Who’s in Charge Here? Aging Parents Resist Interfering ‘Helicopter’ Children

As parents get on in years, there’s a fine line between being an appropriately concerned adult child and an overly worried one

Joshua Coleman remembers watering down a glass of wine before giving it to his father, then in his 90s.

“What the hell is this?” he recalls his father asking.

“I feel a little guilty about that now,” says Dr. Coleman, whose father died in 2001. “The poor old guy had few remaining pleasures left. But I would have felt bad had he gone back to...