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: empty nests

  • Letting Go: Parenting styles for the ages

    We've been through the basic steps of parenting–from being a caregiver for an infant, through manager of school-age kids and advisors to our older teens and young adults. Now, we're moving from consultants  to the final stage: colleagues to our mature, adult children. Sounds like the best of times but it's no easier than the…

  • Boomerang Kids: Return to the empty nest

    A little historical perspective: We may all hear about–and some of us experience–a return of our adult children to the nest–but their leaving before marriage is a relatively new phenomenon. And one some of us may view from a biased perspective.  Michael Rosenfeld, a social demographer at Stanford University says almost 41% of singles ages…

  • Empty Nested: The warring emotions

    I am now more than a decade past shipping uber son and alpha daughter off to college. They've graduated, started careers, moved to other cities and coasts, are leading successful and independent lives: just what any parent could wish. I couldn't feel better about them. And yet, I still remember to this day the first…

  • Communicating with the Kids: Times to keep your mouth shut–and times not to

    There's a new book out on talking to your adult children–and the advice we all give each other to "keep your mouth shut." Ruth Nemzoff, a scholar at Brandeis University, pulls together her studies on the subject in "Don't Bite Your Tongue: How to Foster Rewarding Relationships With Your Adult Children." Here's one of the…

  • Re-Nesters: Profile from the UK on kids moving back home

    We are not alone. The phenomenon taking place here is also raging in the U.K. According to this survey of British home life, Nearly one in ten parents have grown-up children living with them–young adults who have been "priced off the housing ladder." The parents are not only looking after their kids well into adulthood,…

  • Helicopter landings: Overprotecting adult children does not pay off

    There’s an interesting discussion on the perils and pitfalls of helicopter parenting–of the sour fruits parents reap when they don’t let their grown children grow up and take care of themselves–at this web site. While many of us think of the moms as the overprotective parent, this is a story about a dad who does…

  • Money Matters: Helping support a grown child

    At last, a financial planner who isn’t all bean-counter and estate-protector. There is, says Aaron Katsman, more to having an adult child move back home than rental agreements or fees for food. And more to providing them with a temporary stipend than a loan contract. Keying in on the recent, economy-based phenomenon of older adult…

  • Re-Nesting: To have or have not a contract with your adult children

    Parents of 20-somethings–especially recent college graduates–are experiencing a steady march of children returning to the nest. It’s a hostile economy out there: difficult job market; horrendous credit crunch; rising prices for everything. And it’s not just the 20-somethings, as the reports noted in earlier blog entries make clear. But all that raises the question of…

  • The Only Child Speaks Up: “Take your hands off the controls.”

    A recent story in a Canadian newspaper touched a lot of buttons for parents of adult children, and particularly of “only children.”  The story is the  adult child’s complaint about the tight controls parents exert, even as the child approaches marriage. The writer, an only child who is marrying an only child, says she noticed…

  • Re-Nesting: They can go home again

    We’ve got yet another study on grown children and money. This time it’s not about how we parents are helping them pay their bills or buy a house  (we can be so wonderfully generous, can’t we?), but about the pressures that force them home again and how we ought to deal with the boomerang kids.…