When something goes seriously wrong, there is 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. Just the one whose voice makes the situation feel slightly less large. For roughly half of American adults, that person is their mother.
A survey published by the Pew Research Center in January 2025, drawing on responses from 6,204 U.S. adults, put numbers to that instinct. Among the most common sources of emotional support Americans would turn to in a difficult moment, mothers were named by 48 percent of respondents — placing her second only to spouses or partners, cited by 74 percent. Friends came close at 46 percent. Mental health professionals were at the bottom of the list, described as extremely or very likely sources by just 19 percent of adults.
The “still” in any of this is the part worth sitting with. We have more formal support infrastructure available than at any point in recent history. There are therapy apps, telehealth platforms, peer support groups, employee assistance programs, and a widely discussed cultural shift toward treating professional mental health care as a standard resource rather than a last resort. And yet, when Americans were asked who they would actually reach for in a difficult moment, the most common answer — by a significant margin — was someone they had known their entire lives, and did not choose.
That 48 percent figure carries weight. It means that for roughly half of all adults, getting through something difficult involves their mother being part of how they get through it. Not because she has a clinical degree. Not because she has the most relevant life experience for whatever the specific situation is. But because she is, for these people, the person who makes the weight of difficulty feel held rather than just analyzed.
The Pew data also revealed something more layered about how men and women navigate emotional support differently. Women, the survey found, are more likely to reach out to a wider network when things are hard — turning to friends, mothers, and other family members in addition to a spouse or partner. Men’s emotional support tends to be more concentrated, resting more heavily on a single relationship. This is one of the places where conversations about men’s social health locate some of the structural risk: when a primary relationship ends or becomes unavailable, a narrower network offers less to fall back on.
One of the survey’s more quietly striking findings is that men and women report roughly similar rates of loneliness. The idea that men are significantly lonelier than women — while widely repeated in cultural commentary — is not strongly supported by this data. About 16 percent of both men and women report feeling lonely or isolated all or most of the time. What differs is not how often they feel lonely but what they have available when they do.
The groups most likely to report frequent loneliness in the Pew survey — adults younger than 50, those with lower incomes, those with less education, and those who are unpartnered — are also the groups least likely to have the kinds of primary relationships the majority of respondents described. An unpartnered adult cannot list a spouse as their primary source. An adult who has lost a parent cannot reach for a mother. And these are not marginal or unusual circumstances. The overlap between material disadvantage and social disadvantage 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, cultural normalization of therapy in popular media, and a genuine expansion of access through telehealth, fewer than one in five adults say they would turn to a professional as an extremely or very likely resource when life gets hard. Women are somewhat more likely to do so — 22 percent compared to 16 percent of men — but neither figure is high. What this reflects is not necessarily that professional support is ineffective or unwanted. It may be simpler than that: that people go first to the person they trust most, and trust of this particular kind is not something a credential creates.
None of this is an argument for or against therapy. I’m not a psychologist, and this article is a report on survey data, not clinical advice. What the numbers do suggest is that in a culture that has done considerable work to expand formal support systems, the informal and irreplaceable still has an enormous hold. The mother answer is not a measure of how available she actually was, or whether the relationship was a healthy one, or whether the call will actually help. It is a measure of where the instinct goes. For close to half of Americans, that instinct still points to the same place it always has.
When life gets hard, a lot of people still know exactly who they are going to call. What the Pew data adds is simply the knowledge that they are not alone in that.
If loneliness or a lack of close support is something you find yourself sitting with, speaking with a therapist is worth more than any survey can tell you — and is more accessible now than it used to be.
