"It’s a normal part of the life cycle for adult children to start parenting their parents. This generational role reversal may be a prelude to the demographic shift to come..."

"... as baby boomers age out of late-late 'middle age' and are forced to relinquish their invincibility, while their children take on the burdens of caring for elderly—yes, elderly—parents. But the pandemic has pressed the issue, putting many people in their thirties and forties in the tense new role of protectors and even scolds. It’s a twisted inverse of the generation gap of the sixties, when young boomers screamed across the table at their parents about Vietnam—except that now we’re telling ours not to leave their homes. The literary agent Lucy Carson pleaded on Twitter, 'Best advice for convincing a diabetic boomer parent to stop commuting into the city? Rage-sobbing into the phone isn’t helping my cause.' At Vogue, Molly Jong-Fast wrote about a similar dynamic with her 'fabulous feminist mother,' the generation-chronicling author Erica Jong. 'I know everyone is going to get mad at me, but this is not about your conflicted feelings about growing older,' Jong-Fast wrote.... A journalist couldn’t convince her parents to ditch their theatre tickets, until the theatre closed and they had no choice.... The writer Robin Wasserman reasoned, 'My theory is that coming of age at the height of the Cold War/nuclear panic inculcated a faith that no matter how scary things look, the Bad Thing never actually happens.'"

From "Convincing Boomer Parents to Take the Coronavirus Seriously" by Michael Schulman (in The New Yorker).