The coronavirus poses a unique threat to an age group that, whether they admit it or not, includes them. Photograph by Caroline Schiff / Getty

Last Wednesday night, not long after President Trump’s Oval Office address, I called my mother to check in about the, you know, unprecedented global health crisis that’s happening. She told me that she and my father were in a cab on the way home from a fun dinner at the Polo Bar, in midtown Manhattan, with another couple who were old friends.

“You went to a restaurant?!” I shrieked. This was several days after she had told me, through sniffles, that she was recovering from a cold but didn’t see any reason that she shouldn’t go to the school where she works. Also, she was still hoping to make a trip to Florida at the end of the month. My dad, a lawyer, was planning to go into the office on Thursday, but thought that he might work from home on Friday, if he could figure out how to link up his personal computer. That night, moments after getting into bed, I sprang up and wrote them an anxious e-mail. “I feel like the two of you are not taking serious enough precautions right now,” I told them. “The time is DONE for going out to restaurants, showing up at the office every day, etc. Just stay inside and watch TV!” When I followed up with texts, my mother wrote back sarcastically, “Thanks mom.”

This role reversal was . . . novel. I still think of my parents as the grownups, the ones who lecture me about saving for retirement and intervene in squabbles with my little sister. It took a pandemic to thrust me into the role of the responsible adult and them into the role of the heedless children. I’m thirty-eight, and my mother and father are sixty-eight and seventy-four, respectively. Neither is retired, and both are in good shape. But people sixty-five and older—more than half of the baby-boomer population—are more susceptible to COVID-19 and have a higher mortality rate, and my parents’ blithe behavior was as unsettling as the frantic warnings coming from hospitals in Italy.

As I spoke to my peers, I realized that I wasn’t alone. A lot of us have spent the past week pleading with our baby-boomer parents to cook at home, rip up the cruise tickets, and step away from the grandchildren. My in-laws, who live in Puerto Rico, needed all three of their adult children to persuade them over a group text not to go to Macy’s (or at least to skip communion at church). One friend writes, “My dad is a retired doctor. My mom is a retired nurse. They are both in their early seventies. When I called home to check in on them, no answer. Turns out my mom was ‘at the mall having coffee’ (?!) and my dad was golfing. I yelled at them to stop being rebellious children of the 1960s and to please grow up.” Another says, of his parents, “They just won’t fucking listen to me. I’m going to kill them before COVID does. I’m really upset. They are telling me I’m overreacting by telling them to stop eating out, and my mom keeps going to the office. I won’t let them come here to see the boys (who both have mild fevers and coughs right now, which could be nothing, but obviously a bad idea). They get mad at me when I call them to tell them to just stay the fuck home. My dad is a seventy-one-year-old diabetic.”

I told my mom about what seemed like a trend. “All my friends are saying the same thing,” she texted back, no doubt on her way to a farmers’ market, “that their kids are crazy and treating us like elderly people.”

Allow me to wildly generalize about baby boomers for just a moment (or at least the white, well-off, straight American ones who make up most of my sampling). They were born on a grassy back yard after the Second World War, learned how to duck and cover in elementary school, invented sex in 1967, Jazzercized in 1984, and now run the world and won’t let go. They are retiring later and buying anti-wrinkle cream by the tub-load. As countless trend pieces have pointed out, they don’t like to be called “grandma” and “grandpa”—or even “senior citizens,” even when they indisputably are. And who can blame them? They transformed American culture when they were young, gorgeous, and rebellious, ushering in an ethos of freedom. (I’m told the music was quite good.) They’ve managed to stay productive into their sixties and seventies, bending the idea of aging to their will. Until the millennial barb “O.K., boomer” came along, they may not have realized that they are the least bit out of the mainstream. But now a virus poses a unique threat to an age group that, whether they admit it or not, includes them. Our Boomer-in-Chief is the most prominent denialist. But it’s striking that the first celebrities to announce that they had contracted COVID-19 were Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, the closest thing that Hollywood has to fun boomer parents. If Forrest Gump can get the coronavirus, so can you, Dad.

Of course, there are many exceptions to the blasé-boomer mold. One friend writes that her doctor parents have been “overcautious” for a month, and plenty of others have rightfully hunkered down. If you were born between 1944 and 1964 and are obsessively washing your hands and social-distancing, great! Keep doing that! And, yes, foolhardiness has no age minimum. There have been plenty of reports of thirtysomethings going out to brunch or twentysomethings crowding in bars on their now indefinite spring breaks. But twentysomethings—who, let’s be clear, should also take this extremely seriously and stay home—are supposed to feel immortal. Seventysomethings, less so. It’s a normal part of the life cycle for adult children to start parenting their parents. This generational role reversal may be a prelude to the demographic shift to come, as baby boomers age out of late-late “middle age” and are forced to relinquish their invincibility, while their children take on the burdens of caring for elderly—yes, elderly—parents.

But the pandemic has pressed the issue, putting many people in their thirties and forties in the tense new role of protectors and even scolds. It’s a twisted inverse of the generation gap of the sixties, when young boomers screamed across the table at their parents about Vietnam—except that now we’re telling ours not to leave their homes. The literary agent Lucy Carson pleaded on Twitter, “Best advice for convincing a diabetic boomer parent to stop commuting into the city? Rage-sobbing into the phone isn’t helping my cause.” At Vogue, Molly Jong-Fast wrote about a similar dynamic with her “fabulous feminist mother,” the generation-chronicling author Erica Jong. “I know everyone is going to get mad at me, but this is not about your conflicted feelings about growing older,” Jong-Fast wrote. “This is a global pandemic, a disease that is significantly more lethal than the seasonal flu.” My colleague Ben Wallace-Wells observed the emergence of a new type: “the YOLO grandparent.” Some less charitable youngsters have even renamed the virus the “boomer remover.” On Sunday, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, called for the home isolation of residents who are sixty-five and older, which should put a halt to those rogue wine-tasting trips.