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: generational comparisons

  • 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my youth–like “wasn’t that a hoot” to mean, “wasn’t that funny”–I feel I have to apologize to my grandkids for being out of date, for using a phrase that’s totally dated.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…

  • Generation Gap: Where do we get our news and does it matter?

    If you have a 20-something hanging around your life, chances are 50-50 you’re getting your cultural and political news from different sources. If the young person is a grandchild, the odds go to 99-1. I’m making up the numbers but the point is that our older generation gets information about the world from very different…

  • The App World: Should we be tracking our grown children?

    Am I showing my age and my app ignorance? Well, I certainly felt the former and learned a lot about the latter from a Carolyn Hax column. The column dealt with a reader's query about tracking her young adult children–children who are in college and no longer living at home. The parent wrote that "EVERY…

  • Observation: Why it’s so hard to launch 20-somethings.

    In an interview with Laurence Steinberg, NPR reporter A Martinez asked the psychology professor about challenges we parents face in dealing with our 20-something adult children–children who should be more independent than they are or than we were at their age.  Here's Steinberg's observation. STEINBERG: Parents don't fully understand how hard it is to be…

  • Observation: Michelle Singletary on adult children still living at home

    A few weeks ago I posted a blog about a relatively new trend: Our adult children–college graduates and/or employed adults in their 20s–have been moving back home and staying there for longer than, say, we would have at their age.  Since my children have long grown and flown, mine was an observational piece about economic…

  • 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…

  • Compassion for Today’s Adult Kids, Part 2: Parenting and the fearful world of “canceling”

    We more senior parents are somewhat removed from the modern-day stresses our adult children and grandchildren are experiencing. (see my post last week) That list did not include one of the most pernicious stresses: A cancelation and self-censorship culture, particularly on college campuses.  You may know all about it but I had only the vaguest…

  • Compassion for our adult kids who are parenting in today’s world

    When I first became a parent, my mother would chime in with kid-raising tips. Some of it was helpful; some annoying but for the most part there was little in her experience of raising my brother and myself to clue her in on how to deal with such modern-day (modern for my generation) issues as…

  • We Are Style Setters: TikTok says our comfy ways meet the moment for adult kids and their peers.

    Stunning news on the older-parent front: The Washington Post tells us that our grown kids, their kids and the generations in between are embracing the comforts of the grannie style–a trend the Post describes as "billowy linen pants, slipcovered sofas and chilled sauvignon blanc." Dubbed coastal-grandmother, the style (see TikTok's Lex Nicoleta), "taps into a…

  • Parenting Young Adults: The realities and the risks of today’s “lifestyle stress”

    When my oldest granddaughter started college this year, I asked her the usual generic questions: What courses was she taking, which professors seemed dynamic, how was her dorm. I also asked her how she liked going to an all-girls college in a busy city. She ticked off her pros and cons but I was stunned…