PenPenWrites

parenting blog, memoir notes, family punchlines & more

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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.

recent posts

© 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.

Category: aging parents

  • 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…

  • Role Reversals: When our kids share the love we showed them

    As we age into our more mature years, many of us find our kids “parenting” us on the little things: telling us what to do about a checking account, giving us advice on how to dress for the weather or sharing the latest on what we should be eating for breakfast. Some of it’s helpful,…

  • Doomed: Our adult children’s concerns about our drag on their future

    Our adult children are worried about us. Not necessarily about our health and well-being. It's more a generation vs generation thing and the fear that the aging population (that's us) might doom their economic future. That is, we'll drain the purses that support  Medicare and Social Security and leave them working without a future safety…

  • The New Sandwich Generations: We’re in the mix somewhere.

        We've all heard of the sandwich generation–the one where we're on the hook for caring for our aged parents and our young children. What with many of us living longer and the needs of our adult children changing, there are two variations on the sandwich motif. One is the club sandwich: We're taking…

  • Our Children, Our Bosses: A change in the dynamics of who’s taking charge of whom.

    Friends of ours just returned from four weeks in Italy. Days of sunshine. Mornings with una tazza di caffè. So delightful. They stayed at a four-story house their son and his family have rented: Their daughter-in-law was appointed to a prestigious job at an international agency headquartered in Rome and so the family relocated. What…

  • Covid Seniors: Are our adult kids still trying to be our parents?

    Some of us whose adult children are now of sandwich-generation age–-meaning their teen- and 20-something kids are becoming independent while their parents are evolving toward ancient–have a "take control" attitude toward their parents. It may be a hangover from the Covad pandemic. Back in those bad old days, a good number of adult kids, seeing…

  • The Wisdom of our Children: When the balance of giving advice tips in their favor

    A funny thing has happened on our way to becoming older parents: We may find that our grown kids have acquired wisdom and good sense. And now, as we age into our more senior adult years, they share their gravitas with us (though some of their over-protective counsel during Covid was a bit overbearing as…

  • Leaving a Legacy: Is there a fair way to divide our assets?

    The two most boring words in a parent's vocabulary: Estate Planning. Within that world, the most volatile words are Unequal Shares.  Whether we have a gargantuan billion-dollar estate to divvy up among our children or just a small savings account to apportion (or somewhere between those two extremes), we may have reasons to deviate from…

  • Observation: Emma Thompson on the ties that bind grandmas, grownkids and the moms in between

    During the pandemic, actor and screenwriter Emma Thompson hosted both her 22-year-old daughter and her 89-year-old mother. In The Guardian she wrote about the links between generations, on what we mean to and do for each other and of what she found to be "the miraculous luxury of three generations together." Here are some of…