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Comment by buescher | Hacker News Reader

I really dislike the term "adult children". Check out the google ngram: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22adult+child...

The peak in 1992 is especially intriguing.

How would the Victorians have expressed the same relationship?

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Children. Or grown children. Or offspring.

"Grown children" is interesting if you look at google books cites - it more typically meant children older than infants than someone's children that have reached adulthood.

"Offspring", maybe, but you can look at the differences in use and decide for yourself. It might confound you to find that "adult offspring" is less common than "adult children" but follows the same shifts in use and a similar ngram pattern.

please note that the y-axis is scaled, I compared it with the words 'transgender' or 'hacker' and the "intriguing peak" you mention flattened out. Which raises the question of at which point is a change significant in that graph.

Yes, it's not as common as those words. But going from zero use outside of legal documents - as a contrast to "minor children" or less precisely "small children" - to a post-seventies psychobabble and recovery movment term of art is easy to read off that graph.

Do you have a better term to suggest?

First: Why should there be a term at all? Stop thinking of yourself and others in generic bureaucratic or therapeutic terms from a particularly dire era of mass self-absorption.

Second: If you must, "son" or "daughter", and only prefixed by "adult" when necessary for clarity.

To your first point: there should be a term because it is clearly a useful idea that people want to communicate. The ambiguity or inelegance of what current exists to express the idea means we should at least desire a better way of expressing it - that is, a term for it.

To your second point: "son" or "daughter" is not sufficiently general, and it is gendered. What if I wanted to express the idea of adult offspring without knowing (or caring about) the gender of that person?

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