“Mom!” Paris Hilton is reported to have shouted when the judge ordered her back to school, “it’s just not fair!”

Celebrity moms are everywhere these days, from Kathy Hilton giving TMZ an hour by hour update of her daughter’s recent jail time, to Dina Lohan—aka the “Orange Oprah”, aka A Horrible Role Model—exclaiming to Entertainment Tonight that she goes out and parties with her daughter.

It’s not just famous moms and daughters who are spending more time together. A recent article in the New York Times reports “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.

Cell phones, the internet, even AIM are becoming common ways for daughters to talk to their mothers, allowing a connection much more prevalent than ever before.

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

Lindsay Lohan has been reported as saying her mother is her “best friend” (a best friend who ignored her daughter’s coke problem), and many 20 and 30-somethings interviewed for the NYT article claimed that they talked to their mothers up to “8 times a day!”

Look, I love my parents. My mom has always been a great mom, and I talk to her almost every day, but anyone who calls anyone 8 times during a 24 hour period needs to chill the hell out. Who has that much time to spend on the phone? What are you doing with your life?

My mom is a wonderful woman, but she’s not my best friend. She’s my mom. Best friends don’t come with the power to ground you or pay for your future wedding. Best friends don’t look you in the eye and say “I’m right about this because I’m 30 years older and carried you in my womb for 9 months”. My mom knows too much about me to be my best friend. She’s had too much influence over me. She’s my best mom, but that’s where it ends.

It’s great if you have a close relationship with your parents, but sticking to them because you don’t want to pay your own bills or find connections with your own decade is a little strange. We all gotta grow up sometime. And if that means withholding intimate details of my love life from my parents, then so be it.

…I don’t think they’re too interested in that sort of thing anyway. And if they are…we’ll all probably feel much better leaving it unspoken.