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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What makes for a great visit to grown children who live far away? Independence: the ability to get out and around without your children as your constant guide.
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Ah the guilt when a daughter-in-law is frustrated by your son’s messy ways–and you know you’re to blame.
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We all procrastinate but emerging adults–aka our unemployed college grads–may have a worse case of it.
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Communication with our grown children is important but that doesn’t mean we have to share every anxiety and woe over our own lot or their’s.
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Friends are visiting. We haven't seen them in years. The two husbands grew up in the same New York neighborhood. We wives became friends as young marrieds. Then they moved north to Vermont; we moved south and we would see them once a year when we headed for the Green Mountains for a summer vacation.…
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I was obsessed with the Boston Marathon-Watertown attacks. Followed the hour-to-hour headlines the first few days. When the action moved to Watertown on Thursday night and lock-down Friday, that changed. I became a live-action addict as police cars were spotted moving toward some sort of end game. Me and millions of others. I had an…
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There it is as one of my Notes to Self, running down the left hand column of this blog: "Be enthusiastic. It beats being critical." Easier said than done, of course. But it raises the question of praise versus criticism and the role the tension between the two play in our relationship with our independent…
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A friend I haven't seen in a while has moved back to my city. Her daughter and family live here. So she and her husband have a built in welcoming committee. At least, that is how we outsiders whose children live elsewhere see it. As she and I are talking–we are trying to make plans…
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Kids are kids. We bring them up to be independent, accomplished and assertive adults. For our daughters, the leadership–the assertive part–sometimes gets lost in the mix. The new president of Simmons College–my alumnus–posted a piece on Huffington Post: Five tips for dads to pass on to their daughters to help them become leaders. Here's…
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Insights is insight. You take it where you find it. I just finished reading Carl Pickhardt's recent blog on adolescents and parental similarity–how we tend to favor the child who is like us and how the issue rears its head big time as our children go through adolescence. What struck me about Pickhardt's column was…
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