Mommy Is Truly Dearest :Why girls these days are so close to their moms.

I TELL her everything.”

“She always takes a middle-of-the-night call.”

“I’m not comfortable not speaking to her every day.”

The women who uttered those words — professionals in their 20s and 30s — were not talking about their shrinks. They were talking about their mothers.

Alison Cochrane, 30, who teaches English as a second language in Flushing, Queens, has a boyfriend and a coterie of friends on whom to lean. Nevertheless she calls her mother, Denise Martinez, 54, at least four times a day.

“She’s the first person I tell everything to,” Ms. Cochrane said.

And she means everything.

“I talk to my mother about sex,” Ms. Cochrane said. “Intimately. I can say ‘Mom, Joe is absolutely amazing.’ And I’m not embarrassed.” (The same cannot be said for Joe.)

There have always been close-knit mother-daughter relationships. But social, demographic and technological changes have made it more common for adult daughters to keep their mothers’ apron strings tied tighter — and for longer, say researchers who study the transition into young adulthood.

Today, it is not unusual for unmarried middle-class women in their 20s or 30s to share with their mothers the diary-worthy details of their lives, plan weekly outings with them and call the Mommy Batphone when they need backup.

Even Paris Hilton — who has been labeled many things, though never a momma’s girl — revealed that it is her mother, Kathy Hilton, to whom she turns in a crisis. When last month a judge ordered the 26-year-old back to jail, she did not call out for a lover, her lawyer or God. In her hour of need, she cried, “Mom!” Upon being released Tuesday, she ran into her mother’s arms.

Developmental psychologists and sociologists say this phenomenon of attachment is only now beginning to be studied. They have identified several factors that could be contributing to an intensified mother-daughter symbiosis: technology that makes it easy to stay connected; the smaller number of children in each household; young adults who are prolonging decisions about career, marriage and children; parents who want to have a less-hierarchical relationship with their offspring; and parents who feel the need to keep their grown children close at a time when anxiety and depression levels among young adults are at some of their highest points ever.

Additionally, parent-child contact during the college years has dramatically increased. Professors say that many students these days stroll around campus talking into cellphones — and not to one another. It is not surprising, experts say, that some of that behavior spills over into the post-college years, including a reliance on parents to continue to pay the bills.

“There is a higher level of dependence,” said Vivian Gadsden, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. “In that way they are very much a product of this period in our history.”

Frank F. Furstenberg Jr., the chairman of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood and a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said the trend is ripe for research.

“The fact is that very little is known about this topic,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “Our research network is doing a slew of studies on changing relations among young adults and their parents, but the research is still in the field.”

Many of the women who spoke of their closeness to their mothers also said that they had a warm relationship with their fathers, though hardly as uncensored.

“My mom is absolutely my best friend,” said Jennifer White, 25, a paralegal in Manhattan. “We do everything and anything.”

Karen Bauer, 36, of Englewood, N.J., and her mother have spent every Saturday afternoon for 14 years having lunch and shopping. “I won’t give that up for anything,” said Ms. Bauer, an executive assistant. “I’ve turned down jobs because they wanted me to work on Saturday.”

Wendy Spero, 32, took the analogy further, likening the relationship to that of husband and wife: so long, significant other; hello, significant mother.

“I was on the phone with her for hours and hours in school,” said Ms. Spero, a comedian and writer in Los Angeles. “She would literally stay on the phone with me for six hours. No friend would do that. Such insane unconditional support. With a friend, at no point did I feel I could reveal that much of my neuroses.”

Last week Nia Tyler, 24, moved from New York to Boston, where she is an intern with New Leaders for New Schools, a nonprofit organization that trains school principals. On Saturday Ms. Tyler’s mother, Rosalind Bowser, 60, arrived to drop off luggage and take Ms. Tyler grocery shopping because she was not eating healthfully.

“She came up here to talk and just guide me through,” Ms. Tyler said.

“My mom is my support,” she said, adding that she and her mother discuss everything from the necessity of having food staples in the house to what it means to be a black woman in America. “She’s my eyes and ears when I can’t see or hear things for myself.”

Mothers, in turn, said they find it gratifying to pass on career, financial and everyday wisdom to their daughters, and satisfying to converse with them as equals.

“She’s become a woman in her own right,” said Ms. Bowser, who works for a public health program. “And I will take some credit for that.”

Trish O’Connor, 31, of Queens said the support and understanding from her own mother is unequaled. Though she has a boyfriend and plenty of pals, she said it is different sharing good news with a mother.

“There’s a different level of proudness,” Ms. O’Connor said. “I know that if something happened, of course my boyfriend is going to be happy for me and proud of me. But my mom is going to be really proud of me. It’s her day if I tell her good news.”

As Ms. Spero put it: “There’s no other person who’s as invested in your life as you.”

One would think that after giving birth to, nursing, teaching and disciplining a daughter for 18 years, a mother might want some distance. But not necessarily. “Parents don’t want that anymore, especially moms,” said Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., and the author of “Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens Through the Twenties.” “They want to be close to their kids.”

“That’s the payoff for these moms,” Dr. Arnett said. “Their daughters get to the age where they can go out together and talk about these things.”

Denise Martinez was thrilled when her daughter, the teacher in Flushing, decided that living 20 minutes away from her was too far and instead bought a condo only two blocks away. “I just love it,” Ms. Martinez said. “I wish we could afford a two-family house together. I tell her, if mommy came into money ...”

Additionally, the American family is smaller, which means parents have more time to spend with the children they have. At the same time, those children are taking longer to finish school, marry and have babies. So parents and children alike often have a period of freedom after the teenage years during which they can cultivate more intense relationships not only in person, but also via cellphones and instant, text and e-mail messages.

“In 1960 the median age for marriage for women was 20,” Dr. Arnett said. By 25, women had two or three children, he said.

You didn’t “have a lot of time to sit around and chat with mom,” he added.

Some psychologists, though, question how healthy today’s closeness is.

“People have mixed feelings about this phenomenon,” said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology and the director of the Foley Center for the Study of Lives at Northwestern University. He said he has two daughters, 21 and 23. “We want our kids to be autonomous,” he said, “but I don’t want them to forget about me.”

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.”

Ms. Bowser, whose daughter just moved to Boston, agrees.

“I’m missing her already but I say ‘Oh, I miss you’ casually,” Ms. Bowser said. “But I do miss her. But you see that’s a part of growing up, too. She needs to be away from me sometimes. She’s 24. My God, when I was 24, I was up here on my own.”

Some psychologists said the worry may be unfounded; there are no long-term studies proving that being so entwined with one’s mother is detrimental.

“There’s no evidence for it,” Dr. Arnett said, adding that he interviewed hundreds of mothers and daughters for his book and found no proof, “not the slightest, that it’s anything but good.”

In general, psychologists view communication as positive, Dr. McAdams said, and that “any long-term studies will probably bear that out.”

“It would be unlikely that they would find that talking too much with your mom in your 20s leads to bad marriages in your 30s,” he said. “If anything, it might go the other way.”

Even in the 19th century, Routledge’s Manual of Etiquette referred to a girl’s mother as “that truest and most loving of friends.”

“Fortunate is the daughter,” a passage reads, “who has not been deprived of that wisest and tenderest of counsellors.”

These days, with the help of technology, mothers can make sure their daughters are rarely deprived of their counsel.

“She’ll pay for my cellphone bill,” said Ms. White, the paralegal in Manhattan. “As long as she gets a phone call.”

She laughed. “It’s been like eight times already today"