How many more times will you see your parents?

The road home

Every light is a visit

Along the road, each lamp is one of the visits still to come: twice a year, for 4 days each time. The ones beside you are in the coming months; the further away they are, the later they come.

The lights are not equally bright. Each one shines as strongly as the chance that the visit happens, which means that you are both still alive. For the first few years the chance is close to certain.

Around 2047, your mother would be 83. The chance that you are both still here by then is about 50%.

Further on, the lights fade one by one. By around 2057, when your mother would be 93, the chance is down to one in ten.

Somewhere on this road is the last visit. Nobody knows where. The table only says how likely each one is.

Added up

40visits

That is how many visits you have left on average, if you keep meeting as often as you do now. In 8 cases out of 10, the number will fall between 16 and 62.

All the days

How many days do you have left together?

That comes to about 162 days together. Let's lay them end to end in a single calendar, starting on 1 January.

162days

All the days you have left fit between 1 January and 11 June. The rest of the calendar stays empty.

Nor will all of those days be alike. A 65-year-old woman in Romania can expect to live another 19.1 years on average. Only 7.1 of them are years in which her health does not limit her usual activities, by people's own answers to Eurostat's surveys. For a 65-year-old man it is 6.8 out of 15.1.

These figures are for 2024. Eurostat marks a break in the series that year; in 2023 the figures were 3.8 and 4.3 years.

Where the rest went

How much time do you spend with your parents after you leave home?

Here is a whole life: one row for each year, one square for each week. The lit squares show on how many days a year, on average, you see at least one parent, even briefly.

Romania's time-use survey (INS, 2011–12) did ask whom people spent their time with, but its published results say nothing about time with parents. The American survey does: from 2003 to 2024, 252,808 Americans recorded, activity by activity, whom they spent a day with. The calculations on these diaries are our own.

In childhood, parents are there nearly every day. An American mother records spending about 5 hours 9 minutes a day with her 10-year-old, not counting sleep, and 3 hours 45 minutes with a 15-year-old. Teenagers record less themselves: at 15, 2 hours 48 minutes a day with at least one parent.

Then comes the cliff. At 22, 74 minutes a day. At 30, 26. At 40, a person spends time with a parent on only 8 days in 100.

The averages include people whose parents have died. Phone and video calls do not count.

83%

By 18, 83% of all the hours a person ever spends with their parents have gone, according to these diaries: between 80% and 87%, depending on how childhood is counted. Counting days instead of hours, 70%. Parents record more time with their children than children record themselves, so the true share may be a little lower, around 78%.

In "The Tail End", Tim Urban wrote that by the end of high school he had already used up 93% of all the in-person time he would ever spend with his parents. He was counting days; counted in days, these diaries give 70%. Even for people who leave home at 18, counting days gives 86%; only by counting hours, in a scenario built on few people, does it come close to 93%.

Young people in Romania leave their parents' home at 27.4 on average, a year later than the EU average and 6 years later than in Finland. So here the cliff probably comes a little later.

But it comes.

Home

When do Romanians abroad come home?

Nearly 4.6 million people born in Romania live in another country, according to the UN's estimate for 2024. For many of them, the road home starts at an airport.

In December 2024, 848,875 passengers landed at Romania's main airports from 69 foreign airports. The most arrivals came from Luton, near London: 83,114 passengers in a single month.

Not all of them were coming home. They include tourists and people travelling on business.

December is not the month with the most passengers; summer is busier. But in 2023 and 2025 it had the year's biggest surplus of arrivals over departures. In 2024, July beat it by 13 passengers. Then, every January since 2023, the flow reverses.

In a 2023 survey for Romania's Department for Romanians Abroad, 6,699 Romanians in the ten countries with the largest Romanian communities said how often they come back: 6% several times a month, 9% once a month, 33% every few months, 20% for the holidays, 15% once a year, 8% less often and 9% never.

If you only come home for Easter and Christmas, your road has two lights a year, just like the road at the top of this page.