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PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

The 11th Commandment: Thou shalt not comment on thy children’s appearance.

05/11/2022

When my brother was recovering from his first round of chemo for intestinal cancer, he put on a lot of weight. He was 45 years old, six feet tall and he blimped up to almost 300 pounds.

My mother was unhappy about it. She was worried, of course, that weight gain was unhealthy but that's now how she chose to address the issue: She was distressed at his appearance–she had always been concerned about our weight gain during my brother's and my childhoods–and asked me to tell my brother that he should lose weight. I, in wisdom gained from my own battle over pudginess as a little girl, refused to do it. My operating principle: No one who has gained a hefty amount of unwanted weight gets up in the morning, peers into a full-length mirror and says, "Dang, I look good!" (My brother may, in fact, have felt that weight gain was a sign the illness was in recession.)

I share that anecdote because it touches on an issue many of us face: What do we do when our grown kids "let themselves go" by gaining too much weight, dressing in a sloppy way, failing to groom their hair, letting a beard become unkempt or something along those lines. It's hard to watch and the pandemic may have exasperated the issue. I have friends whose daughter and son-in-law have not cut their hair and he hasn't shaved since the 2020 quarantine set in. They live a three-hour plane ride away and when my friends fly there for a semi-annual visit, they admit it takes a lot of self-control to zip their lips and say nothing.

One reason to keep our commentary to ourselves (or to limit our whining about it to close friends) is what I realized about my brother: He was not unaware of how he looked at 50+ pounds but by calling attention to it we are not adding useful information.

Another reason: It won't do any good. Our kids are no longer living under our roof or purview. We are not in control of their bodies, appearance, food intake or shaving habits.

But the biggest reason is this: It's bound to alienate our child. Plus, if there's an underlying cause behind the unappealing appearance, we would show a lack of empathy, support or understanding. Here's a case in point straight from the annals of Carolyn Hax:

A mother writes that her daughter has gained 40 pounds since she quit her "high-paying" job to stay home with her two elementary-age kids. The mother says she has "made some comments "about her daughter's appearance" and since then her daughter has cut way back on in-person visits and stayed offscreen when the mother zoom-chats with her grandkids. Did she, the mother wants to know, "really screw up that bad?"

"Apparently so," Hax writes, noting that the daughter's weight gain might be a signal that she's struggling, and the mom's response is, "I'll say. You look like crap.” Beyond the chastisement, Hax adds these insights into what might be going on here.

So the first step in making amends with your daughter is a reckoning with yourself. Have you done this before — have you missed her inner struggles because you couldn't get past the surface? Have you hurt her when she needed help? Have you done it a lot, a little, just this once?

Apologizing to your daughter is still the second step, regardless — but since its quality will directly reflect the quality of your introspection, save it for when you're ready to assume the full scope of the responsibility for whatever you did wrong. Do so even if you believe she has overreacted, because …. your job right now isn't to be accurate, it's to be self-aware, humble, and sorry for real.

After giving the reader advice on how to apologize, Hax adds this kicker: Rethink your values on looks.

painting: David C. Driskell, Yoruba Circle
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

The Wisdom of our Children: When the balance of giving advice tips in their favor

05/03/2022

A funny thing has happened on our way to becoming older parents: We may find that our grown kids have acquired wisdom and good sense. And now, as we age into our more senior adult years, they share their gravitas with us (though some of their over-protective counsel during Covid was a bit overbearing as I posted here.) Many times, though, they become our guides to making difficult decisions.

I was reminded of this when I bumped into a friend I hadn't seen in years. Now a widow, she was telling me about her son–I had last seen him when he was a toddler–who was now a physician in charge of a major healing center at a hospital across the country. When her husband became gravely ill and hospital-bound, my friend desperately wanted to bring him home to care for him. She was trying to figure out how to reconfigure their home to make it possible to care for him there. When her son flew home for a visit, he assessed both his father's condition and the house and told his mother what she didn't want to hear: It couldn't be done. There was no way his father could come home and be cared for safely and comfortably.

Her son's words and advice–"Let's find a really good nursing home for dad"–helped her acknowledge the best course to take for her husband's well-being. He died within a few months, but she was able to oversee her husband's care at the nursing home and spend much of every day with him.

When we face difficult choices, we are fortunate when we can lean on our children for sound advice. At some point in our lives, the good-counsel balance shifts slightly and our children become our valued advisors. We are able to reap what we've sown.

painting: Picasso, Still Life
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Memory Lane: Reliving the past with an adult son in tow

04/26/2022

He learned to ride his tyke bike here and to zip down the slide at the playground. Our son spent his first five years in this townhouse in River Park in the Southwest quadrant of Washington D.C. When he was five, our family moved to a suburb on the other side of the city. None of us had been back to River Park since.

Southwest now has a newly developed waterfront area. In "our" day the waterfront was nothing but broken sidewalks, weeds and an old railing that kept the occasional visitor from toppling into the Potomac River. Today, hotels, restaurants, boat docks and a wide boardwalk lap the river. When my son and his family came to visit recently, we went to see what was going on in the old neighborhood and topped off our day with a walk over to River Park.

The trees have grown taller and fuller in the 40-odd years since our family of four lived there but the minute we set foot into the heart of the complex everything was familiar. We pointed out the houses where we remembered old friends living–the Nellums over there, our best friends George and Marcy over here. And then we came to the front of our house–a three-story, barrel-roofed marvel at the corner of a row of half a dozen attached houses.

So many memories piled in. Our son showed his daughters where he had zoomed up and down the concrete plaza in front of our house on his tyke bike. He and I remembered the sunken concrete plaza–now turned into a grassy lawn–where we would hang out with friends. We found the houses where his sister's best friends–Nona and Lorraine–had lived. I remembered the babysitting pool where we parents paid each other in chits for watching each other's kids while we went to a movie or out to dinner. He remembered how, after Hurricane Agnes stormed in, he and his dad had walked down to the river and he had been overwhelmed by the power of the high, surging waters. We also stood on the spot where his dad had been held up at gunpoint–not the pleasantest of memories.

A woman walked by with a dog on a leash. "Is this your house?" we asked, since we were loitering in front of it. It wasn't. She said she had moved into the River Park apartment house a few months ago. What she liked so much about the place were the car-free open spaces and how filled with children River Park was.

That's what we remembered. It was also heartening to see that our old home and the community it was part of had weathered well. My son seemed buoyed at the chance to show his daughters where he had lived as a little boy and tell them stories about those times. I was wallowing in memory after memory as one after another anecdote or person popped up from some recess of my over-stimulated brain. I could almost see once again what a speed demon my son had been when, as a 3-year-old he discovered the wheeled glory of a tyke bike–nothing but a plank of wood on wheels with a handle bar to keep it going straight.

As we left River Park and walked back to the waterfront, my son used an app on his phone to rent a motorized scooter for one of his daughters, who then sped off on the new sidewalks of Southwest. A technological update on her dad and yet a page from the same book.

River Park, 2022

photo: Maia Lemov
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Leaving a Legacy: Is there a fair way to divide our assets?

04/18/2022

The two most boring words in a parent's vocabulary: Estate Planning. Within that world, the most volatile words are Unequal Shares. Whether we have a gargantuan billion-dollar estate to divvy up among our children or just a small savings account to apportion (or somewhere between those two extremes), we may have reasons to deviate from the mean.

The mean, of course, is to divide whatever we have equally among our children. That way we are likely to head off squabbles–and possible litigation–among our heirs. It's true that we're no longer around to witness any ugliness that may ensue but as financial advisors are fond of saying, "Most of us would like to be remembered for who we were, not for what we had." (Backing that up, a 2020 Merrill Lynch study found that two-thirds of us want our family to remember us as the people we were; only 5 percent ticked the box for wanting to be remembered for our accumulated wealth.)

Would a positive memory be besmirched by our kids fighting over what we've left them? Let's go to the research again. An Ameriprise survey found that, after we were no longer around to adjudicate, 70 percent of the fights between and among siblings involved how an inheritance was divided.

“With unequal inheritances, you run the risk of causing sibling animosity,” one estate planner said. “If you go this route you need to manage expectations so you don’t have one sibling blaming another.”

Why go the unequal route? A friend of mine with a disabled daughter has set up a special trust for her care and asked her sons to manage that trust. Most of my friend's assets will go into that trust. Her sons understand why and what their family responsibilities are.

There are families where one child is super successful financially and the other works in a worthy but low-paying field. In some families, one child has remained close to her parents while the other is estranged or one child manages to visit often but the other doesn't, or one has several children and the other doesn't.

As parents we may have all kinds of valid reasons for carving our estate into unequal shares. And a number of us are doing so. In fact, the percentage of parents who left unequal inheritances to their children more than doubled between 1995 and 2010, rising from 16 percent in 1995 to 35 percent in 2010.

The key to avoiding sibling spats over unequal shares is pre-planning. As I've noted in my posts here and here , while you're still in good health or of sound mind, it pays to sit down with your child (especially the one with the diminished share) and explain what you're doing and why. Facts alone may not be enough. Their emotional understanding of the unequal share may be helped by our reassurance that their share of our worldly goods is no reflection of how much we love them. Estate plan aside, it never hurts to remind our children of our unmeasurable love for them. They're never too old for that.

art: Robert Rauschenberg
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Visits with Adult Children: The importance of time limits

04/06/2022

I have long espoused my Blitzkreig theory: When visiting grown children who don't live near you, Get In, Get Hugs, Get Out. I have perfected the two -day visit for weekends, holidays or stop-bys on the way to somewhere else.

I have been vindicated about my approach. Science is with me, and the time is right to share this science with my readers since many of us whose children live far from us are now able to spend time together–whether our children (and their families) come to us or we go to them.

If you spent a long weekend or a week with your kids at your house or theirs and everything was perfect every waking minute, my hat is off to you. For most of us, though, there are tiny timebombs that go off the longer the visit goes on. When my mother used to visit me for three weeks at a time, by the end of week one I had broken out in hives, week two my ulcer kicked up, and in week three my back regressed to a painful past. So the Blitzkrieg is personal for me: I may not be the judgmental guest my mother was, but I still don't want to inflict an over-long stay on my children.

Let me digress no further. Here's the science I'm talking about. It has to do with our grown kids' reaction to us–not the other way around. But it explains why there are hiccups and occasionally unpleasant outbreaks during family visits.

A New York Times article had this commentary from psychiatrist Pooja Lakshmin:

Psychologists have a term to describe the way we fall back into predictable, maddening behavior patterns when we’re with our family of origin. It’s called family systems theory — the notion that families have an equilibrium, and each person has a fixed role that “is in service of keeping the family system intact.” So whatever your established role is — whether you’re the appeaser, or the family clown, or the petulant one — you’re going to be thrown right back there the second you walk through the door of your childhood home.

Research professor Kira Birditt, reported:

94 percent of respondents to her study on tensions between parents and adult children admitted there was some kind of strife in their relationships. Research also shows that the connection between mothers and adult daughters is especially fraught. Of all relationships, it is the closest and most irritating.

Speaking of the close-but-irritating relationship, author and linguistics professor Deborah Tannen notes the specific underlying tensions between mothers and daughters:

Mothers and daughters tend to expect more from each other than from anyone else. There is a constant struggle between mothers and daughters to balance closeness vs. distance and being the same vs. being different from each other.

Coming soon: A post on how we can, besides keeping them short, keep our visits sweet.

painting: Renoir, Madame et ses enfants
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Vacationing with Grown Children and Grandkids: Five rules for the road and the rental

03/29/2022

Summer vacations are on the horizon. If we spent vacation time away with our grown kids and their kids last year or in pre-Covid times, we may have had vacations that were lively and refreshing–or they may have been filled with cooking, cleaning and a lot of babysitting. We may have come home with nothing more than the semi-excitement of a change of scene and the busyness of constant company.

How to make sure this year we're on a three-generation holiday where we have as relaxing or invigorating a time as our kids and grandkids? Here are five rules to keep things rolling along smoothly.

Great expectations: Each of us has our own vision of what our vacation should look like. We may want to sit by the ocean and stare at the waves or play tennis every day or take a long walk every morning. Or just sleep late every morning. If we talk to each other in advance about what we really, really want out of our vacation, we can accommodate each other. That is, our kids won't ask us to babysit when it's our time to go off and read. And we won't disappear when we know it's our grown kids' time to play tennis with each other. Knowing each person's vacation goals also means you probably won't do everything together. And that's okay. It's even a bonus: It can make dinner conversations livelier.

Sharing the chores: If you're renting a house–or if you're lucky enough to own a retreat of your own–you don't want to be stuck cooking all the meals, stocking the refrigerator or vacuuming the day's litter every morning. A lot of families assign a dinner per person or family so that responsibility for cooking and clean-up gets spread around. As to babysitting patrol, some of us find that delightful but if you have your limits–and I do–there's nothing wrong with laying down some markers. For instance, you can encourage your kids to enjoy a date night and offer to babysit for the evening–which is a subtle reminder that you're not on duty all the time.

Splitting the costs: Many of us pick up the tab for family vacations–our kids are just establishing their careers; we have more expendable income than they do. Or, as sociologist Madonna Harington Meyer put it in an interview, "there is very little money flowing uphill" on family trips. But as our kids' families expand (larger families mean larger rental quarters) and we near or are in retirement, that one-way street may not work as well. Or even be necessary. We don't have to keep doing things as we've always done them. We won't get a cold shoulder if we ask them to share the rent on a beach house or split the grocery bill or if we let them take us out to dinner. A corollary to this rule is to get as big a house or campsite or tent as the family can afford: It will be worth it.

Parenting rules: Our grown kids set the rules for their kids. No argument there. While we may indulge our grandkids when they spend a few hours with us at home or on a special trip, the flaunting of the parental rules is not okay on vacations when we're crammed into a house together. A further complication: if two of our kids and their families are with us on vacation, we may have to juggle their different approaches to parenting. This one allows juice drinks; that one forbids them. This one allows swimming without water wings; that one doesn't–good luck remembering which is which. Best approach: ask before doing. If a grandkid wants to eat your portion of chocolate lava cake, don't just push your plate in front of them. Ask their mom or dad if a taste is okay.

Escape time: I loved our family vacations in Vermont with my kids and their young families. But the grandpops and I made ourselves scarce at around 4:30. That was usually melt-down time for the little kids, and the parents knew better than this grannie how to handle tired children who needed quiet time. Extra credit: When we came back on the scene, we were rested and refreshed. A guilt-free pleasure.

photo: Maia Lemov
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

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

03/22/2022

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 by one "pro" in particular: She felt safe at her school. It was "not the kind of campus that would attract a mass shooter."

Our children and grandchildren are growing up at a very different time from us. The stresses–from social media onslaughts and the pandemic to the fear of a Kalashnikov-toting classmate appearing in a school hallway–are far beyond anything we experienced or worried about at their ages. Where our schools had fire drills, theirs have mass shooter drills.

As Peter Catapano wrote of parenting his daughter, "As she grew, the gentle life lessons she’d absorbed from Elmo and Dora the Explorer faded and gave way to the constant drumbeat of a 24-hour news cycle, social media and a culture driven almost entirely by the internet." The violence of the times in which she was coming of age "had all become undeniably woven into the fabric of life."

It's no wonder young adults today are operating under what psychologist Carl Pickhardt calls "the risk of lifestyle stress." In one of his newsletters, Pickhardt writes about the excessive demands on youngsters who are starting out their years of "trial independence." He offers some parental guidelines on the causes, how to assess if your child is struggling from stress plus some tips on how to help them deal with it.

His practical advice for parents is to guide your child with self-awareness pointers like these:

–Treat occasional stress as expected.

–View ongoing signs of stress with attention.

–Make regular self-maintenance a priority every day.

–Don’t pursue tempting changes at the expense of maintenance.

–Set your goals, standards, and limits to avoid constant over-demand.

–Try not to make resorting to stress to accomplish daily tasks a regular habit.

As for Catapano, he writes that it had become impossible to look his daughter in the eye and

"tell her everything was going to be OK. It wasn’t, not really, and she knew it. Yet, somehow, our family found ways to keep a sense of enjoyment and purpose in our daily lives, and an openness to possibility — even optimism — about the future. Regardless of the circumstances we face, it’s what humans do.

painting: Picasso: Dora Maar with Cat
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Observation: Dealing with disputes between a stepfather and a son.

03/16/2022

After an argument with his step-father, a 29-year old son slammed the door and left the house. He then began pulling away from his mother. Their communication, the mom says, "dwindled to a slow trickle of texts." One point her son made on one of those texts was that during the 20 years of being parented by his mother's new husband, the mother had never stood up for him with his stepfather. Now, the mom, who describes herself as a natural peacemaker, is "hurt and paralyzed with fear about how to handle this."

This is the plea for help as it appeared in Philip Galanes' Social Qs column: What to do if you're a mother caught between two important men in your life.

Galanes began by reframing the situation with the good news: The son loves his mother enough to lay out his feelings.

Then he looks at the world as the son, who was a young child when the stepfather moved into his life, might see it: The mother's constant peacemaking–that is, her searches for compromise–may have felt to the son like abandonment.

Galanes' advice to the mom is of a piece with much of his sound counsel: "Get out from between these two men."

How to do that? The mom should repair her relationship with her son by apologizing for making him feel unprotected. Then, since she cannot control the behavior of others (her husband or her son), she should seek counseling for the family of three to work on family dynamics.

painting: Diego Rivera
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Observation: What to do when our kids don’t remember each other’s milestone moments

03/01/2022

When I was young and had just gotten married, my brother did not give me a wedding gift. Not that it bothered me. I'm not sure I even noticed. We weren't particularly close. What did bother me is that months later my mother brought me a gift–a small hand-painted ceramic butterfly–that she said my brother bought for me as a wedding gift. He had not, and her attempt to right what she saw as a wrong hurt more than the supposed "wrong." I still have that stupid butterfly and it is still a sad symbol of dysfunction between me, my brother and my mother.

I am reminded of my butterfly moment by a question raised by a Social Q's reader. The overall issue is whether we are the gatekeepers for the interpersonal relationships between and among our children. If our daughter forgets her brother's birthday–or those of his children–is it our job to be the tick on her to-do calendar? What if one sibling remembers the other but not vice versa. What's our role in keeping our adult children up to snuff on observing important occasions in each other's lives?

Social Q's Philip Galanes has an answer and it boils down to four words: Stay out of it. But let me give you the full situation and the nuanced wisdom Galanes imparts to the mother who wrote to him:

The situation: Galanes' reader (the mom) has three sons. The wives of the two older sons remember to send the siblings, their spouses and children gifts or cards to commemorate milestone events such as birthdays. The youngest son, who was unmarried, was "spotty about acknowledging" these occasions. He married recently and his mom hoped his wife would take up the slack, but she hasn't. The mom wants to know how much of a nudge she should give the youngest son's wife.

The wisdom answer:

"Before we deal with your problem, let’s deal with mine: All we’ve heard about the men in your family is that two of them married meticulous gift givers, and the youngest (who was spotty at it) hitched his wagon to an underperformer. Yet somehow these men — the actual blood relations — aren’t expected to pitch in at all.

Now, there’s no problem here if each of the couples has agreed to this division of labor. But it seems sexist to simply expect the new woman to solve the problem of family gifts. …

As for what you can do: Extricate yourself! I know you want family harmony, but you can’t force adults to send gifts. If your sons or their wives tell you they’re upset about this, suggest they speak directly to your youngest son. This may be more motivating for him than hearing from you again. He and his wife may not be “gift people,” but we all have calendars. (Or they may not care.) Stay out of it."painting Van Gogh
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Post Pandemic Equation: A new calculus for moving closer to the kids

02/22/2022

Pre-pandemic, my yoga class ended the "semester" with a dinner out together–beer, pizza, mellow discussions among mostly women who knew little about each other than their down dog limitations. The subject turned to adult kids and how tied we are to them. More specifically, the question was raised about whether, if your children live in a city far from you, would you move to be near them when they start having children. Do you pull up your roots, leave your job and move to be near your grandkids and to help your grown child with them? My dinner companions–all of a certain older age–told stories of friends who had done that and found themselves babysitting 3 out of 5 weekdays. Some felt it was a gift to be such an integral part of their child's family; others shuddered.

This was not a road I considered when my grandkids were born in cities far from me. I was working in an office at a job I loved; so was the grandpa half of the equation. We were going to stay put and live our lives independently of our children. Three out of four of my fellow yogis felt the same way: No way, they said. Taking the job piece out of it, my fellow yogis felt they still had active lives–networks of friends; activities they pursued; dentists, doctors and hairdressers they depended on. They weren't ready to be full-time nanas and poppies. Moreover, the fear of being socially dependent on their children was enough to keep them where they were.

Comes Covid and the calculus may be adjusting. The ripple effects of the pandemic may mean that some of us don't have to quit our jobs to make a move and that it might be energizing to try a different way of living. Here's an example of what I mean.

Within the past five years. friends–he's a financial adviser and she's a speech therapist–have been blessed with four grandchildren. Two are by a daughter who lives north of New York City; two by a son who lives in Ohio. The parents live in a Virginia suburb near Washington D.C. They have decided to sell their house and move to New Jersey. They'll have an hour's commute to visit the New York kids and access to an easier drive or direct flights to Columbus. Since the pandemic, their jobs have moved online so they are no longer tethered geographically. Moreover, they won't live close enough to either set of grandkids to be regular babysitters but they'll be near enough to be more active in their lives and be helping hands in case of an emergency. They'll be within range of visiting friends from the old neighborhood and near enough to Manhatten to take in its cultural delights.

Variations on arrangements like this could become the new norm for those of us who want to live closer to our kids and grandkids and yet maintain our independence–and maybe try a new lifestyle while we're still energetic enough to do it.

photo: Maia Lemov