A college counselor watches anxiously as her teenage son applies to college without her help. As her son plans for his future, the counselor and her husband reflect on how quickly their lives have changed, seeking ways to steady themselves in the midst of middle age.

A man thinks about his relationship with his parents (especially his mother) as he watches them grow old. He then realizes that he is now old too.

Over dinner, an observer reflects on mothers and their omnipresent prevalence in children’s lives.

After he gets divorced, a father finds renewed purpose through his role as a single parent and the precious time he spends with his children.

A stay-at-home dad with a wife who works in Manhattan attempts to find a sense of control by tenderly disciplining his young son after he puts himself in danger.

As a boy grows to adulthood in the years encompassing WWII, and his understanding of the world changes, so too does his perception of his schoolteacher father evolve from respectable teacher to embarrassing clown to free-spirited man.

After their mother leaves a preteen and her siblings, the preteen must navigate her emerging adolescence by herself in an orphanage.

When a teenage girl meets with her father to remind him of his late alimony payments, she feels disappointed by his unhelpful reaction.

Though numerous social workers try to step in, a co-dependent mother and son bounce from city to city, in search of a place where they can be together at all times.

After a fifteen-year-old girl makes a bet with her father that after high school she will leave home to never return, her father takes her to the train station early one morning and tells her to leave. When she winds up in Los Angeles, she finds her way there, despite the fact that she does not feel free.