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

Observation: Emma Thompson on the ties that bind grandmas, grownkids and the moms in between

02/14/2022

During the pandemic, actor and screenwriter Emma Thompson hosted both her 22-year-old daughter and her 89-year-old mother. In The Guardian she wrote about the links between generations, on what we mean to and do for each other and of what she found to be "the miraculous luxury of three generations together."

Here are some of her comments:

My daughter has tattoos. I like them, which surprises me. I understand the urge to mark life’s more seismic events upon your body. …

My mother’s body bears witness in more traditional ways – watching her navigate its frailty and bentness is a daily learning, a meditation. …

Living between these bodies is an odd mixture of joy and grief. My daughter thrums. Her life force changes the atmosphere in the room as soon as she enters. We all receive the electrical charge and, once again, we dance….

Or my daughter comes in upset, chaotic, spinning out and sits by my mother and receives a calming nod – no questions, I note – and the chaos subsides…..

But the meeting of these life forces now feels more essential than ever. We are constantly exchanging ever-altering resonances, and balance occurs. Not perfectly – nothing’s perfect – but, consistently, we change and reset one another’s state. So instead of grieving my mother’s ageing, instead of envying my daughter’s youth, I find I am buoyed up and calmed down by turn.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Grown Kids and Our GrandKids: What we get wrong even if we’re technically right

02/08/2022

Some new parents (our sons and daughters and/or their spouses) don't like it when we call their child and our newest grandchild, "My Baby." To judge by the complaints I've read in advice columns, they don't just dislike it–they deeply resent it. The child is, of course, their baby, not ours. The resentment may be a reflection of their relationship with us (worst case) or of something in their past or of nothing at all (best case). There's nothing wrong, of course, with using the two words. They may not mind at all. After all, most new parents love our enthusiasm for their children. We just need to check with the parents first.

I bring this up to note that I've been keeping tabs on the little things we get wrong vis a vis our grown children. That is, little or big things we do that may offend our children or their spouses and bring tension to our relationship with them. I'm focusing here on our role as grandparents. With reason. “I would place ‘intrusive grandparents’ in the general category of challenges that adults and couples face in managing relationships with their respective families of origin, and with parents in particular.” Thus spake a clinical social worker whose clientele are working through these issues.

In the interest of keeping our sensitivity antennae in working order, here are some of the offenses I hear young parents complaining about (about us) with some regularity:

Serving our small grandchildren foods or drinks that are verboten in their households. Who among us hasn't learned the hard way that a good number of young parents see sweet treats and sugary drinks–even those innocent-looking mini-boxes of orange or apple juice–as the equivalent of poison. (If we have more than one child starting a family, we may have difficulty keeping tabs on which household doesn't mind our serving their child a grandma-baked cookie and which does. C'est difficile.)

Offering young mothers and dads a constant stream of advice on childrearing–of what worked for us back in the day. It may make young parents feel like they are being judged and put them on guard to defend themselves. (That said, one of the mothers making this complaint added that, annoying though the constant advice is, she realizes her mother has the best of intentions and is grateful to have her in her young son's life.)

Taking it personally and being unkind when a small grandchild takes his or her time to warm up to their grandparent, even one they see regularly. One young mother complained that her mother-in-law would get so offended when her toddler son clung to his dad that grandma would walk away from her grandson in a huff or tell him she was not going to play with him today.

Just to put all this "wrong-doing" in perspective, one young mother said that despite the occasional misunderstandings with her mother over discipline and food, she valued the benefits her child experienced by having a loving grandmother. Here's how she put her Aha! moment:

“Grandma’s house isn’t home, and grandparents get to have a different relationship with our children than we do. When I’m not there, it’s O.K. if my daughter eats an extra candy or gets to eat applesauce, graham crackers and a marshmallow for lunch. Those times [with grandma] are memories she will have forever.”

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

Social Media Etiquette: Tips for staying in touch with the in-college grandkids

02/01/2022

Some of us have grandkids who are away at college. Naturally, we want to stay in touch. We may even expect that contact to be as close and regular as it was when they were youngsters living with their parents. And yet we may be disappointed that our in-college grandkids are a little more distant now. They don't answer every text, email or direct message we send them. When we don't get a reply we may be disappointed–even frustrated. And that begs the question: What are the rules of the road here?

One suggestion is to lower expectations: We may want our communications to be back and forth but our grands are making new friends, going to challenging classes, trying out for teams or clubs and, of course, studying and partying hard. Their lives are full and full of new responsibilities. A daily e-chitchat with their grandparent? Maybe it's an additional pressure they don't need right now.

That doesn't mean we have to stop our end of the conversation, but we can take the pressure off them to respond. The least-cliched bit of advice I came across in this regard was this simple suggestion (thank you Grand Magazine here and here): Tack an NNTR onto whatever it is you're sending. It stands for "no need to reply." It lets your grandchild/college student read (and delight) in your message without feeling guilty about not replying.

That leads to another tip: Let your emails or texts be something amusing, informative or newsie–a funny anecdote, a report on the whereabouts of one of their cousins, a link to research they may find useful for one of their courses.

Last piece of advice for now: You don't want to clog up their accounts or be in touch so often that, much as they love you, they groan to see it's a message from you, again–even though (and maybe especially if) it's a forward of a fwd of a series of jokes about aging that your friends are sending around.

Have you got any suggestions to add to this? Pop it in the comment box if you would.

art: grandparents by Suzanne Jackson
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Vacationing with Grown Children: Are their romantic partners welcome? Even if they’re married to someone else?

01/24/2022

When we invite our grown children to join us on vacation–when we're footing the bulk of the bill–how much say do we have on whom our child can bring along as our guest. A long-time girlfriend or boyfriend: Most of us would say OK. A romantic interest of a few weeks: That might be a little more complicated. But what if the long-standing boyfriend or girlfriend is married to someone else?

If you're reaching for the same quick-reflex answer I had–No Way!–hold on. Philip Galanes at Social Q’s turned my head around (and introduced me to the term "polyamory.") Let me delay no further. Here's his answer to a mother who's divorced from a man who cheated on her. She has invited her daughter to join her on a trip to Greece. The daughter wants to bring her boyfriend, who is married to someone else:

I may be off-base, but I don’t think the real issue here is the cost of a trip to Greece or your ex-husband’s infidelity. This is about respecting your adult daughter’s choices. You have substituted your idea of happiness for hers. This is a common (and often well-intentioned) trap for many parents. It’s not productive, though.

Let’s put aside the trip to Greece and the specter of your cheating ex. Unlike him, people in polyamorous arrangements usually set ground rules with their partners for opening their relationship to others. (No one is cheating!) Try to understand, as best you can, what your daughter likes about this arrangement and how it satisfies her.

As a show of respect, read up on polyamory before you broach the subject with her. Then ask questions. I am not suggesting that you set aside all of your concerns — only that you try to respect your adult daughter’s decisions. In a more open-minded context, you may find that the trip to Greece resolves itself.

painting: Mykonos by Mikki Senkarik

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

Grandparent Rivalries: The social media effect

01/18/2022

When we have grandchildren we can be tugged into a competitive frenzy with out co-grandparents: If our grandkids see their other grandparents more often than they see us, does that mean they'll love them more? Is the bond between grandparent and grandchild dependent on gifts the other grandparents bring or favors we offer?

A Carolyn Hax reader raised a variation on that worry: Can social media posts reflect our relationship with our Grands vis a vis the other grandparents. Here are two Carolyn Hax anecdotes that circle around that question.

Complaint one: A daughter-in-law posts regularly on social media about her parents and what terrific grandparents they are. The posts are full of photos of the grandparents playing with their grandchild. The grandparents live in the same West Coast town as the young family does. The daughter-in-law never posts about her in-laws and how great it is of them to fly across the country to visit every few months and to take the whole family on vacation in the summer. She never posts photos of the East Coast grandparents on visits or vacations with the family. The East Coast grandma feels under-appreciated by the lack of balance in the social media attention and resentful of the social media love showered on the other grandparents.

It may be that the daughter-in-law is more comfortable talking about her parents on social media than she is about her husband's parents. Or she's addressing friends who know her parents. Or something else totally benign. As Carolyn Hax noted, there can be a host of non-negative reasons for being ignored on social media and the East Coast grannie should free herself from worry by coming up with a benign reason for the uneven coverage. Beyond that, Hax's bottom line is this: "It's social freaking media. Ignore, ignore, ignore."

Complaint two: The other variation on this social media theme comes from a daughter-in-law who writes to Hax to complain about her mother-in-law's social media misrepresentation of her relationship with the grandchild. She frames herself as an active, involved grandmother when she is not–she wasn't before Covid made visiting difficult and once the quarantine set in, she refused zoom or other Internet visit options. On social media, the mother-in-law paints herself as a poor-me victim of the pandemic and her loss of closeness with her granddaughter. The daughter-in-law resents the general injustice of the misrepresentation.

Hax's reaction follows along the lines of her previous ignore, ignore, ignore and advises the daughter-in-law: "Stop following her on social media. It is not oxygen; you can cut it off completely, immediately and forever, and still not die."

Both of these episodes made me think of a line from Lisa Carpenter's first book, The First Time Grandmother's Journal (my blog post on her book is here) that taps into the core of finding your footing as a grandmother. She writes of her own journey and says, "I just needed to be true to myself and define the role on my own terms, in my own way." To which I would add this update: No need to let social media do that defining for us.

painting: Family, Romare Bearden
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Money Matters: Grown children and the financial intelligence gap

01/12/2022

A letter to a financial expert asking for advice about an inheritance was not your usual request. The question came from a woman whose father-in-law left her 29-year-old daughter—his granddaughter–a sizeable fortune in a trust that was currently being managed by her daughter's father. When the daughter reaches 30, however, she is eligible to manage the trust herself. Few of us are in the situation of being the parent of a child who is inheriting a fortune. And yet, though the sums of money may be significantly substantial, the issue this parent faces is one many of us worry about: Will our grown children be able to handle financial responsibilities if we're no longer around to help them. How do we prepare them?

If you're interested, you can read here the expert's advice on helping the daughter understand her financial challenges and choose an adviser to manage the money.

But the expert's advice on preparing a child to be engaged in and understand how to handle financial responsibilities applies more universally. Here are some points Quentin Fottrell, who writes as the Moneyist, makes:

Encourage them to ask questions:

Unless your daughter builds enough financial confidence to ask questions and learn about how she can invest her money, and trust her instincts and establish her own risk tolerance when it comes to investments, she is vulnerable to another person stepping in and filling your husband’s shoes, particularly when he is no longer around to help.

Let them make decisions:

Trusting your daughter to make the right decisions is part of her growing up….The best you can do is to lead by example, and — I’m with you — part of that is allowing her to make her own decisions, as you and your husband have done with your own lives.

Talk things over with them:

Bottom line: You want your daughter to become an active decision maker, even if the answer is to do nothing for now; learn the basics of investing so she knows what questions to ask; and not hand her fortune over to one person to make decisions without her knowledge or understanding. It’s her money, after all.

The first step is for you both to sit down with your daughter and include her in these conversations. You will discover that you will all learn from one another.

painting: Marinus Van Reymerswaelle, 1539
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

How inclusive should we be when our kids bring home new romantic partners?

01/04/2022

It's a tap dance we do when our kids bring a new romantic interest home. If it's for a weekend or overnight, do we assume they'll want to be in the same bedroom or sleep on the same sofa bed? (I wrote about some of those challenges here and here.)

When the relationship is new but "serious" we need to take care to neither warmly over-embrace nor coldly underplay the relationship. If we lean too far from neutral we're sending a message we may not want to–or shouldn't–send. Since we're just barely on the far side of the holidays, many of us may have grappled with this when one or more of our children brought new romantic-interest guests to our family gathering. (If so, I would love it if you would leave me a comment on how it went.)

For many of us, the issue behind the guest-bringing is whether it signifies a ratcheting up of our child's relationship and, if so, should we adjust our welcome mat accordingly. If our child has intimated that the relationship is "serious," how does that translate into family moments.

Here's a case in point: A reader who signed her question "Carol" asked Philip Galanes at Social Qs what to do about formal photographs that would be taken at a birthday celebration for Carol's father's milestone birthday. One of Carol's daughters, who's in her late-20s, was bringing her serious boyfriend of six months to the gala. Carol asks: "Should he be included in the family photos?"

As usual, Galanes puts the photo-taking issue into a larger perspective:

Consult your daughter. Tell her you want to respect her relationship, but you don’t want to put pressure on it. Then ask her how she’d like to handle family photographs, maybe including the boyfriend in some, but not others. Err on the side of inclusion, though. You don’t want to hurt her. Your relationship with her is more important than photographs.

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

Thank You Notes: Once again into the fray of a failure to acknowledge a gift

12/29/2021

We are midway into the Holiday week. The family feasting and gift-giving parts are behind us. Behind us, yes, but those of us who weren't present to see our presents unwrapped by our grown children or grandchildren still want to know that, hey, they liked it, and more importantly that it wasn't lost in the mail. The official thanks might come in the form of a video of the opening of our gift. Or an email. Or a text. Or even an old-fashioned phone call. Whatever it is, it doesn't have to be pen on paper. A thanks is a thanks is a thanks, an issue I've covered here and here and here.

But giving a shout-out of thanks can be a complicated issue. What happens when our children don't thank relatives who have sent them gifts. We may try to get our adult child or grandchild to pen a note–or supply them with a text address. But if that doesn't work, what options do we have?

Meghan Leahy addressed this issue in a Washington Post Parenting Q&A. In an online chat a parent wrote that her young adult daughter had received a generous graduation gift from her uncle but had not written a thank you note. "I have tried to get her to do it and now we are fighting," the parent wrote. "I'm ashamed that she hasn't said thank you. Now she is in her corner, and I am very embarrassed. What's the mature way to handle this?"

Here's Leahy's two-step solution:

I want you to write a generous thank-you note from your whole family, and include some beautiful flowers or a yummy treat, too.

Acknowledge their hurt and how ungracious she appears, and let them know that you are working on it and that it isn't personal. Then move on and drop this with your daughter. Work on your relationship with her by finding ways to connect in any way you can.

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

Holidays with Grown Children: Do we expect them to buy us holiday gifts?

12/22/2021

Once again, Philip Galanes of Social Qs comes through with an answer to a question that may plague some of us as we navigate the gifting side of the holidays: Is gift-giving a one-way street?

Here's the dilemma a reader posed:

We have a loving relationship with our 30-year-old son. As we prepare for Christmas, though, we’re feeling resentful in advance that our gift exchange will probably be one-sided: We will buy him gifts; he will not buy us anything. Nor will he seem appreciative. He acts like our gifts are his birthright. Help!

The short version of Galanes' advice:

Tell him that he’s old enough to make holiday giving a true exchange. And remind him that the cost of his gifts is irrelevant. He may be stuck in his view of himself as the child in your relationship. Hopefully, a brisk nudge will set him straight.

painting: J Lawrence, Street to MBari
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Zipped Lips: Are we still in charge of correcting a social faux pas?

12/14/2021

When our kids were young and living under our roof, if they were impolite or said something inappropriate to their grandmother, we stepped up to point out (kindly, of course!) a more polite way to do or say something. But now that they are adults, is it still our job? Are we still in the social-correction business? Here's why I'm thinking about this:

A friend, let's call her C, was grousing about her son (let's call him D) who's 34, married and dad to a toddler. He was invited to an old friend's wedding–a friend from childhood whom D sees only occasionally but who came to D's wedding three years ago. Now the friend is getting married in his bride's hometown. The pandemic being a disrupter, weddings may come with all kinds of new limits and adjustments. In this case, spouses were not invited to the wedding. Going to the wedding would mean that D had to fly to a city one time zone away and be there for the weekend while his wife stayed home with the baby.

D opted not to go. He told his mom that his wife had nixed the idea.

C was livid. The wife being the nixer was only part of it. The groom's mom was C's old friend and had mentioned to C that her son had been disappointed that D was not at the wedding. So C wrote her son an email telling him he should have gone to the wedding, that his old friend had come to his wedding, that she and the grandpop would have helped D's wife with the baby while D was away.

Although her son has not responded, C has no second thoughts about shooting off the email. She tells me, "I'm still his mother and it is still my job to call him out when he does something wrong. No one else will do it."

Is she right?

painting: William Chase, "A Friendly Call"