If you were a college student in America a few decades back, chances are you engaged in a semi-regular ritual: You’d trudge to the nearest campus payphone, drop in some coins, and call your parents. That image kept cropping up as I reported this story … Laurence Steinberg, a Temple University psychologist and the author of You and Your Adult Child: How to Grow Together in Challenging Times, remembers “a perfunctory 10-minute phone call” every Sunday afternoon. “The idea that I would have been in touch with my parents five times a day,” he told me, “would have been bizarre.”

Now Steinberg is a professor, and his own students seem to be in touch with their parents … all the time.