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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
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