Aging parents may need us to step in. Adult children need us to back off. Somehow, we’re supposed to know which is which.
Why is Mom still at the doctor’s office?
Do you call? Maybe you should wait.
You didn’t apply for this thankless job, but here you are, an executive in charge of deciding whether this is something or nothing. So you watch the dot. And while you’re watching it, another one moves. Your kid has stopped somewhere unexpected after class.
Don’t text. Don’t ask. Hold the information. Make space for autonomy.
The same blue dot appears for both. At one end are our parents; at the other, our children. Each dot expects something different from us. When it comes to our parents, knowing often means doing something. With our kids, knowing might mean not acting right away.
This is how we get tangled in the middle: keeping an eye on our parents while learning to practice restraint with our children.
The dot isn’t the problem. The expectation is.
When Knowing Becomes a Job
Constant access can make every delayed appointment, unfamiliar stop, and unanswered text feel like it needs your attention. But love doesn’t make the logistics simple. We know, at least in theory, that our parents will need more help just as our kids are launching. What can be startling is how much these two stages overlap, and how much help everyone seems to need all at once. One study of working women caring in both directions found that those with more social support reported better well-being.
Caring for children is a role we grow into over their whole lives. Caring for our parents is different. There may be decades of history attached to every request: old roles, wounds that haven’t quite healed, gratitude, and even resentment. Sometimes a demanding parent becomes even more so. Sometimes appreciation comes coupled with an assumption—you’re the eldest, the capable one, the responsible one. The decision becomes unanimous. You get the job while everyone else takes one large step backward out of the spotlight.
Much of my practice consists of women who are caring for their children as well as their parents. We often talk about the strain and know that it rarely begins as a crisis. It starts with trying to launch a young adult into the world, then stopping at your mother’s house to refill a pill organizer, reset a television remote, or figure out why a bill wasn’t paid—before you can make it home for the evening.
And because so much of this care now happens through an app on a phone, there’s no natural end to the day. Shared calendars tell you when the appointment is and pharmacy apps announce that the prescription is ready for pickup. Then there’s the location dot, telling you she’s still at the doctor’s office. Each is useful, but can arrive as another task with your name on it.
The Problem With Knowing Everything
All of this makes me remember how we tracked family when I was growing up. The system was simple: “Give me two rings when you get home.” You arrived, called, let it ring twice, and hung up. It avoided long-distance charges while making one thing clear: you were safe.
Two rings told them what they needed to know. The boundary was built into the technology.
Today, there are no built-in boundaries at all. We once kept the details of the in-between to ourselves—or maybe shared them sometime later. The detour, how fast we drove, the stop we made after school: those details belonged to us.
We now can know far more than our own parents ever could. We can see where our loved ones are, whether they made it home, and if they have stopped somewhere they didn’t mention. In a study of 706 college students, nearly half reported that a parent or caregiver was currently tracking or had previously tracked their location. Those who were currently tracked tended to see their parents as less supportive of their autonomy.
When Love Means Not Stepping In
That doesn’t mean every family should delete the app. It means autonomy requires restraint. You can’t act on every piece of information you know. You can see that your daughter stopped somewhere after class. You know your son hasn’t yet arrived home. You can watch the dot, open the text thread, imagine every possible explanation—and still choose not to intervene. Part of giving them autonomy is learning to live with the discomfort of not knowing every detail. And what I hear each week is that restraint can be more exhausting than stepping in.
Being in the middle requires judgment and can leave us wondering whether we’re doing too much, not enough, or somehow both at once.
Eventually, that constant load asks for an escape: five extra minutes in the car before walking into the house, a drive home with the phone off and the radio loud, a small chance to come off duty—to stop watching the dot move, answering messages, and deciding whether this is something or nothing.
That pause gives us the chance to ask whether this really needs our attention right now. Is this mine to handle? Does it need to happen today? And maybe the hardest question of all: Will intervening help, or will it simply soothe my own anxiety?
We’re the last generation that remembers what it meant to be completely unreachable, and the first expected to keep everyone within our sight. Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is make the call. Sometimes it’s to let the phone stay quiet.
