According to the New York Times, if you're a young professional woman, you spend a lot of time on the phone with your mom. Hours. Like six hours. Four times a day.

Dr. Gadsden, of the University of Pennsylvania, said that if mothers are orchestrating their daughters’ lives and regularly attempting to take away the hurt, they could be turning them into overly needy adults.

“Parents over the last 25, 30 years have been far more indulgent than they necessarily needed to be with their children,” Dr. Gadsden said. “Some problems have to be solved by yourself.”

I talk to my mom several times a week, but not everyday. And when we do talk, it's usually for at least 15 minutes or half an hour, and often much longer. My male friends have remarked that I seem particularly close to my mom. Well, yes. I'm an only child and my parents are divorced, so we have been each other's main supports for years. But I see similar relationships between many of my female friends and their mothers, regardless of family dynamics. I think our cultural assumptions about young adult's relationships to their parents have certainly shifted, so much so that one friend of mine recently said she feels uncomfortable when she tells people she doesn't feel that close to her mother.

This Times article is gender-specific, but we've seen plenty of coverage of parental "hovering" over both male and female college students via cell phones and email. Do you think it's really about delayed marriage and increased technology? Or does our generation, many of us raised by children of the sixties, really have better, closer relationships with more "with it" parents? How often do you talk to your parents?