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: letting go
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The comforting way to put it is that our grown kids need space. But the far end of that need can play out in a way that translates into "they don't want us around." In answer to a reader's complaint that her daughter won't take her phone calls, discourages her from visiting (even though she's…
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He's a psychologist who specializes in adolescence but Carl Pickhardt also has a lot to say about the next stage: young adults (roughly twenty-somethings) and their natural and inevitable independence from us, their loving and occasionally controlling parents. In a recent newsletter, he laid out the basic changes in our relationship with our grown-up young…
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There's helicopter parenting an adult child and there's Extreme Helicoptering of our post-adolescence offspring. Neither is healthy but the latter can be especially harmful. Extreme helicopter parents have been sited accompanying their adult children to job interviews and barging into the interview itself. (It does not leave an employer with a positive impression of the…
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The swell of emotions we feel for our grown kids, their new family and our place in it: It’s complicated.
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We give our kids a gift when we let them struggle to be financially independent.
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When it comes to their love life, we should limit ourselves to being a sounding board.
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The latest trend in parenting adult children: Hovering over their workplace and letting their bosses know there’s a higher power watching.
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Another way of letting go: Hanya Yanagihara’s parents set her free from expectations of filial duty.
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