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© Penelope Lemov and Parenting Grown Children, 2025. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given.

  • PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

    The Big Worry: Will we become a burden to our kids?

    We Baby Boomers have been financially favored. A good number of us rode a rocketing stock market and rewarding jobs to ultra-healthy investment portfolios. The eventual transfer of those assets to our grown children–spoiler alert: we won’t live forever–is the stuff of media chatter about the $100 trillion in wealth we’re likely to fork over to our heirs over the course of the next two decades. It’s being called The Great Wealth Transfer.

    But is it? What this hoopla doesn’t take into account is that we upper-middle-class boomers who’ve accumulated our tiny piece of these trillions of dollars of wealth are living long lives.

    All of which means that the pleasure of leaving our kids and grandkids a financial bonus is giving way to fear of outliving our assets. That’s because growing old and fragile doesn’t come cheap.

    Here’s what financial advisers have to say:

    • One of the biggest factors that drives wealth depletion during retirement is health care costs, including rising out-of-pocket costs for medical treatment and the probability of needing long-term care later in life.
    • These potentially high expenses increase the likelihood that most of our their savings would be wiped out during their lifetime, leaving little or nothing to transfer to their children or other beneficiaries.

    The projections on the likelihood of being faced with these costs go like this:

    • Women vs. Men: Women have a higher probability of needing care (57 percent by age 85) compared to men.
    • Average Duration: The average person needs care for roughly 2.5 to 3.6 years, but 22 percent of adults will need care for more than five years

    When I previously posted about this issue, I wrote from personal experience of how jarringly expensive it was to care for an infirm spouse. This is especially true when a loved one suffers from one of the big three causes of debilitation among the elderly: stroke, dementia, Parkinsons. The costs of care vary, depending, of course, on the extent of care needs and local costs of that care. But I can tell you, the costs I incurred (I needed around-the-clock non-medical care for my spouse) could wipe out $1 million in savings in a flash of three or four years.

    Congress continues to hold hearings on the “financial risk to every individual’s retirement income security posed by long-term care needs.” Thus spaketh Senator Charles Grassley when he chaired a hearing to identify steps to help Americans better prepare. The consensus, certainly among those in power at the present moment, is that we holders of a piece of that trillion-dollar portfolio should save more. But the question is: How much is enough?

    Painting: Pierre Bonnard, “Dining Room in the Country”

  • PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

    Clean Closets, Fiscal Style: Tips from a financial guru

    I’ve over-shared my concerns about leaving clean closets for our kids. When we’re no longer around to tell them what’s a sentimental treasure and what’s just junk, we want the curating job to have been done. By us.

    Now there’s a new twist on clean closets: financial cupboards. While this form of storage doesn’t have the heavy lift of pulling out boxes from under our beds, it still has things that need to be cleared and cleaned up.

    In one of her columns, Michele Singletary offered clean-up advice. What you need to take care of depends on what generation you are. For us Boomers (those of us 62 years old and upwards), she doesn’t have clean-out suggestions so much as a to-do list: Create a Letter of Instruction. It should include:

    • Usernames and passwords to your mobile phone or computer.
    • The location of your original will or trust documents.
    • An inventory of your important papers, including financial accounts, insurance policies (life and home), retirement and pension information, or veterans’ records.

    And by the way:

    • If you’re going to keep the letter on your computer, be sure to print a copy or save it to a flash drive in case your computer can’t be accessed.
    • Update your beneficiary designations. There should be “Payable on Death” (POD) and “Transfer on Death” (TOD) names on every account that match your current family structure. That’s one way to avoid probate.

    This clean-up isn’t too formidable, is it? You’ll feel all tidied up when all the pieces are in place, and then you can forget all about it. Except to tell your spouse or kids where the Letter is.

    art: Hilary Precis

  • PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

    iPhone Addiction: Is it our Kids or is it us?

    There’s only one person in this photo gripping her phone.

    Last week I spent a two-day mini vacation with my son and granddaughter. We stayed in the Old Town section of Alexandria, Virginia. Our one big tourist outing was Mount Vernon.

    Guess who decided not to bring a phone along to wander around George Washington’s estate? It wasn’t me. It wasn’t my son. My Grand, a high school senior, said she didn’t want to be distracted. She wanted to focus on the history of animal life on the estate and how slaves lived and were treated. She left her phone in her hotel room.

    Her dad and I were very impressed, though she brought up one caveat. “If we get separated, you won’t be able to text me.” We managed to stay in touch the old-fashioned way. When she wanted to wander off to see something we were uninterested in, she knew which bench we’d be sitting on.

    I tell you this for a reason. My granddaughter seems to be part of a growing trend among younger people. It’s called “digital detox“:

    • Despite being digitally active, some research suggests younger generations are purposefully taking breaks from social media and managing their screen time.

    Older adults are part of a different trend. Ours could be called “High Screen Tme.”

    • We’re becoming more reliant on technology, often exceeding younger generations in our use of digital devices. That usage includes mobile devices but also–and notably–television, and desktop computers. The latter do not have a large presence in the Gen Z world.

    I find this thought-provoking. Yay for Gen Z. News about their Digital Detox versus our High Screen Time is creeping into mainstream media. To wit:

    • “Are boomers the real iPad babies? Why Grandma and Grandpa can’t seem to stop scrolling.” A recent Washington Post. headline.
    • “Once seen as a Gen Z problem is now quietly gripping an entirely different generation. Screen addiction, it turns out, has crept into the lives of older adults and it’s tightening its hold.” A report in Asianet News

    Cheers to my Grand and the growing number of Gen Z’s who are finding joy in human interactions, not just digital ones.

    photo credit: family iPhone

  • PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

    Togetherness: When our grown kids are there for us

    Some anniversaries are joyful. Others are simply meaningful. And others are meaningful with a touch of sad.
    The weekend of No Kings marked the second anniversary of Mike’s (my husband’s) passing. If Mike hadn’t been born a political protester, he was one by the time I met him as a young man. He kept that drive alive for the next six decades. So it seemed fitting to commemorate the anniversary of his death by taking him (well, just his likeness and a spoonful of his ashes) to the March 28 rally on the Mall in Washington, D.C.

    His daughter (and mine) flew home to make the Fight On poster (see above) with a photo (below) of Mike at a protest rally some eight years ago. Then we headed downtown.

    As the crowd gathered on the Mall and the speeches began, as the worst moments of the Trump presidency were called out to a roaring crowd, my daughter and I took turns holding our poster high to make sure Mike’s presence was counted. We also found a discreet place near a large tree overlooking the Capitol to dig a teeny tiny hole and leave a teaspoon of his ashes.

    Bringing Mike to No Kings made the Second Anniversary of his passing more meaningful and less sad. There was a joy in it. We did right by him.

    So here’s to our grown children. Not mine in particular. All of our grown-up children and the issues that have surfaced in this blog. However much we may fret about them, disagree about their life choices or wonder what they’re thinking when they opt for a tattoo or purple hair, it doesn’t matter. When they are here for us if we need them, count us fortunate ones.

  • PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

    In Other’s Words: How do we get through tough times?

    “The world is too much with us.” Wordworth was referring to the materialism of his time (“getting and spending we lay waste his powers.”). Yet I can’t help but think of that poetic fragment as a reference to the news and politics of our time.

    When the world comes crashing in–news of war, misinformation about events, uncivil commentary, attacks on science and higher education, cancellation of clean water and air rules (I don’t know where to stop the list)–we may feel grief and loss. So may our adult children, especially when it comes to environmental degradation. Many of us (I am a guilty party) cope by no longer listening to the news and making sure podcasts or substacks are about culture, sports and feel-good topics. We may keep our conversations with our adult children on the same plane.

    But our children and their children are going to have to live with this re-made world. There’s no escaping what’s happening. So, where to find comfort and calm and still be of this time and place?

    There are words of solace in Jennifer Breheny Wallace’s Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose:

    • “No matter what kind of upheaval we’re facing, be it job loss, retirement, empty nesting, a shifting world, or some other destabilizing event, the surest way to sustain our own sense of mattering is to focus on making others feel like they matter.”

    A recent book on grief — many of us are grieving the loss of our traditional moral and ethical codes— also addresses this issue. The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller is organized around five grief gates, with Gate Three being the Sorrows of the World. Weller argues that ignoring this grief leads to a deadened life, while facing it allows us to feel intimate with life, fostering “soul activism” and deeper love for the world.

    Some of Weller’s words of support:

    • The Shared Burden of the Environment: “Whether or not we consciously recognize it, the daily diminishment of species, habitats, and cultures is noted in our psyches. Much of the grief we carry is not personal, but shared, communal”.
    • Living with Loss: “It is at the third gate that we acknowledge losses on a planetary scale. … Staying close to sorrow can keep the heart open”.
    • Confronting the Crisis: “Every sorrow we carry extends from the absence of what we require to stay engaged in this ‘one wild and precious life’”.
    • Resistance to Numbing: “We are designed to encounter this life with amazement and wonder, not resignation and endurance”. 

    painting: Edgar Degas, L’Absinthe

  • PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

    What Matters: The importance of feeling valued

    Angry parents grumble about a lack of a thank you for gifts given to an adult child or grandchild. We may grouse that our progeny call only when they’re stuck in traffic or carp about requests for the loan of a car but not for our companionship. It’s not necessarily a sign that our children and grandchildren are rude, uncaring individuals. If there’s a common thread amidst these frustrations, it might be this: A worry that we don’t matter, that we aren’t valued.

    • As we age and as our adult children become more entangled in their complicated work and family lives, we may feel out of the loop. In fact, we probably are. I know I am. But that doesn’t mean our children and grandchildren don’t care about us. An unwritten thank you note, a phone call only when they have dead time in their car doesn’t mean we’re an afterthought.

    We aren’t the only ones struggling with this. So are people thirty and forty years younger than we are. A website dedicated to mattering, The Mattering Movement, has this to say on the matter:

    • Research shows that at the root of many mental health struggles in young people—pressure, anxiety, depression, and loneliness—is an unmet need to feel that we matter: that we are valued for who we are at our core, and that we can add meaningful value to the lives of others.

    Could this concern about feeling irrelevant be at the heart of our anger at our grown kids or grandkids about not calling, not writing, not keeping us up to date on what’s going on in their lives? Take the lack of a thank you for a gift. It isn’t that we need to know they liked the sweater we sent or the check that we tucked into a gift card. It’s often the feeling of being ignored. We’ve reached out to them–and this is especially true for those of us who live a good distance away from our children–and they have not reached back. Not even with a virtual hug.

    In a previous post, psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb took the thank you conundrum even further:

    • No matter how much we tell ourselves that gifts aren’t about reciprocity, the reality is that they often hold emotional significance in which both parties are essentially asking to be recognized. The giver wants acknowledgment of their thoughtfulness and investment, while the receiver wants confirmation that they’ve been truly seen. Both are essentially asking, “Do I matter?”

    Her advice on the thank you issue–and it applies to other frustrations as well–is not to attack, as in, “What is wrong with your parenting that your kids didn’t send me a thank you note for the books I chose for them?” Rather, it’s to reach out in a friendly, sympathetic way. Here’s an opening gambit Gottlieb suggests as a possible road forward:

    • You might say, “I know I mentioned the gifts and thank-you notes before, but I realized that what I really want is to have a stronger relationship with you and your family. What can I do to make that happen?”

    If you’re interested in further reading on the matter of mattering, here are two recent books on the subject:

    painting: possibly S. Boza

  • PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

    Sharing Family History: What one generation owes another.

    Author Jeff Katz (right) and moderator Marc Fisher at Wonderland Books in Bethesda, Md.

    Talk about intergenerational communication, of one generation catching up with the stories of another. Many of us, as we reach our more senior years, are sorry we didn’t ask our parents in-depth questions about their past. And some of us wish our kids and grandkids would ask us.

    I bring this up because a friend, Jeff Katz, has written a terrifically readable book about a terribly difficult subject: How Germans today are reckoning with the Germany of the Holocaust. (Unsettled Ground: Reflections on Germany’s Attempts to Make Amends)

    • He’s done it by showing how his parents and their neighbors, who lived side by side for a century in a small town in Germany, dealt with the events of the time, and more importantly, on what a growing number of Germans today are doing to recall the past and reckon with it.
    • The older history is, of course, a tale of neighbor turning against neighbor, and such stories are not unique in world history. But what Jeff is addressing is how the follow-on generations are affected.
    • Many of those families don’t talk about what happened–and neither did Jeff’s parents until he finally prodded them into telling him about his grandparents’ and their experiences in escaping from Nazi Germany. It was his parents’ personal history that got Jeff interested in finding out whether and how today’s Germans are making amends.

    The book stands on its own as a report about Germany today but the stories his parents finally told him about themselves and the grandparents (Jeff’s father’s family lived in a tiny rural town in Germany for centuries) are a reminder of how important it is for us to share our past with our children–even if it’s not as life-and-death traumatic as Jeff’s parents.

    I have been to one of Jeff’s bookstore talks (see photo above), and from both his remarks and the questions the audience raised, I’ve come to realize that what the young generation of Germans today is doing to understand the past is fairly unique. Other countries and people with equally horrendous histories have not looked back to learn about what went wrong and why.

    That leads me to a personal note about current events: We are living through a neighbor-against-neighbor time here (Let us not forget Minneapolis). I want to make sure my family’s future generations know that we, their parents and grandparents, did all we could do–and are doing all we can do–to stop it. What will those who are bearing arms (with military-style bazookas and grenade throwers) against their neighbors or applauding those who do tell their children? Will their children and grandchildren have to make amends in another generation or two?

    Unsettled Ground: Reflections on Germany’s attempts to make amends: You can find the hardcover at independent bookstores such as Wonderland Books and Politics & Prose, as well as at Bookshop.org, and all three editions at Amazon. You can also read an excerpt and early reviews at Jeff’s website.s

    photo: courtesy Jeff Katz and Wonderland Books

  • PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

    Gifting and Getting: A wish list for gifts from grandkids

    The gift-giving mania of the Holidays is finally over for now. We no longer have to sidestep the occasional requests for what sort of present we’d like from our kids or grandkids. Except that it really isn’t over: Birthdays, Mother’s or Father’s Days and various anniversaries are still coming up. If a grandkid or grown kid asks what you’d like for a Special Day, I’ve got a worthy suggestion for you.

    I didn’t think it up myself. A friend of mine did. She used it this past Christmas. Let me lay it out for you:

    My friend, A, is a grandmother whose grandkids have been growing up and away geographically as well as more distant as they age into their teen and young adult years. For her Christmas present this year, she asked each of her grandkids to write her a letter. More specifically, a letter (in any form–email, typed, handwritten) that, in effect, went deep.

    She shared her gift-ask letter with me so I’ll quote bits of it directly:

    • I am asking you to write me a letter (which can remain confidential, if you wish) and tell me who you are today.
    • What do you like to do? What are your goals? Where do you see yourself by 2030? Doing what? What are your fears or concerns? What are your strengths? If you could change yourself or the world around you, what would you change and why?
    • Write more than a surface letter. This is an introspective one—a real set of your feelings and a picture of who you really are. I will write back.
    • This is a big gift and one I will treasure.

    Did she get what she wanted?

    • Seven of eight of her grandkids responded. (The youngest, who’s 11, is still working on his.) One wrote about how she did not fit in when she was in high school and what she learned about herself from that. Another wrote that he was a happy person who believed things would always work out but worried about the uncertainty of the future. Another wrote about how difficult it was to be the younger sibling of a brother who was an athletic superstar.
    • None tackled the question of “how I’d change the world.”
    • The letters renewed the rapport she had with her grandkids when they were younger and lived near her.
    • She’s is making good on her promise to them: She has been writing back.

    photo credit: Maia Lemov

  • PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

    Blast from the Past: Our youthful slang is no longer passé.

    Whenever I use a term from my youth–like “wasn’t that a hoot” to mean, “wasn’t that funny”–I feel I have to apologize to my grandkids for being out of date, for using a phrase that’s totally dated. But now I find out that the slang we bandied about when we were in high school and college is coming back, baby.
    Thus spake the NYT in an article with the hip headline, “Why Kids Are Starting to Sound like Their Grandparents.”

    • “Language change is a team sport,” a sociolinguist explained to the Times. “You cannot get it going by yourself.” Rather, the spread of a new word, or the rebirth of an old one, begins when a given group of cool kids starts using it.

    That’s why, whether we elders know it or not, “sheesh” and “goon” and “yap”–the delightful gift of gab–are being used by cool kids of the Gen Alpha generation.

    What could be more of a hoot than being groovy again?

    painting credit: Tamara de Lempicka, “Tamara in a Green Bugatti”

  • PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

    Money Matters: Data on how the Bank of Mom and Dad is doing?

    Retirement looms for many of us as a signifier of our status as a mature person with wisdom to share and time to spare. Or it’s a tantalizing adventure we look forward to. But if we give up our day jobs and our kids need financial help–to, say, buy a house, pay for groceries or cover child care costs–does the Bank of Mom and Dad have the wherewithal to help?

    It’s a pretty open question. First, a Pew research survey from this past November addresses the question of how we are feeling about our finances as we age. No judgments here; just the facts:

    • Amid a dwindling Social Security retirement trust and increased national life expectancy, many of us are uncertain about our financial future and how solid the Bank of Mom and Dad is.
    • Four-in-ten U.S. adults say they aren’t confident they’ll have enough income and assets to last throughout their retirement years or say they won’t be able to retire at all. Only about a quarter of us are very confident that the income and assets in our Bank are solid.
    • Older adults are the most confident about their finances in retirement. Fewer than half of us in our 60s and 70s are highly confident, compared with 50% of us in our 80s and older.

    Meanwhile, a lot of us are in support mode.

    • In an AARP survey, 75% of parents said they were providing some financial assistance to at least one adult child (age 18+).
    • How much are we providing? A Savings.com survey found the average support per adult child is $1,474 a month, roughly 6% higher than last year.
    • Another survey by Ameriprise Financial found that 63% of parents cover ongoing expenses for children 21+, with 76% helping with big one-time expenses, and 36% worrying about the impact on their retirement.

    What are we helping our kids with? Here’s where the money goes (according to the surveys):

    • buying groceries,
    • paying for a cellphone plan,
    • covering health and auto insurance
    • subsidizing rent
    • buying a car
    • tuition and education expenses
    • credit cards
    • investments

    One last stat: More than three-quarters of supportive parents follow banker rules, that is they attach conditions to their financial assistance. The rest give money without any conditions. That stat raises the question of loan versus gift. It’s a topic I’ve written about in several posts, including this and this post.

    painting credit: “The Banker and his Wife” by Marinus van Reymerswaele