” to their fathers in 2005.

Mothers still communicate more with their adult children and especially their daughters.

That’s not how it is in my family. We specialize.

I talk to our adult children about their relationships and keep them up-to-date on what is going on with each other. The children talk to their father when they have problems with their cars and computers.

One of our sons always calls me whenever he is feeling down, and he calls often, not just on Sundays. He has even given me advice on the telephonic response he wants when he is feeling low: “Be cheerful.” “Be affectionate.” “Be optimistic.” “Do not give me any advice!”

Why have adult children gotten closer to their parents? My bet was on e-mail. My older son e-mails me several times a day. He is making it his personal mission to keep me informed about the high-tech revolution so I won’t turn into a dinosaur.

He also sends me e-mails which support his politics and undermine my own.

But e-mail is not what keeps parents and children even closer than they used to be.

The big reason is the telephone revolution. The cost of long-distance phone calls has plummeted since I left home. And cell phones had not been invented, let alone free roaming.

Making a long distance telephone call used to be something you thought about. Sure, you called your mother on Mother’s Day. But telephone calls to other states and especially Alaska were so expensive that our parents didn’t even want us to call all the time.

Cheap long distance telephone calls and virtually no-cost Internet calls have made it easy to stay in touch. My daughter calls us from Nepal and Afghanistan.

All this communication makes the traditional Mother’s Day call much less of a special event than it used to be. We talk with our adult children so often that lots of days become Mother’s Day.