PenPenWrites

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

Covid, Kids and the Comfort of a Hug: Is it safe to travel to see our kids and grandkids?

03/30/2021

The headlines have been reassuring: "Grandparents are getting to hug their grandkids for the first time after getting vaccinated."

Well, that's fine for grandparents who live near their grandkids or within driving distance. Those of us who have to fly–well, that's another story. In the best of all possible worlds, we should hold off on airplane travel unless it's absolutely necessary. Does a hug qualify? Our public health gurus tell us, Don't do it unless you must, even if you're fully vaccinated. Maybe by summer when even more people are vaccinated (and a fourth wave either doesn't rise or is under control) it might be safer to go.

We're making plans to see both our grown kids and their kids later this spring and again this summer. We'll fly, as we did last fall. This article spells out what we can expect if we take to the air. Here's what I learned from it and from others:

It will be more crowded and busier than it was in September 2020 when we took our "see the kids" trip. Planes will be fuller. Delta is still blocking middle seats but that's only through April and may change for May and beyond. Other airlines are filling all seats on their flights. So we may be sitting cheek-and-jowl again. Here we go, back to normal but in way that we wish would be back better. word.

Airlines required (but didn't enforce) masks when we flew in the fall. The current Transportation Security Administration has mandated masks at airports and on airplanes through May 11; airlines have become stricter about enforcing their own mask-up rules. A T.S.A. spokesperson said it was too soon to say what will happen after the May date but given airline mask requirements, the rise of a fourth wave and the variants that are around, face coverings are likely to be required for the seeable future. Given concerns about that fourth surge and President Biden's plea to wear masks, we''ll probably double mask while traveling. Just to be sure.

At the height of the pandemic, most airlines stopped food and drink service. They may start again–at least with beverages and snacks. What happens to our masks when and if the airlines roll those drink carts down the aisles? Can't eat or sip a soda with a mask on, so what do we do if we're thirsty or hungry? We may have to mask between bites.

Most food concessions remain closed at many airports–though that may loosen up as vaccination totals climb. When we flew in September, there were one or two concessions available to buy food. We ate our lunch while we waited to board the plane. The airport was eerily empty so we had plenty of space to ourselves. If more passengers show up at airports, concessions may begin to reopen and socially distanced space may be harder to find.

When we get to our destination there's the question of whether, even though we're vaccinated, we can carry and spread the virus to our loved ones. The research so far is unclear, though it leans toward non-spread. Some of us may luck out in that our grown children may be vaccinated by the time we travel–and therefore immune from anything we pick up during our travels. Our New York State kids already have appointments for jabs. If we put off our trip till their second shots take root, we can visit with them in their home with fewer precautions–and more hugs.

painting: Renoir, Oarsmen at Chatou
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Covid, Us and Our Grown Kids: We’re a luckier generation.

03/23/2021

With the possible exception of newborns, I can't think of an age group that hasn't suffered terribly during the pandemic. Certainly, school-age and college-age children have had their worlds turned upside down; many are struggling with mental health issues from social isolation and screen-learning difficulties. Young adults may have lost a year of finding a career and an independent lifestyle. Older adult children may have had their careers curtailed, their job safety undone, their incomes lost.

Our generation is at the further end of the generational arc. Many of us are retirees or older parents who may still be working but whose careers are no longer on the mega-growth path. Overall, we seem to be doing better than our grown kids and grandkids. We were starting to slow down anyway; the pandemic accelerated that trendline. So long as income hasn't been an issue, we've suffered mainly from isolation and the inability to hug our grandkids or enjoy the pleasure of having an adult child drop by for an in-person visit.

I'm not the only one to think our generation has been luckier than others in this pandemic. Surveys over the last year show that, despite being at higher risk of contracting Covid and suffering severe complications, we've managed to stay relatively happier than younger generations.

Why is that? Here's what researchers at Stanford University's Center on Longevity, who surveyed some 1,000 adults, aged 18 to 76, reported:

Age was associated with relatively greater emotional well-being both when analyses did and did not control for perceived risk and other covariates. The present findings extend previous research about age and emotion by demonstrating that older adults’ relatively better emotional well-being persists even in the face of prolonged stress.

In other words, compared with young adults, people aged 50 and over score consistently higher, or more positively, on a variety of daily emotions. We tend to experience more positive emotions in a given day and fewer negative ones than the generation of our adult children.

In a similar study, psychologists at the University of British Columbia exhaustively surveyed some 800 adults of all ages in the first couple of months of the pandemic and found the same thing.

Their investigation of daily life amid the outbreak, found,

Older age was associated with less concern about the threat of Covid-19, better emotional well-being, and more daily positive events.

There's more than curiosity associated with the findings of this research. It has policy implications. As Susan Charles, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Irvine, told the New York Times,

“I think the older generation now, as much as it’s been threatened by Covid, they’re beginning to say, ‘My life is not nearly as disrupted as my children’s or grandchildren’s,' and that is where our focus on mental well-being should now turn.”
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Downsizing: Our housing decisions are emotional ones for our children

03/15/2021

There comes a time when the kids are grown and the house we raised them in is too big, too much to maintain, a burden to carry or a source of little and big repair bills. The roof might need replacing. The driveway is cratering. The washer and dryer are aging out. Or all of the above.

We were ready to sell the home we lived in for 43 years and move to something easier. Plus, we wanted to try an urban lifestyle.

We were ready to move out and on, but were our children? They have been living far from us with families and homes of their own. So why would we even think they mattered in our decision to sell.

We checked in with them anyway. The house was where they grew up–their story of origin. Even as they became independent and moved to other parts of the country and world, the house was there as a refuge–a safety net. When they married and started families, they brought their children to the house to show them where they grew up, what their life was like when they were young. They took pleasure in showing them a secret passageway between rooms, the hill on the driveway where they practiced kicking a soccer ball. It wasn't just our children who were attached to the house. One of our grandchildren spent enough time visiting us there that she became friendly with the girls across the street and knew every dog that lived nearby.

It would have taken an emotionally persuasive argument for our children to change our minds about selling the family manse. They had no desire to do so. They were behind the move. But a day before we closed on the sale, they both flew home–without spouses or children–to say goodbye to the house and the neighborhood and to reminisce about the riches of the family life we had known there.

This visit happened nearly five years ago, but the memory of it came flooding back as I was reading Claire Tomalin's "brisk and sparkling" biography of Jane Austen. Tomalin wrote about the effect on the Austen children (all of them adults) of their parents' decision to leave Steventon, the home where Jane and her brothers and sisters were born and raised. (Jane and her older sister, Cassandra, still lived with their parents.)

Jane was greatly distressed [by the news.]….[A niece] was told her Aunt Jane fainted. The whole thing was a shock, and a painful one.

All the Austen children were affected by it. The fact that every one of them who was absent and could possibly return to Steventon–[four of Jane's brothers]–made a point of doing so before their parents left–"while Steventon is ours,' as Jane put it–suggests how much they felt it as the closing of a door on their childhood and the end of a way of life."

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

Observation: Philip Galanes on when to give our children advice about parenting our grandchildren

03/08/2021

Philip Galanes of Social Qs recently tackled a query by a worried grandma. Her 6-year-old grandchild was struggling at school and having temper tantrums. "His parents and teacher are working hard with him," she wrote but the writer's son was giving his son's teacher monthly cash gifts. Grandma asked Galanes, "Is this right?"

Galanes made short shrift of the gift-giving. Since most school districts have rules about gifts to teachers, "Let's assume…that your grandson's teacher and parents know the rules in their district."

His more telling piece of advice applies to all of us who are tempted to intervene in the way our adult children parent their children:

"Rules are important. But no one asked for your advice here."
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
Communication Skills: Keeping conversations with grownkids and grandkids fresh

03/01/2021
Keep up your own interests. That's one of my Notes to Self (see list to the right). My point when I added it to My Notes was–and still is–that the more we continue to pursue our interests (apart from our children's lives) the livelier our conversations with our grown children and our grandchildren will be. We won't be hounding them with deadly questions like "What's new?" We'll have something to bring to the table and talk about. The energy we get from actively pursuing a job, project or Zoom lecture will freshen up both us and our interactions.

I was reminded of this by Kathy Gottberg. In a blog post she took note of a book, A Brief Eternity—The Philosophy of Longevity by Pascal Bruckner, an author who has written a ton of books critiquing society and culture. Deep stuff. Gottberg admits the book is a tough slog that wades its way through deeply philosophical waters. To save us the work of wading, she sums up what she gleaned from the book. As I read her post, I was reminded of my Note to Self and how what Bruckner via Gottberg has to tell us about this stage in our lives is ever-relevant.

Here's an excerpt from Gottberg's post:
If I had to boil down this complex study into a short paragraph I would ask: Now that we typically live longer and have been given an extension to our lives, what do we want to do with it? Calling this extra time an “Indian Summer,” Bruckner claims that all the great questions of the human condition appear in the years after we turn 50 including:
- Is it more important to us to live a long time or more intensely?
- Do we carry on as we have always done or try new things and follow new paths?
- Do we find new love? Leave old ones? Start new careers?
- How do we move beyond great joys and great pains—and keep going?
- How can we avoid the weariness of living, the melancholy of the twilight years?
- What is the strength that keeps us going despite bitterness and excess?
Buckner offers insights found in the form of literature, philosophy, the arts as well as his own observations. Peppered throughout the text are lines that illustrate his ideas and offer insights that kept me reading. For example he asks: “What reasons can we give for living fifty, sixty or seventy years? Exactly the same ones we give for living to twenty, thirty or forty. Existence remains delicious to those who cherish it, odious to those who curse.”

In another place he says, “What remains to be done when we think we’ve seen everything, experienced everything? Constantly beginning over…Life goes on: that frightfully simple sentence is perhaps the secret of a happy longevity.” And another statement dear to my heart, “We are always living on a trial basis; existence is above all an experiment.”
painting: Two Women, Degas
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Observations: We are unique as grandparents.

02/22/2021

In Lisa Carpenters book, she has an important reminder for us all: Each of us is unique and we bring different gifts to our grandchild and to our grandmothering role. Here's how Lisa puts it:

Grandmothers cannot be pigeonholed. Every grandmother is a unique blend of intentions, interests, beliefs, behaviors, skills and stories. The only commonality: They love their grandchildren.

Realizing that no grandmother fits the stereotype assured me that I did, indeed, have what it takes to be a grandma. I just needed to be true to myself and define the role on own terms, in my own way.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Re-filled nests: Our adult children have moved in. They don’t like it either.

02/16/2021

No matter how difficult it may be for us to host our grown children in our once-empty nests–and the pandemic has increased the number of us in that position–let's have a little compassion for them. Their childhood home may be physically comfortable, they may be well-fed and free of financial burdens, but psychically it's a downer.

Some of them had been living independently or were on the path to being on their own. Now, they're not and that feels like a reversal of fortune. Here's how a psychology professor explains it:

“There’s a sense that ‘going back’ should not be happening.” They were on a trajectory toward living their lives in “a broader context.” This means constructing identities that are “independent from their families, schools and neighborhoods of their childhood.”

With the pandemic, those trajectories suddenly shifted to reverse for many young people. If they’re also feeling a sense of failure related to job loss, these emerging adults might experience a “feeling of betweenness.” That is, “They’re connected to their parents, yet they’re trying to be independent.” This can be very difficult to accomplish when you’re all under the same roof.

As one young woman told a Washington Post reporter, “The situation is full of stress, even when you’re the most fortunate person in the world. ” The biggest challenge “is just the fact that they are my parents. They are always going to be parenting, no matter how old I am.”

This is a reflection of the social and familial challenges the pandemic has unleashed, with 52 percent of young adults now living with their parents. This is the highest percentage since the end of the Great Depression.

Until we're all vaccinated and the economy has picked back up, our adult kids may be under our roof a while longer. Can we make it easier on and for them? A little. In addition to establishing house rules and personal routines with the boundaries that brings, it helps to give each other alone time–physical space where we and they can breathe without interruption or oversight. It's back to hands-off parenting, of being barely seen and practically unheard.

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

Vaccine Hunters: Who can helm our search for Covid protection?

02/10/2021

I got a shot today. My state tells me I am of an age where I qualify for the Covid vaccine. My husband I–both recovered Covid patients–had hoped to go together for shots. We signed onto various pre-register websites, but it became increasingly challenging (that us, impossible) for us to find and make reservations for shots at the same time and place–no less for even one of us to get a shot. Yesterday, I received an "invitation" from one of the lists to make a vaccine reservation for the next day. My husband, on the same list, did not get an invite. Go figure. Since the vaccine site was only 2 miles from our home, I decided to accept the invite and continue working on an invite for him, somewhere, somehow.

Some friends of ours have managed the "together" feat (see this post ) even though it's meant driving an hour or two each way. The appointments came courtesy of a technological lift from their grown children. What I saw happening with a handful of friends turns out to be a nationwide phenomenon. Adult children, who are more nimble than their parents with their phones, laptops and iPads, are finding places and times for mom and dad to get immunized.

How universal is this phenomenon? One New York resident reported to the Washington Post, "My group texts have really shifted from swapping horror stories about managing kids in virtual learning to getting vaccination appointments for our parents."

I consider myself moderately adept on the Internet–I use my desk and laptop computers for writing, editing, researching and communicating. I use my smartphone and iPad to zoom into courses and meetings; I can even set up a short meeting. But when I read about the manipulation of multiple devices that the younger generation executes in their search for parental vaccine shots, I realize I am way below novice grade.

Here's what one daughter did to secure shots for her parents: She learned a supermarket in her parents' county was going to schedule 1,500 vaccinations and would open its website for appointments at 6 in the morning. At 5:55 she had the website open on her laptop and "fired up a second page, this one in incognito mode. Then she pulled up two more browsers on her phone. 'I'm using my thumb on my phone and flipping between pages, and clicking through on the computer.' "

She lost me at "incognito mode."

Another recent report took note of how a lack of access to computers and smartphones is shutting out many seniors who are eligible for shots. The main way to book an appointment is by the Internet. There is a phone number to call but good luck getting through. That makes older parent totally dependent on their adult children to help them out.

There has long been a technological gap between generations– oil lamps to electric lights; radio to television. (For a fun look at adjustments to new technologies, see Doonesbury on bringing Joanie, Zonk and others into a zoom room.) It's just that in the pandemic world, the stakes are too high not acknowledge our Internet illiteracy. If we have to tap into our kids or grandkids to bridge that gap, we are lucky we have them and they are there for us.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Covid, Grown Kids and Technology: Our kids help us through the hard parts–even from afar.

02/01/2021

My sample may be small but here's what I see happening: Many of my friends who have managed to get their arms in the way of a covid vaccination have had the aid and assistance of their grown children. Their kids became their vaccination hunters. Makes sense: Our kids have more Internet savvy, online search skills and knowledge of different platforms. They're finding hot spots where a vaccine shot can be had–and booking reservations for their vaccine-eligible parents as soon as they spot an opening. No waiting around to talk it over. Everything takes place on Internet time, folks. One set of friends had to drive an hour from their home to get their first shot and a reservation for a second one; another went to a state where their son lived. They admit they couldn't have managed the sophisticated search it took to find a slot, figure out the eligibility rules and make a reservation on their own.

Here's something else, and it's something I've experienced personally: When, despite the masking and social distancing and handwashing, we nonetheless fall ill from Covid, our kids are there to manage information, health providers and other services–from afar but with their superior smartphone skills. After my husband and I both became ill (and tested positive) our kids boned up on everything Covid–calling their medical friends, reading CDC guidelines and gathering information from a variety of sites. With their dad in the hospital and me fogged-out and sick at home, they called the hospital for updates, talked to our doctors, asked questions about our care and overnighted oxygen measuring devices. They threatened to drive down here and were coordinating that effort when I got wind of it and rallied enough to yell "No." After all, there is nothing they could do for either their dad or me that they couldn't do by phone from the safety of their homes. Or as the hospitalist doctor treating their dad told them: "The only thing you can do if you come down here is get Covid."

It was an odd feeling to have my kids calling our doctors instead of the other way around (as it was when they were young.) This wasn't them being parents who were telling us what we could or should do in the pandemic (as discussed in this post); it was them stepping up to take care of their parents who were ill and needed someone to take over for a few days.

My husband turned out to have a mild case of Covid-19 and was home in three days; I too had a mild case. But I can tell you, mild though it was, Covid is nasty. A month later we're much better but still not tip-top–not yet as fit as we were before we got sick.

We do have something positive from our experience: The comfort of knowing our children were willing and more than able to step up and take care of us–and from afar.

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

New Grandparents: Do we have babynaming rights?

01/25/2021

Many of us have been proactive when it comes to our handles as grandparents. We feel free to tell our kids–the parents of our grandbabies–what we would like to be called. Whether it's PopPop or Nana or something we make up–I've chosen PenPen–it doesn't feel intrusive or controlling to choose our name.

But the naming ends there. Where we need to tread more cautiously is when it comes to choosing the baby's name. We can make suggestions; perhaps, pass on to our children reminders of family traditions. But we are at our peril if we persist in trying to sway our children in their choice.

“Names are all about identity. The name the parents choose is central to who the child is and will be, and grandparents feel very invested in that,” said Pamela Redmond, chief executive of Nameberry and co-author of books on baby names. Although we may hope to see a family name carried on, or would like one that reaches into our family's culture, our children may have other ideas. When they act on those ideas, we may feel that “the link to their ancestry is broken,” Redmond said, in an article by Paula Span in the NYTimes.

Some of the points covered in Span's article:

Discomfort with the "new" names:

We have our own notions of appropriateness and a probably misguided sense that our grandchildren’s names reflect on us. So when our children creatively come up with Nevaeh (it’s “heaven,” backward) or use the city where the baby was conceived (like Nashua), we bridle.

“If you’re the conservative who named your kids Tom and Emily, and they’re naming their daughter Miles and their son Freedom, it’s like showing up at the country club with blue hair and tattoos,” Ms. Redmond said.

The new normal:

Young parents face a vastly wider assortment of choices than older generations ever considered. New parents may gravitate toward gender-neutral names, for instance. Older generations’ notions about playground taunts have become outdated when kids have such diverse names that a plain vanilla Linda or a mundane Mike may yearn for something more distinctive.

Standing down:

“This is the first stage in grandparents’ realizing that this is not their kid and they don’t have control. They have to step back, and some are good at that and some are terrible.”–Sally Tannen, who has directed parenting and grandparenting workshops at the 92nd Street Y in NYC.

Worst-case scenario:

Clashes over names can backfire, Ms. Tannen pointed out, if they make new parents angry enough to withdraw. Parents serve as the gatekeepers to their children and, as I learned from my conversations, they remember feeling pummeled, even decades later.

Get over it:

“As soon as you’re pregnant, everyone has an opinion” about names, Ms. Tannen has observed. “Once there’s a baby, it would be pretty silly to hold onto that.”

Span writes of one grandfather who was so angry about his children's choice of name for his first grandson that he swore he would never utter the name. "It’s taken a while but, he told me," Span writes, " 'I’m happy to call him whatever he wants to be called.' ”

painting: Mary Cassatt