Ira Glass

Move it along, Mom.

Quickly.

Yes.

I'm just going to make a little checklist here.

God, I'm shooting zero for two so far.

I keep going.

You told me on the phone earlier something interesting about this.

I'm just going to interrupt.

At this point in my life, I was 36, 37, and I had no spouse and was deeply uninterested in having children.

And this was not something that my parents were too pleased about, either of those things, and a point of discussion now and then.

You told me on the phone earlier something interesting about this.

See, now I wonder if that is because there is an inherent tension between children and their adult parents, that the child sometimes wants to be treated as the child and sometimes wants to be treated as an independent adult.

And for the parent, it's pretty much a hellish guessing game.

And then, yeah.

Do you think that this relationship... Yeah, Mom.

Can I just say, from 2026, that was definitely not the standard practice in our own family to wait until somebody asks for advice for advice to be given.

And no disrespect in saying that, just a factual statement there.

Do you think that this relationship is harder, the relationship between adult children and their parents, is harder on the parents than on the children?

Right.

All right.