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: Uncategorized
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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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“The world is too much with us.” Wordworth was referring to the materialism of his time (“getting and spending we lay waste his powers.”). Yet I can’t help but think of that poetic fragment as a reference to the news and politics of our time. When the world comes crashing in–news of war, misinformation about…
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Angry parents grumble about a lack of a thank you for gifts given to an adult child or grandchild. We may grouse that our progeny call only when they’re stuck in traffic or carp about requests for the loan of a car but not for our companionship. It’s not necessarily a sign that our children…
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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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The gift-giving mania of the Holidays is finally over for now. We no longer have to sidestep the occasional requests for what sort of present we’d like from our kids or grandkids. Except that it really isn’t over: Birthdays, Mother’s or Father’s Days and various anniversaries are still coming up. If a grandkid or grown…
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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…
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Retirement looms for many of us as a signifier of our status as a mature person with wisdom to share and time to spare. Or it’s a tantalizing adventure we look forward to. But if we give up our day jobs and our kids need financial help–to, say, buy a house, pay for groceries or…
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