How many more times will you see your mother?

Enter two ages and how often you meet. If this person has died, if you are not in touch, or if they are seriously ill, this count is not about you: it knows only an age and a country.

By Coru · Published 2026-10-30 · Updated 2026-10-30

Your count

The calculator runs with JavaScript on screen. Below is a ready table for typical ages.

Meetings left, on average

The parent's age now and the meetings left at 4 or 12 meetings a year. United States, UN medium-variant projection for 2025. The child is 28 years younger than the parent.

Age	mother 4	father 4	mother 12	father 12
50	132	119	396	357
55	115	103	344	308
60	98	87	294	261
65	82	73	246	218
70	66	59	199	176
75	52	46	156	137
80	39	34	117	102
85	28	24	83	72
90	19	16	57	49

Why the number is so small

Take an ordinary case. Your mother is 60, you are 32, you lived together for 18 years, and now you meet four times a year. By the UN life tables for the United States, you have about 98 meetings left. You have already spent nearly 6,000 days together. So 98.4% of all your days together are gone, even though adult life feels as if it has only just begun.

The arithmetic is simple and unpleasant. A year under one roof is about 330 days. Four meetings are four days. One of your school years holds as many days as 82 years of meetings like these.

Tim Urban laid this idea out in 2015 in his essay "The Tail End". By his count, when he finished high school he "had already used up 93%" of the in-person time with his parents that he would ever get. He called his own assumption super optimistic: both parents alive into his sixties. We use life tables instead of optimism, and we count the risk for both of you, because a meeting takes two people.

Your father's number is smaller

Switch the calculator to your father and the number falls: 87 meetings instead of 98 in the same example. The gap between men and women varies a lot by country. In the UN's medium-variant projection for 2025, a 60-year-old American man has 22.5 more years on average and a woman 25.5. In Britain it is 23 and 25.7. In Russia it is 16.9 and 23, and the same example there gives 64 meetings with a father against 86 with a mother.

This is not a forecast about your mother

The table knows nothing about any one person. It takes the death rates of people of every age in a single year and assumes they hold. So the honest answer is wide. In the example with your mother, half of such pairs would get at least 104 meetings, one in ten fewer than 40, and another one in ten more than 144. Health, habits and luck can move any one case a long way in either direction.

What is up to you

Ages and tables are not up to you. How often you meet sometimes is. Meet monthly instead of four times a year and 98 becomes 294. Weekly, it becomes 1,275.

Not everyone has even that: distance, money, borders and illness get in the way, and some people have good reasons not to meet. This is not a reproach.

The American Time Use Survey shows how this usually goes: in their 20s, Americans' time with friends and family starts to drop off, as partners and children take its place.

If your mother or father has died

Then this page may have hurt. We are sorry. You do not need to count anything.

The same sum can be done for other people. A friend of 35, the same age as you, whom you see twice a year: about 75 meetings left, on American numbers. Neither of you has probably thought about that.

If you can still meet

Every meeting lowers this number by one. It is the only good way to spend it.

Where these numbers come from

The life tables are from the UN's World Population Prospects 2024: complete tables by single year of age, medium variant, 2025, separately for men and women. They describe one year, so future progress in medicine is not built in. We do not ask your sex, so for you we use the average of the male and female tables. The tables end at 100, so beyond that we hold the risk steady, using life expectancy at 100 from the same table.

For each future year we take the average chance that both of you are alive and multiply it by that year's meetings. The sum is the expected number. We treat the two lives as independent, although people close to each other often share their conditions. The range shows how many years it takes for the chance that both are alive to fall to 90%, 50% and 10%.

One meeting counts as one day. A year under one roof counts as 330 days, which is our assumption; Urban writes of 90% of days. If you still live together, years under one roof include the future ones. The years after moving out, past and future, are counted at the meeting rate you enter now, so changing the rate also changes the share of days gone. For friends and other people we show that share only once years under one roof are given, because otherwise we do not know how long you have known each other.

Data: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2024). World Population Prospects 2024, Online Edition. Licence: CC BY 3.0 IGO. We rounded death probabilities to five decimals and averaged the male and female tables for you.

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