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

Walking on Eggshells: Our children and their grooming habits

12/06/2021

Friends have returned from a two-week visit with their daughter, her husband and their twin sons. We are having a dinner debriefing on the trip–the tales about the warm weather (the daughter lives in Florida), the sunshine and the beach plus, most importantly, their daughter's hospitality and the chance to spend time with their grandsons every day. They have returned home looking refreshed and relaxed, the visit coming after 18 months of confinement in their home in the northeast where the wind chill is threateningly low.

As we drift past the positive highlights of the trip, they start joking about how they, as parents of adult children, have to keep their lips zipped and not express disapproval at some of the choices their children make. When we get down to specifics they seem almost relieved to tell us about their major zipped-lip challenge. While their middle-school grandsons marched off to school clean and neatly dressed every morning, the parents were, sigh, disturbingly ill groomed–at least from our friends' point of view. Their daughter hasn't had her hair cut since the pandemic hit; it is now down to her waist with the grey growing in above formerly dyed hair. To our friend–the mom–the hair makes the daughter look a decade older than she is and ill-kempt. The son-in-law hasn't cut his hair either, or shaved. His beard is long and straggly and his long hair is tied into a topknot but only when he's working outside.

It's partly a generational thing. Many of us aren't as comfortable with the half-shaved look or the full beard or the long, long hair. And the pandemic has readjusted the younger generation's aesthetics. Our friends, fortunately, kept to the high road during the visit: "I kept my mouth shut," one of them tells me. " I didn't say a word about it, but it was killing me."

She is exactly right. It may be killing them to say nothing, but there is nothing to be gained by alienating a child by commenting on their appearance–whether it's weight, or dress or hairstyle. We may be mortified about the way they look but better to suffer in silence and live with that than risk a fractured relationship with an adult child. Bottom line is, our children have control over their bodies–we don't.

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

Holiday Traditions: A change in family customs

12/01/2021

Let me not count the many ways the pandemic has changed the way we live our lives–the holidays chief among them. Last year was the outlier when the pandemic was a full-blown menace–we hope never to repeat a Zoom-only family Thanksgiving again.

This year we would have liked to return to our usual family traditions–some of us traveling by air (we the parents/grandparents) or by three-hour car ride (our daughter and her family of three) in order to pile into my son's house (family of five) for 48 hours of turkey, tofurkey and togetherness. But additional needs surfaced (an increasingly frail 92-year old cousin who doesn't live near any of us needed to be included somehow); traditions had to be adjusted.

Our family is not alone in changing holiday rites and passages. A friend who usually spent Thanksgiving with one of her nieces and their small children got squeezed out when each of the nieces went to their in-laws and the in-laws wanted to keep the gathering small.

If the first post-quarantine Thanksgiving is a precursor for the other big holidays of the season, here's what we learned about what "new approaches" worked and which didn't.

In order to accommodate everyone, our family split up: Paterfamilias and I went to our son's house for three days, including Thanksgiving day. The next day we took a train to the city where our daughter and her family had spent Thanksgiving with our cousin. We had a day-after dinner with our daughter, her family and our cousin.

On the plus side: Both dinners were festive, celebratory and full of goodwill and laughs. They were small enough (six people at each one) that we could have inclusive conversations (and those with hearing challenges could hear everyone). We the parents/grandparents were able to spend in-person quality time with each of our adult children and our grandchildren–something that's not always possible when all three families are together.

But: By splitting up, the cousins didn't get to see each other nor did our son and daughter get to spend time together. A brief FaceTime visit on Thanksgiving day helped but not much. And I sorely missed watching inter-family interactions and connections.

The other Big But: We were overly ambitious about travel, especially during a holiday weekend. In order to see everyone we wanted to see, we spent time in two cities within five days, taking one airplane flight north and two train trips south. We are fortunate that we could afford the extra train fare to buy reserved seats and avoid the hustle of boarding a sold-out train and dragging our luggage while we searched for two seats together or at least near each other. We are aging out of that difficult train ritual.

Bottom line: Our post-pandemic planning for holiday get-togethers is a work in progress. New traditions take time to evolve, but splitting up–well, I don't like it.

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

Holidays and Adult Children: The seven stages of Thanksgiving traditions

11/16/2021

We are on the cusp of setting a totally new tradition for our family's Thanksgiving. It's time. We are no longer young parents. Our kids are middle-aged adults; they have children who are young adults. Extended family members are growing frail and need special attention.

I, who usually embrace change, don't like the changes that are coming our way. Yet, when I look back and see how our family's Thanksgiving holiday traditions have morphed, I take comfort in life's cyclical pattern. Like other families, ours has no stasis; the balanced becomes unbalanced.

We move through our Thanksgiving customs as we move through life–in stages. My family and I have moved through seven of them. Other family's particulars are inevitably different from mine, but for all of us, there are make-overs and take-overs over the years.

Stage 1: Loosey Goosey: Our children are very young. We have moved to a city 4-hours away from where we grew up and where our parents live. We keep the holiday simple and small–as small as the little townhouse we are renting. Two pre-school children less than two years apart in age focus our minds on day-to-day needs rather than elaborate holiday meals.

Stage 2: Friends and Family: When we move to a bigger house and our children are in the prime of their primary school years, we have Thanksgiving dinners with another family. We share the cooking and meal planning, scanning our memory banks to remember which surprising new dish from the previous year our families liked and which should never ever be repeated. Thanksgiving dinner is always at our house: They have dogs; we have allergies.

Stage 3: New Attachments: Our kids leave for college, start independent lives and put down roots in other cities. They form romantic attachments, some of whom appear at Thanksgiving dinner. Attachments became spouses and now Thanksgiving is more than a meal. It is a weekend during which the refrigerator has to be stocked not just for a turkey dinner but for three meals a day and additional guests. The house expands to accommodate bigger beds and pillows as well as more seats at the dining room table.

Stage 4: New Beginnings: Grandchildren transform our Thanksgiving get-togethers into a wild weekend at our house. Blow-up beds and portable cribs accommodate sleeping babies and toddlers. Those in charge of the kitchen have to keep straight our grandchildren's sipping and eating patterns and what their parents permit them to have and what is verbotten–for one family but not necessarily the other. There are multiple trips to airports to pick up and drop off a son and his family and a daughter and hers. By Sunday, we are as flat on our backs as the now-deflated blow-up beds.

Stage 5: Passing the Baton: Our children's families grow bigger. It makes more sense for the two of us–the parents/grandparents–to travel to them than to have eight children/grandchildren moving through airports and highways to arrive at our house for Thanksgiving. Our son and daughter-in-law who have the largest family and house take on the mantel of hosting Thanksgiving. Our routine now is: We arrive two days in advance to help–and to avoid the height of airport congestion. We assist in the kitchen, run errands and set tables but we are no longer in charge.

Stage 6: Zoom. The pandemic is a game changer. No one is going anywhere. No hugs. No sneaks into the kitchen to pre-taste a side dish. No idle chit-chat. We make do with Zoom. Our son emcees the family get-together with photos from the past and a fun quiz about what's happening in those photos, i.e. why have the parents (that's us) let their 10-year-old daughter wear a sweater advertising Joe Camel? Fun stuff. But after an hour, we click off and the goodwill of being together online dissipates. Is Zoom or a hybrid mode going to be the future for family get-togethers?

Stage 7: Frailties: We are negotiating Thanksgiving in a post-pandemic world. It is also a world in which time has been marching on. Grandchildren are taking a gap year abroad. Elderly relatives who live alone in other cities are growing increasingly frail and in need of attention, especially during the holidays. We, the parents/grandparents, are not as spry as we once were. We will make the trip north this year but our three families will split up in order to accommodate the elderly cousin who is alone. It's not just the cousin who's feeling his age. Our children have already raised the question of whether they should come to us. We could, they suggest, rely on store-prepared turkeys and sides instead of cooking a meal for ten or more.

We are on the cusp of something completely different–and not completely welcome.

painting: Norman Rockwell