#life-stages

#life-stages

Long before social media feeds or targeted ads, my mother used to say that life tends to show you the thing you're looking for. Or the thing you're afraid of. Or the thing you keep insisting you don't want. If you were trying to get pregnant, suddenly everyone around you was pregnant. If you wanted out of your relationship, magazines on the grocery store rack were filled with tips on "spicing up your marriage." If you were single, you noticed couples everywhere.

"I've had to sort of mourn in a way, not the loss of those friendships, but like how they've changed," Moore said.

When I was researching and writing my new book, I knew that the focus would be on identifying ways to parent adult children that results in more harmonious and less stressful contact. But the farther I got into it, interviewing people and reading the research, the more I realized that every decade has its unique challenges and that I needed to fine tune how we communicate with our adult offspring based on their current stage in life.

I don't know if it's something I should bring up with them or not At 30, my friends are all in different places with our finances. Some are buying houses, getting married, having kids, moving up in their careers. Others are living paycheque to paycheque or haven't moved out of the family home yet. I fall somewhere in between, and make a decent enough living.

The portrayal of midlife as a crisis flies in the face of decades of research showing its non-universality. Midlife can be a period of questioning, but these feelings are not unique to this stage of life.