“I tell her everything." "She always takes a middle-of-the-night call."  "I'm not comfortable not speaking to her every day."

The women who uttered those words — professionals in their 20s and 30s — were not talking about their psychiatrists. They were talking about their mothers. Alison Cochrane, 30, who teaches English as a second language in New York City, has a boyfriend and a group of friends on whom to lean.

Nevertheless she calls her mother, Denise Martinez, 54, at least four times a day. "She's the first person I tell everything to," Cochrane said. And she means everything. "I talk to my mother about sex," Cochrane said. "Intimately. I can say, 'Mom, Joe is absolutely amazing.' And I'm not embarrassed." (The same cannot be said for Joe.)

There have always been close-knit mother-daughter relationships. But social, demographic and technological changes have made it more common for adult daughters to keep a very close tie to their mothers — and for longer, say researchers who study the transition into young adulthood.

Today, it is not unusual for unmarried middle-class women in their 20s or 30s to share with their mothers the diary-worthy details of their lives, plan weekly outings with them and call mom when they need help.

Even Paris Hilton — who has been labelled many things, though never a momma's girl — revealed that it is her mother, Kathy Hilton, to whom she turns in a crisis. When a judge ordered the 26-year-old back to jail, she did not call out for a lover, her lawyer or God. In her hour of need, she cried, "Mom!" Upon being released, she ran into her mother's arms.

Developmental psychologists and sociologists say this phenomenon of attachment is only now beginning to be studied.

They have identified several factors that could be contributing to an intensified mother-daughter symbiosis: technology that makes it easy to stay connected; the smaller number of children in each household; young adults who are prolonging decisions about career, marriage and children; parents who want to have a less-hierarchical relationship with their offspring; and parents who feel the need to keep their grown children close at a time when anxiety and depression levels among young adults are at some of their highest ever.

Additionally, parent-child contact during the college years has dramatically increased. Professors say that many students these days stroll around campus talking into cell phones — and not to one another.

It is not surprising, experts say, that some of that behaviour spills over into the post-college years, including a reliance on parents to continue to pay the bills.  Many of the women who spoke of their closeness to their mothers also said that they had a warm relationship with their fathers.

Karen Bauer, 36, of New Jersey, and her mother have spent every Saturday afternoon for 14 years having lunch and shopping. "I won't give that up for anything," said Bauer, an executive assistant. "I've turned down jobs because they wanted me to work on Saturday." Wendy Spero, 32, took the analogy further, likening the relationship to that of husband and wife.

"I was on the phone with her for hours and hours in school," said Spero, a comedian and writer in Los Angeles. "She would literally stay on the phone with me for six hours. No friend would do that. Such insane unconditional support. “

One would think that after giving birth to, nursing, teaching and disciplining a daughter for 18 years, a mother might want some distance. But not necessarily. Some psychologists, though, question how healthy today's closeness is. But some others said the worry may be unfounded; there are no long-term studies proving that being so entwined with one's mother is detrimental.

Even in the 19th century, "Routledge's Manual of Etiquette" referred to a girl's mother as "that truest and most loving of friends." "Fortunate is the daughter," a passage reads, "who has not been deprived of that wisest and tenderest of counsellors."

These days, with the help of technology, mothers can make sure their daughters are rarely deprived of their counsel.