Forty-five percent of parents with adult children say every one of their grown kids lives within 50 miles of them, according to a Marquette Law School Poll of 1,514 adults nationwide conducted June 9-15, 2026. Another 37% have at least one child nearby and others farther away, meaning only 18% of parents have all of their adult children living more than 50 miles off. More than 80% keep at least one grown child within an hour’s drive. The picture that emerges runs counter to the popular assumption that American families have scattered for good. Most haven’t, and the closeness shows up in more than just geography.
Age changes the pattern in a specific direction. Among adults under 60, roughly 15% have all their adult children living more than 50 miles away. For those 60 and older, that number rises to about 20%. That’s a modest but real increase, and it likely reflects a mix of things: children who moved for careers earlier in life eventually settling somewhere permanent, and parents themselves relocating in retirement, sometimes toward grandchildren rather than away from them.
Proximity translates directly into childcare
The poll ties geography to something more concrete than sentiment: how much actual childcare grandparents provide. Half of grandparents in the survey care for grandchildren at least monthly, and that number is heavily distance-dependent. When adult children live within 50 miles, 56% of grandparents provide monthly care. When all their adult children live farther away, that drops to 18%. Among the middle generation, the parents raising the grandchildren in question, 38% say a grandparent watches their kids at least monthly.
Childcare involvement also peaks at a specific life stage: grandparents in their 50s provide monthly care at the highest rate, 61%, likely the window when they’re old enough to have grandchildren but young enough to still have the energy and flexibility for regular hands-on help. This matches a broader pattern documented by the Pew Research Center, which found 55% of U.S. adults live within an hour’s drive of at least some extended family, with the closest proximity concentrated among people ages 50 to 64. The Marquette and Pew data sets, taken together, suggest family proximity in the U.S. isn’t declining so much as it’s been consistently underestimated.
Trust rises with age, and with financial stability
The same poll surfaced a second finding worth sitting with: family trust isn’t fixed, it shifts across a person’s life. Sixty-two percent of respondents say they trust their immediate family “a great deal,” but that figure climbs sharply with age, from 47% among 18-to-29-year-olds to 78% among adults 70 and older. Marital status matters too: married respondents report the highest trust in family, 71%, compared with 50% among adults who’ve never married. That 31-point age gap is larger than almost any other split in the poll, and it suggests trust in family isn’t something people arrive with. It appears to be something built cumulatively, through decades of a relative actually showing up, that a 22-year-old simply hasn’t had time to accumulate yet regardless of how close their family is.
Financial stress cuts through both of those patterns. Among people who describe themselves as struggling financially, only 42% report high family trust, compared with 70% among those living comfortably. That’s one of the widest gaps in the entire poll, and it’s a reminder that family closeness isn’t purely emotional. Money, or the lack of it, shapes how safe people feel leaning on relatives, even the ones who live five minutes away. It also complicates the proximity findings: living within 50 miles of a parent doesn’t automatically translate into a trusting relationship if financial pressure is straining the dynamic, which suggests distance and closeness, geographically and emotionally, are related but far from identical measures.
Charles Franklin, the poll’s director, oversaw a survey with a margin of error of ±2.7 percentage points, run through the SSRS Opinion Panel, alongside a married-couples subsample of 761 respondents with a margin of error of ±3.8 points. That level of methodological rigor matters for a topic that tends to get discussed anecdotally, one relative’s move across the country standing in for a whole generation’s supposed drift away from family. The actual numbers tell a steadier story: most parents still have most of their adult children close by, and the minority who don’t skews toward specific, identifiable factors, higher education, higher income, urban living, rather than a broad generational abandonment of family proximity.
The takeaway isn’t that geography guarantees closeness. It’s that when families do stay near each other, that proximity tends to get used, in childcare, in trust, in the ordinary logistics of showing up, far more often than the scattered-family narrative gives credit for.
