When something goes seriously wrong, there’s usually one person you want to tell before anyone else. Not necessarily the most qualified person to help. Not the one with the most professional training or the most relevant experience. Someone whose voice just makes the situation feel a little bigger. For nearly half of American adults, that person is their mother.
survey published by Pew Research Center In January 2025, it put numbers on this instinct, based on responses from 6,204 US adults. Among the most common sources of emotional support Americans will turn to during difficult times, 48 percent of respondents named mothers, followed by spouses or partners by 74 percent. Friends came close with 46 percent. Mental health professionals were at the bottom of the list, described as extremely or very likely sources by only 19 percent of adults.
The “yet” in any of these is the part worth sitting through. We have more formal support infrastructure than at any point in recent history. There is a much-discussed cultural shift toward therapy programs, telehealth platforms, peer support groups, employee assistance programs, and professional mental health care being viewed as a standard resource rather than a last resort. Yet when Americans were asked who they would reach out to in a time of need, the most common answer — by a significant margin — was someone they’d known their whole life and not chosen.
That 48 percent figure carries weight. This means that for about half of all adults, coping with something difficult involves their mother being a part of how they coped with the challenge. Not because he has a clinical degree. Not because he has the most relevant life experience regardless of the specific situation. But because he is a person who feels more than analyzing the gravity of the difficulty for these people.
The Pew data also revealed a more nuanced finding that men and women handle emotional support differently. According to the survey, women are more likely to reach out to a wider network when things are tough – they turn to friends, mothers and other family members in addition to their spouse or partner. Men’s emotional support is more concentrated, more based on a single relationship. This is one of the places where conversations about men’s social health find part of their structural risk: when key relationships end or become unavailable, a narrower network offers less to fall back on.
One of the more quietly striking results of the survey is that of men and women they report roughly similar rates of loneliness. The idea that men are significantly more lonely than women—though widely repeated in cultural commentary—is not strongly supported by these data. About 16 percent of both men and women report feeling lonely or isolated. What’s different is not how often they feel lonely, but what they have on hand when they do.
The groups most frequently reporting loneliness in the Pew survey—adults under 50, low-income, less educated, and the unpartnered—are also the least likely to have the primary relationship most respondents describe. An unaccompanied adult cannot cite his or her spouse as the primary source. An adult who has lost a parent cannot reach out to his mother. And these are not marginal or unusual cases. The overlap between material deprivation and social deprivation in the Pew data is consistent and clear: the people with the fewest resources are also the people with the fewest people.
The 19 percent figure for mental health professionals is, in its own way, the most complicated number in the study. After years of destigmatization campaigns, the cultural normalization of therapy in popular media, and the actual expansion of access through telehealth, fewer than one in five adults say they would extremely or very likely seek professional help when life gets difficult. Women are slightly more likely to do so — 22 percent compared to 16 percent of men — but neither number is high. This does not mean that professional support is ineffective or undesirable. It could be simpler than that: people go to the person they trust most first, and this particular kind of trust is not something created by a credential.
None of this is an argument for or against therapy. I am not a psychologist and this article is a report of survey data, not clinical advice. What the numbers suggest is that in a culture that has done much to expand formal support systems, the informal and irreplaceable still hold great power. A mother’s response is not a measure of how available she really is, whether the relationship is healthy, or whether the call really helped. This is a measure of where instinct goes. For about half of Americans, that instinct still points to where it always was.
When life gets tough, many people still know exactly who to call. What the Pew data adds is simply knowing that they are not alone in this.
If loneliness or a lack of close support is something you’re stuck with, talking to a therapist is more valuable than any survey can tell you, and it’s more accessible now than ever.
