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: leaving a legacy
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Our closets are full. So is the attic, basement and every cranny that can hold papers, memorabilia and photo albums. To say nothing of unused dishes, scarred pots and chipped figurines. Getting rid of some or all of that stuff is formidable. It looms like a climb up a mountain of slag. And yet, do we…
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I've written, possibly too often, about how cleaned-out closets are part of our legacy to our children and other assorted heirs. That is, whether they're in basements, attics or closets, the collections of items we no longer use and we know our kids don't want should be dealt with by us. We should chuck those…
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Do we have to share our wealth–be it a dollop from our savings, income or investments–with struggling grown kids? If we don't have to, should we anyway? Many of us have answered the latter question with a "yes." That is, we want to if we can afford it. (Never mind the Boomer, Gen X or…
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I recently found an essay I wrote about five years ago about sharing–or failing to–my life story with a granddaughter, of finding out she had to Google me to learn more about my career. Our lives reflect the history of our times and that's reason enough for our grandkids–and our adult kids–to know how…
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Long-time readers know how I've ranted about an important part of the legacy we leave our children. That is, besides the assets and the sense of our values we leave our children, we should clean out the mess of papers and junk stored in our closets, basements, attics and crannies of our house. I have…
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I do not have the complication in my life of a second marriage and stepchildren. That means my adult children do not have to worry about whether step brothers or sisters will complicate the inheritance of the worldly goods their father and I leave behind. I mention that because, experience-wise, I was unprepared for a…
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