My best friend and I have kids 17 years apart. Turns out parental age plays only a minor role in how we parent our daughters — here's what matters most.

• My friend and I have known each other for over 35 years.
• She had her daughter at 27 and I had mine at 42, making them 17 years apart in age.

Fussiness, congestion, and restlessness. I wondered whether these were symptoms of my baby cutting her first tooth or having COVID.

I called my best friend from high school, Molly, to get her opinion, even though she'd never parented an infant through a pandemic. She answered my call while sitting in the dentist's office, waiting for her daughter to emerge from a wisdom-tooth extraction. Over the past two years, our relationship has seen a revival through sharing the joys and worries of mothering our daughters. But while I was stocking up on Band-Aids and knee pads as my daughter learned to walk, Molly was racking up sleepless nights awaiting her new driver to return home.

Molly and I are both 44 years old but raising daughters 17 years apart in age. We have been friends for 35 years. In our teen years, we traded babysitting jobs, always imagining we'd be raising kids of the same age. Her daughter is almost 19 and mine is 2.

Society often assumes that we will raise our children differently because we became moms at different ages, but research shows age can't predict parenting style. Even though we became mothers almost two decades apart, the challenges and milestones we face as mothers will be more similar than different.

Mental health and social support play a bigger role than age

The same week I dropped my daughter off at her first preschool, Molly dropped her freshman daughter off at college. We called each other describing the matching lumps in our throats mourning our mutual losses. While my daughter knew I hadn't disappeared, I worried she didn't trust I would return. And while Molly knew her daughter hadn't disappeared, she worried home and all it entails had been replaced. While our minds may learn as infants that objects still exist even if they can't be sensed, our hearts never seem to learn object permanence — no matter our age.

I spoke with Amy Lewin, a clinical psychologist and professor of family science at the University of Maryland, who coauthored a paper that reported a longitudinal study on parenting styles. It examined mothers of 2-year-olds to determine if certain factors influence parenting practices. The mothers were categorized according to the age at which they'd first become a mother: adolescent mothers (18 or younger), emerging-adult mothers (19-25), and adult mothers (26 or older).

When maternal education, poverty status, and race were controlled for, the researchers found that certain practices seemed correlated to age. For example, adult moms had more positive regard for their children than emerging-adult moms who had more positive regard than adolescent moms. However, Lewin said that factors like a mom’s attachment history, mental health, and social support play a much bigger impact on parenting behaviors than age. "These are aggregated data, so while we may see this pattern on a population level, there is enormous individual variation," Lewin said.

Some things are the same regardless of age

Some aspects of mothering are timeless, no matter the age we become mothers or the age of the daughters we are mothering. The means by which we do it may change, but the goal is the same. We want to encourage them to dream. We want to protect them. We want them to feel seen. We want them to learn healthy boundaries. The values my friend and I share far outweigh the age at which we became mothers.

The technology we will have used with our daughters at the same age will vary but not the goal — take safety, for example. When Molly's daughter was 2, she watched her sleep on a baby monitor that sat on her nightstand. I use an app on my iPhone linked to a camera in her room. Now Molly tracks her daughter's whereabouts via an app on her phone. She knows how fast she's driving and when she reaches her dorm. When my daughter is in college, who knows what kind of technology I'll use to monitor her security.

The era in which we become parents shapes our parenting practices around safety. My daughter was born during the COVID pandemic and Molly's daughter was born just after 9/11.

There are so many important factors that determine one's parenting style, and age is just one of them. Ultimately, we each carve out our own path as parents despite the way society tries to assign us certain "tracks" based on age.