Paris Hilton is a Mamas Girl?

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.”

Paris Hilton is a Mamas Girl?