PenPenWrites

parenting blog, memoir notes, family punchlines & more

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.

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

  • Money Matters: When does the dependence of grown children end?

    A friend tells me his friend's woes: She's a divorced divorce attorney with a small but steady practice. Her daughter has gone to New York City to pursue her dreams. She wants to be an interior designer–get right in there and help people decorate their homes. And she has a talent for it. Only trouble…

  • Children Grow Up: A poet describes that independence best

    They've grown up and moved on. Here's poet Thomas Lux's take on the tempus fugit nature of it all and the ability–or is it need–to let go: A Little Tooth Your baby grows a tooth, then two,and four, and five, then she wants some meatdirectly from the bone. It's all over; she'll learn some words,…

  • The Loneliness of the Empty Nest: A novelist describes that empty feeling

    A novelist captures the mixed emotions of having children grow up and leave the nest. Her main character, the owner of hardware store,feels empty without his four sons around. It is a sadness that trails around with him.

  • Re-Nesting: Advice on the move back home

    If your grown children and their children are moving back home–out of economic necessity or for a temporary but long-term visit–there are lots of challenges ahead. Here's a blog that's detailing how one family is working things out. I like the tone of it. Here's part of an opener to one recent entry: "When you…

  • Moving Home: The Boomerang kids return to the nest

    This isn't the first time I've posted links to newspaper, magazine or blog items on how to handle a return to the nest. But it is the first time I've seen the topic covered at length by no less a media than the New York Times. In true Times tradition, "When Fledglings Return to the…

  • Empty Nest: Feeling down in the dumps when the kids leave for college

    I always thought paterfamilias and I had a solid marriage. It was tested when our kids–they were one year apart in school–left for college. Within a year, the house was empty. We had more fights those first few weeks than at any other period in our marriage. It was, I came to realize, because both…

  • Refilling the Nest: Economic woes bring older adult children home

    The latest census report and a couple of surveys hold some startling statistics for those of us with adult children: They are moving back home in force. And at mid-career–or older. Here are the numbers, starting with the younger ones: According to the most recent Census report, there were 5.1 million Americans age 25 to…

  • Empty Nest Redux: When the kids come marching home again

    This just in from Great Britain. A survey by Selftrade of 2,000 Brits on fallout from the current economic downturn finds that "50% of British adults have been forced to make a ‘Plan B’ in the last year, as their lives have taken a surprise turn in a different direction. In 87% of these cases,…

  • Refilling the Nest: Two is company, three is crowded

    The semester is almost over. The students who went off to college as overgrown teens are heading home for the summer as adults. A friend's son, after two years of struggling with college courses, is coming home for the duration–to figure out what he'll do next, what he wants out of life, whether further schooling…

  • Returning to the Nest: Do you still have to wash their socks?

    They're moving home again. Sixty percent of young adults move back home–staying for no one knows how long.  The rules of the house that worked so well when they were youngsters don't quite apply now. So how do you work things out? Do you ask them to pay rent, lay down cleaning and cooking rules?…