PenPenWrites

PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
Emerging Adults: Big adjustments ahead as teenage kids morph into independent adults.

12/03/2019
He's a psychologist who specializes in adolescence but Carl Pickhardt also has a lot to say about the next stage: young adults (roughly twenty-somethings) and their natural and inevitable independence from us, their loving and occasionally controlling parents. In a recent newsletter, he laid out the basic changes in our relationship with our grown-up young 'uns. This period of development, he notes, is a time when our children have gained "functional independence and a sense of identity." That is, our newly minted adults should be able to tell themselves, "I’m on my own and I know who I am.”

In the real world, young adults have their struggles coming to terms with this sense of independence and self awareness, but so do we. Let me quote Pickhardt on the range of losses we may feel as the transition takes place:
- Demotion: parents lose positional superiority. Interpersonal standing is now equitized. “I can’t pull rank of ruling authority anymore.”
- Distance: parents lose central importance. Parents become more peripheral to young adult life. “I’m more of an outsider now.”
- Disappointment: parental expectations are unmet. Old dreams do not match the emerging reality. “He didn’t turn out all the ways I anticipated.”
- Disapproval: parents don't like some daily decisions being made. In the young person’s place, they would choose differently. “We don’t agree with her priorities.”
- Diversity: parents lose some old sense of similarity. The adult child life is increasingly unfamiliar. “Her lifestyle is so different from ours.”
- Despondency: parents lose accustomed contact. Primary intimacy and importance are found elsewhere. “I miss the old closeness we used to share.”
- Deprivation: parents lose current information. They feel more out of touch with what is happening. “I'm not regularly told what is going on.”
- Directness: parents lose spontaneity of communication. There is more talking carefully. “I’m more diplomatic about what I say and how I say it.
How to adjust–while doing no harm. Pickhardt has a warning on how important it is that our children make the transition.

Proceeding as though your adult child will stay as family-centered as the adolescent usually doesn’t work too well. Instead, by emphasizing certain parental roles, more closeness can often grow. A few suggestions follow.
- Parents can become cheerleaders – celebrating accomplishments.
- Parents can become supporters – providing listening.
- Parents can become motivators – encouraging effort.
- Parents can become followers – expressing interest
- Parents can become mentors – advising when asked.
- Parents can become companions – providing welcome company.
- Parents can become independents – leading separate lives.
- Parents can become informants – sharing home and family news.
- Parents can become helpers – being on family call.
- Parents can become requestors — asking for assistance.
It's the future we have been building towards–that day when our children will be independent, sentient beings who'll mature into adults who can, let us all hope, live productive lives and rise to the occasion of caring for us in our dotage.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Holidays with Grown Children: The good, better and stress of family togetherness

11/25/2019

Why say it again. Here's a re-run from a year or two ago about the sweetness and the challenges of a "one big happy family" Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is a family get-together favorite–for the most part.

It's easy because there are no gifts, decorations or other "extras" to drive everyone to hyperventilate.

It's fun because it's a gathering of several generations of family under one roof–plus the occasional "orphan" or two, which usually brightens the conversation.

It's simple because the meal is pre-ordained. In our family, we've settled into a routine of who will do what–especially the vegan variations. (Shout out to Whole Foods for its very edible vegan fruit pies and pumpkin pie.)

That said, Thanksgiving isn't all that stress free, especially for the parents of the grown children and the grandparents of their children. When the holiday means three to four days at the home of one of one's grown children–when the mantle of hosting has passed to the next generation–there can be a lot of uncomfortable "down time."

We who provide extra helping hands in the kitchen (the stuffing/dressing is my domain) do not feel it as much as those not drawn to kitchen duties. This was especially true this year when one of the Grands in whose home Thanksgiving now takes place turned 16 and was the very proud possessor of a brand-new driver's license. He was Volunteer #1 for any and all errands and store pick-ups. That meant Paterfamilias, who usually broke up the "down" time by running errands, was out of a job. Not fired so much as by-passed.

"Down" time aside, when our grown children and their spouses get together–our children don't live near each other or us–there is a lot of reconnecting. We see each of our grown children and their children several times during the year, but our grown children have fewer face-to-faces with each other. Long and short of it: We're a bit of a fifth wheel at the reunion. It is so wonderful to have both our children and all our grands together under one roof for at least 24 hours, but it is also a battle to feel relevant and be heard.

We should remember–though it's hard to reconcile ourselves to–Lao Tze's philosophic advice:

Your silence is as beautiful as the Harvest moon.

In another bit of poetic advice ("for the second half of life"), Lao Tze says this (as re-interpreted by William Martin in The Sage's Tao Te Ching):

Whatever your losses,

hope and happiness can be yours.

Act each day with compassion

for yourself and others.

Let each inhalation bring you peace

and each exhalation dispel your fears.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Parenting Adult Children: Are we doing more for our grown kids than they want us to do?

11/13/2019

oil on canvas, R. Lemov

We love to do things to help out our adult children. It may be little things like packing up lots of leftovers to send home after Sunday dinner. Or sharing access to our Netflix account. Or babysitting so new parents can enjoy a date night.

Little things mean a lot. But sometimes we step over the line. When my mother flew up from Florida for her semi-annual two-week visits, I would go off to work and she would give my kitchen a top-to-toe scrub, including re-organizing my pantry and re-arranging my plants. I resented it. This was not help I asked for or wanted.

Maybe that's why I reacted viscerally to a recent commentary cum question from a Social Qs reader about a mother-in-law who seemed to have lost her sense of boundaries.

Returning home from a trip during which my in-laws stayed with our kids, I discovered my mother-in-law had replaced our kitchen chairs with a set she bought at a neighbor’s garage sale. Who does that? …. I am appalled that someone would change my furniture without permission. BTW: I hate the chairs. What should I do when she comes over and sees that mine are back?–Anonymous

Here's some of what the Social Q guru Philip Galanes had to say, first about the chairs and then about the crossing of lines by "helpful" parents:

It is the greatest disappointment of my week that I can’t show our readers a picture of these chairs, for the sake of anonymity. (They are wantonly hideous!) Sadly, though, there is a bigger issue here: boundary-busting by your mother-in-law.

You don’t mention any history of inconsiderate behavior on her part….It also seems unlikely that she’d be respectful for years, then — wham! — new chairs appear without your blessing.

Acknowledge the germ of generosity here. Say to your mother-in-law: “Thanks for watching the kids and for your gift. I don’t care for the chairs, though. I like to choose my own furniture. Would you like them?”

Just a little reminder that we can be helpful on little things (if they don't like the left-overs, they can toss them out on the way home. No harm done.). But they are in charge of their homes and hearths. Note to Self: It's their life.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

When should our adult children be able to stand on their own financial feet?

11/04/2019

By the time they're 22, our children should be financially independent. It's a milestone most of us think they should reach as young adults. At least, that's what a survey by the Pew Research Center finds.

The reality (now it's U.S. Census analysis doing the finding) is that only a quarter of today's 22-year-olds have met that milestone. That's a much smaller percentage than 40 years ago when many of us were young and in our 20s. Then, one-third of 22-year-olds had crossed over the point that is supposed to distinguish childhood and the comforts of the parental home from stand-on-your-own adulthood.

This slippage in independence raises the question: Are we over-coddling our kids, offering too much helping hand and not enough tough love? Pew finds that the public perception is that, yes, we're we're doing too much for them. Here's what those in the Pew survey had to say about today's parents of young adults:

When those who say parents are doing too much for their young adult children were asked in an open-ended format in what ways they are doing too much, 43% pointed to financial assistance. Some 37% said parents are trying to solve their children’s problems for them or are afraid of letting their children fail. About one-in-five (23%) said parents are doing too much for their adult children by letting them live with them. And 4% pointed to providing babysitting and child care for grandchildren as examples of how parents are doing too much for their adult children.

A lot of us are guilty as charged. Pew found that roughly six-in-ten parents with children 18 to 29 gave their children a lot or some help in the past year. While some of that assistance was a one-time shot, a good deal of it was for recurring expenses, like household, medical or housing assists or educational expenses.

In fact, educational expenses loom large in the breakdown of the reaons we give, though it reflects parental income. According to Pew:

High-income parents are more likely than those in lower income groups to say the financial help they gave was related to education. Two-thirds of parents in households earning $100,000 or more a year say the support they gave their adult children was tied to educational expenses, compared with 53% of parents with incomes between $75,000 and $99,999, and fewer than half of those earning less than $75,000.

To give those educational dollars some perspective, in the past forty years college tuition has grown four times as fast as inflation and eights times more rapidly than household income. The amount owed on student debt–whether it's the students or taken on by their parents–is estimated to be $1.5 trillion. That's more than what we Americans owe on our credit cards and auto loans combined. If our kids are one of those 45 million owing that debt, they're starting out their adult lives with a lot of I.O.U. on their shoulders. No wonder today's parents feel pressured to help out if they can.

(You can see more details on the Pew survey here , including the definitions the foundation used for financial independence and gender differences in the findings.)
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Money Matters: Two tips about lending money to adult children

10/28/2019

You've heard it–I've said it–over and over: It's a tricky and emotional business lending money to adult children. We want to be helpful–if we can afford it, and sometimes even if we can't. But we worry about why they are unable to manage on their own. That said, financial advisers speak as one in saying that if you do lend money to your grown children, do it like a banker would: review their financials; set the repayment contract in writing.

Ah well. Seems like such a cold thing to do when it's your loved one. Michele Singletary, who writes a syndicated personal finance column, also hands out that "get it in writing" advice, but her recent column on the subject of loans to adult children made two points about that lending process that may clarify your perspective:

On the importance of reviewing their finances:

Upon review of bank statements, you may find evidence that your adult child is living above his means, such as eating out a lot. Don’t lend money to people who earn enough to cover their expenses, but can’t because of mismanagement. That’s not helping. That’s enabling bad behavior. Why should they enjoy the fruits of your frugality while they are living it up?

On the need to find out why they're tapping the bank of mom and dad for loans:

This is not about being hypercritical of their lifestyle. Just because there’s a request doesn’t mean there’s a need. Perhaps your adult child is underemployed. Maybe your daughter and her husband bought too much house and need to downsize. If your adult child is constantly asking for loans, there’s probably an underlying situation that needs to be addressed. Your handing over money all the time prevents this analysis.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Extreme Helicopter Parenting: Are we still part of their doctor-patient dynamic?

10/17/2019

There's helicopter parenting an adult child and there's Extreme Helicoptering of our post-adolescence offspring. Neither is healthy but the latter can be especially harmful. Extreme helicopter parents have been sited accompanying their adult children to job interviews and barging into the interview itself. (It does not leave an employer with a positive impression of the would-be employee.) Or calling their adult child's boss and explaining difficulties the child is having with a co-worker or insisting on a raise. (It is counterproductive.) We have been known to get carried away in the pursuit of helping our adult children navigate the world.

Now there's this: Accompanying a grown child for a medical check up and staying in the examination room. One physician, who was disturbed when it happened in his office, wrote an article about it. The child was a burly, 20-year old male construction worker suffering from fatigue; the concerned mother answered more of the doctors questions than the son did. The doctor eventually insisted the mom leave the room. Only then was he able to have a meaningful discussion with his patient.

Here are three key points the doctor, Tim Lahey who practices in Vermont, made in a Washington Post story about parental over-oversight of health issues:

—Let them speak up for themselves: "I worried the mother was unintentionally keeping the patient from learning how to advocate for himself. This wasn’t just a clinical intuition. A 2017 study showed that greater parental involvement in young-adult health care predicts lower young-adult independence.

—Give them room to talk about personal stuff: "A physician seeing a young adult [without a parent in the room] is able to screen for behaviors that may require more discussion, such as drinking and drug use, self-harm, dangerous relationships, and mental health issues."

—Stand behind them: "Parents play a critical role in young-adult health. The trick is to provide support in ways that reinforce autonomy. Parents can encourage a young adult to bring up an issue before a doctor’s visit and even brainstorm with them on how to bring it up."
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Power Shifts: Our adult children call the plays

10/03/2019

We had plans to have dinner with friends last Friday night. They canceled. Their son asked them to babysit his 9-year-old twins.

Paterfamilias watches the football game every Sunday with his friend Lance. This Saturday Lance called to say he couldn't make it: He and his wife were invited to have lunch with their daughter and her family. Understood. Family takes precedence. On Sunday morning the friend called again. The daughter changed the invite to an early dinner. Game On!

This weekend, we were supposed to see friends whose work schedules even in semi-retirement are so complicated it took us weeks to figure out a date when we were all available. We canceled the get-together yesterday. Our son, who lives in a city far from us, suggested this weekend was the best one for us to come visit him and his family. When we emailed our friends to tell them we had to reschedule, they were nonplussed. "We understand completely," they wrote. "[Our son] wields the same power over our schedule."

So the pendulum swings. When our children were young they marched to the needs of our appointments, meetings and business trips. Now we adjust to theirs. In part it's because their lives are more complicated than ours–they are the ones juggling high-pressure careers, children's activities and social obligations. We're retired or our careers are on a less active plane; our social obligations less obligatory. We are able to be more flexible and adjust to a request for a last-minute babysitting assist. What's more important than helping out our kids?

But it's more than that. They have always been our priority but right now, as they raise families and come into the prime of their careers, we aren't their priority. So we fit ourselves into that new dynamic.

There's another reality. Our grown children are the access to our grandchildren. Case closed.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Overlooked: Do our children talk over us at family get-togethers? It may be our fault.

09/19/2019

As soon as I read the letter in Social Qs from a man who felt he was being "talked over and generally excluded" from dinner conversations with adult children, I started counting. How many friends did I know who had complained about the same thing. They had had successful careers, experienced the joys of parenting and proudly headed the table at family functions. From Thanksgiving dinners to Christmas feasts, Passover Seders to Easter breakfasts, they had steered the conversation and made sure the value of their point of view was heard.

And now? Well, now the adult children are in charge and it is hard to have our voices heard–no less to take command. "They're no longer interested in my opinion," one friend put it. This was after a Christmas dinner hosted by his son (from his first marriage) and attended by his wife and wife's kids (ditto), the adult children's spouses and the grandkids. It didn't seem to count that he had long provided wise business counsel to three of the four grown children, all of whom had gone on to succeed in business.

His brief lament mirrored the longer tale told to Philip Galanes' Social Q's:

I am fortunate to be in a great long-term marriage that produced a wonderful daughter and an amazing college-age granddaughter. But lately, they have told me, in plain English, that my opinions and standards (from my education at a parochial school and military academy) don’t count for much. The last time we had dinner, they talked over me and generally excluded me from the conversation. My opinions were dismissed, and my values were derided. These are the three most important women in the world to me. How do I get them to stop using me as a piñata?

Philip Galanes suggests the writer might be dominating conversation and not falling in line with the more democratic approach of the current times. Here's Galanes point:

We all have a right to our opinions, of course. But one of the interesting shifts in the past few years has been a greater public awareness of who feels entitled to speak up and expect their views to be heard — and who doesn’t. You may not suffer from blind privilege, but it’s a question worth considering.

If you have been holding the Talking Stick for too long, perhaps the women have become impatient for their turns. So, share it! And especially because they are so dear to you, make an effort to understand how their views differ from yours. In my experience, the respect in that gesture is often reciprocated.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Empty Nests: When you don’t really want them to move back home

09/04/2019

This is the emptying nest season. A lot of our kids have left for college and parents are wistful and lump-in-throat sad to see their empty place at the kitchen table. We wish they were still youngsters living under our roof. Or so we think. But four years hence, we may not be so thrilled if the young adults return and set up headquarters in their former bedrooms (now our guest rooms or dens).

We were devoted parents while they lived with us but we may not be so happy to see them come back. That's the gist of a column by Charles Blow, an oped columnist for the NYTimes who usually writes about such weighty matters as racism and immigration. But Blow, a single dad since his son was six years old and his twins were three, has taken time to fill his column space with an essay on parenting. He acknowledges that when the twins went off to college a few years ago he felt "free, that I was entering a new life of my own, and I felt absolutely no guilt about that."

When the twins graduated from college, they moved back into his house and settled in as they searched for jobs and looked for their first apartments. Blow admits to, well, being less than happy about their return.

I will say the thing that we as parents are not supposed to say: What happened to my empty nest? The very definition of home has changed. Mine will always be their family home, their spiritual home, but it cannot be their primary home. This is now my primary home, alone.

I know that this arrangement is temporary, and I want to help my children out in every way possible, but it would be dishonest to say that their reappearance in “their rooms,” which I now call guest rooms, has not been jarring.

Then he addresses the conflict many of us feel when our kids refill the nest and our culpability in making it oh-so-comfortable for them.

No matter how much I try to resist the urge, I’m reverting to my last-phase parenting mode — worrying about whether they’re eating enough and eating healthfully, washing their clothes and taking them to their rooms.

These are young adults and not children. I have to remember that. I also have to remember that this phase is temporary. But, I also have to prevent them from dragging their feet leaving home and starting their own lives.

When your children return to your empty nest, it is a good thing to firmly nudge them out. That, too, is what love looks like.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Young Adults: What if they call home from college and they’re miserable.

08/28/2019

Photo: Palo Coleman

They're off to college. The empty nest looms or maybe just the diminution of the number of children at home. Paterfamilias and I have been there, lived through that. Now it's one of our grown-up children whose oldest child has bounded off happily for college.

So maybe this is as good a time as ever to talk about a blog post Dr. Carl Pickhardt wrote for Psychology Today. It's not about children leaving the nest or parents having empty-nest longings. It's about a surprise call parents may get from their child while he or she is presumably taking notes in classes, trying out for various activities and figuring out how to fit in. Even if our kids go off to college happily, we parents may find all is not what it should be with the new experience. Pickhardt's post is about what to do if the child you've dropped off at college calls home weeks later and is in crisis.

Let me let Pickhardt set the scene:

Most young people making this transition into more independent living have at least a few times at the outset when they feel truly unprepared and overwhelmed…. Consider some hard adjustments of this challenging time.

Some of the adjustments Pickhardt ticks off are missing home and family; feeling lonely; disappointment at not coping well; concerns about living up to parental expectations; incompatibility with a roommate.

So how parents can parents handle the situation. Here's Pickhardt's five-step process should that "crisis call" come.

1.   WELCOME the call. “We are so happy that you thought to call us; we love hearing from you, whatever you have to share.” Show that the loving family connection is unbroken.

2.   EMPATHIZE with the upset: “Yes, if sounds like you are going through a really difficult time. Tell us more about it.” Provide emotional support.

3.   OPERATIONALIZE the problem. “Can you tell us specifically what is happening and not happening that has contributed to your feeling this way?” Bring the problem into practical and objective focus.

4.   STRATEGIZE about what to do. “What might be some constructive actions to take that would ease your current unhappiness, and would any outside help be useful at this time?” Explore problem solving possibilities.

5.   ENERGIZE with faith in finding ways for moving forward. Declare: “We believe you have what it takes to meet this challenge and will come out stronger on the other side. Please keep calling us, and we’ll keep checking in if you like, so we can be with you as you work this through. " Provide confidence and optimism.

Depending on how fragile your child might seem, Pickhardt notes the possibility of seeking professional help from on-campus sources. But not too fast.

When a college crisis call does come in, it may help to remember that quote from John F. Kennedy: “When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters – one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.”

So, parents need to thread this needle: Take action if endangerment is communicated; but short of that, provide listening, empathy, and advice if asked, but do not intervene and interfere in this opportunity for the young person to grow.