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

Emptying Nests: A tip for moving boomerang kids out of your house

08/21/2017

Let's call it the Canadian solution. The problem: Our adult kids living in our homes.

If you've followed the U.S. Census news, you know the phenomenon is more widespread today than forty years ago. Back then, one in five adults ages 18 to 34 were living at home. Today, it's one out of three.

For some of us, having the grown kids putting down roots in their childhood bedrooms is pure pleasure. If they're saving money to get married, buy a house, start a business–or they're keeping vosts down low until the right career job comes along–we feel good about making the future more financially sound for them. Some adult kids are at home because it suits both parents and child. A couple we met on our recent group tour of Morocco admitted, in somewhat embarrassed tones that they enjoy having their 30-something son and his girlfriend live with them. When the parents travel, the younger couple water the plants, feed the cat and walk the dog; when the parents are in town, they are included whenever the younger couple's friends drop by. She's an artist, he's a poet and having the next generation around keeps them in touch with the changing culture.

For many of us, though, the pleasure is mixed with pain. We may be embarrassed that our kids are still at home. Or we may be concerned that our 20-or 30-something kids have failed to launch, or their habits may be out of sync with our life style. Or we feel it's time for our kids to live independently: we don't want to deny them the space to learn the life-management skills of paying the rent and balancing their budget.

Pleasure or pain, if we want to encourage our grown children to find a new place to call home, Canadian parents have a sure-fire method. Pay them to move on.

How widespread is this approach in Canada? A commercial bank's survey of 1,000+ parents found that three out of four Canadian parents with a child age 18 or over would or have offered their child money to move out of the house. How much? About half put the figure at $24,000. (In U.S. dollars that's a few thousand under $20,000.) Those with household incomes of more than $100,000 said they give $40,000, with as many as 25 per cent offering more than $50,000.

You could sum up the concept as, "Here's the money, I love you, now please move out." The survey did not mention how successful the payoff was.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Helping Hands: Being there for our grown kids

08/10/2017

The kids may be grown up, have kids of their own, be launched in their careers and be living lives independent of us–just as we brought them up to do.

And then something happens–an emergency, a minor accident or temporary difficulty–and suddenly our parental services are in demand. Well, demand may be too strong a word. Let's say. there's an opportunity for us to be helpful without being intrusive or making them feel they've regressed into childhood.

A few years ago the "something" in our family was a frightening car accident: my daughter's child, my Grand was hit by a car and ambulanced to Children's Hospital with a concussion and broken pelvis. It was a high anxiety, frightening moment until we knew that she would be all right. Being an hour away by airplane, I flew up–ostensibly to help out, though there was little I could actually do. By the time my daughter and family got home from a two-day stay in the hospital, friends and neighbors had started a chain of casserole deliveries, offers to walk the dog and do anything else they could possibly do. Months later, when I had enough perspective to post about the event, I noted how useless I felt. My daughter wrote to assure me that it meant a lot to her that I was there.

I was reminded of this a few weeks ago when "something happened" again. It was not as life- or health-threatening– as the first something but challenging nonetheless: My daughter hurt her back (Ashtanga yoga. grrrr!). She ended up with an extruded disc or two, a lot of pain and a numb left leg that occasionally collapsed. Ordinarily, this would not call for a mom to fly to a daughter's side–there is a helpful husband, many friends and neighbors, and doctors and physical therapists. But there was this hitch: She and her family were about to decamp for a summer in California, swapping their home in New England with a friend who has a home in the East Bay area near San Francisco. There was a limit to how long the cross country trip could be delayed–the California family would be en route shortly. My daughter and Grand were scheduled to fly to San Francisco and make their way to the house while my son-in-law with the dog in the back seat and a trunk full of luggage drove across the country.

A fine plan when my daughter knew not of back pain. Now she was temporarily incapacitated and hurting. Although the worst of the acute phase seemed to be receding, I suggested I could fly to San Francisco with my daughter and Grand, help them settle into the house and take care of some basics until my son-in-law got there.

Offer made. Offer accepted. Which is why I woke up on a Tuesday morning a few weeks ago with a view of the Bay Bridge to my left, the Golden Gate on my right and mountains shrouded in cloud straight ahead on the far side of the bay. Outside, nasturtiums grew wildly, spewing their yellow and orange pops of color up hills, along sidewalks and out of cracks in driveways.

I also saw that my daughter, injured though she was, was capable of managing on her own. She logged onto her laptop and ordered dinner delivered. If it had been necessary, she could have done the same with groceries. None of whatever it took to move in required my presence.

So what was I doing there? Was I on the wrong side of useful? Maybe, but, once again, being there is helpful in a less tangible, reassuring way. No matter how old our children are–no matter how grown up and independent they become–there still is room for parental presence and the reassurance of emotional support. I may not have had to take care of basics, but I got my reward anyway: Three days of quality time with my daughter and my Grand. Three generations of our family's women helping each other out.

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

Observation: Connie Schultz on the magic and importance of grandparenting

08/04/2017

As if we needed reminding: We can't help ourselves when it comes to falling in love with our Grands. So here's Connie Schultz to express it for us and remind us why we are important to them and to their parents, whether or not they are genetically our direct descendants. (Schultz's beloved first grandchild –"The relationship between a child and a grandparent is the closest I've ever come to experiencing magic."– is the son of her stepson. Well, let her tell it and why it's relevant to our role as grandparents:

My grandson and I are not what you might assume us to be. I did not meet his daddy until his daddy was 6, through marriage. I was raising his father full time by the time he was 8. Ten years after my divorce, he walked me down the aisle to marry the man who is the love of my life.

If you were ever misguided enough to tell me that our beginnings mean he is not my son, our conversation would be brief, and I dare say you would not enjoy it. He is my son, and he has given me this miracle of a grandson.

That is only the beginning of this crazy tale of this family of ours. My husband and I brought two children each into our marriage, and we now have five grandchildren, period. Challenge this at your peril.

Why am I telling you all of this, you might wonder.

Well, it's summer, which is that time of year when so many grandparents long to see the children they love no matter what. No matter who is divorcing. No matter who brought them into the world. No matter who is angry with whom.

Children should not bear the burden of unfinished grudges. This is especially true now, when the briefest snippet of overheard news via TV or radio can make a child believe the world has lost its collective mind.

I'm not saying grandparents are perfect or that we're even someone you'd choose for neighbors. But we are in this for your children. For so many of us, the moment we become grandparents, in whatever way that happens, something changes in us.

Your children become the center of our universe. Shouldn't they know that? Shouldn't all children, everywhere, get to feel that way at least once in their lives?
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Helicopter Parents: Hovering at home, college and even the office

07/13/2017

Many of us raised our children to be independent. Once they were adults, we wanted them to come to us for our advice, good counsel and, yes, the occasional handout. But in college, they would be on their own in dealing with professors and deans. In finding a job, we might prep them on how to put their best foot forward, but they would be on their own. Once on the job, they would figure out how to perform and to stand up for their rights and benefits. So I thought.

I was misled. In a trend that's been picking up momentum, adult-child parenting is heading to a new and higher hover level. Parents are jumping in to complain to colleges about their child's grades or dorm situation and continuing that oversight into the work years.

Let me trace some of this for you. Five years ago, NextAve ran this headline to a story:

When Parents Go Too Far to Help Their Kids Land Jobs: Helicoptering has reached the workplace, with some moms and dads even going to their kids' interviews.

Five years later, the hovering has moved from helping a child land a job to dealing with the nitty gritty of the work place. By way of example, a recent NYTimes article reports the findings of a former Stanford freshmen dean, Julie Lythcott-Haims, author of “How to Raise an Adult.”

[O]fficials at Teach for America have been mystified in recent years by the volume of parents who intervene on behalf of their adult children, whom the group employs as teachers.

A Teach for America administrator told Ms. Lythcott-Haims that parents had called him with complaints about such issues as their child’s being disciplined by a principal or having a run-in with a fellow teacher, as though the adult child were still a student.

It isn't just Teach for America. Workplace blogger, Lee Caraher, wrote this recently about parental interplay with their adult child's job:

What does this look like? Millennials’ parents joining their adult children at interviews; parents calling managers to lobby for better reviews or higher raises. Or parents actually doing the work for their adult children – which all unravels when the employee doesn’t have the luxury of time to participate or complete a task.

When I mention this phenomenon to a friend who, as a parent, is a generation or two behind me, he tells me he knows such parents. He has friends, he says, "who seem to think they're still responsible. They don't feel the least bit guilty about intervening. We tell them, 'we think you're out of your mind.'"

Now comes this word. Companies are recognizing the phenomenon and accommodating it. Some are setting up newsletters so that parents can learn more about their child's workplace. A growing number of companies are hosting "Bring in your parents to work" days. Count LinkedIn and Google in that number as well as a number of small companies.

Call me (and my friend) old-fashioned or out of touch with the current culture, but this doesn't seem like the road to independence–for our kids or us.

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Leaving a Legacy: The case for giving them a share of your worldly goods now

07/03/2017

The headline is provocative: "Why I Am Giving My Children Their Inheritance Now." The NYTimes story was told in the first person by a man who said of his financial standing, "I know what wealthy is. And I know my wife and I are not." Nonetheless Paul Brown, an occasional columnist for the NYTimes and the author of best-selling business books, clearly has a comfortable amount of disposable income and not many major expenses ahead of him–he has finished financing his children's college education.

That is why, he writes, he and his wife decided to begin to give each of their four children part of their inheritance now. Now, as in while their children are still setting themselves up in life as opposed to later when Brown and his wife are no longer around and the children are set up–living their lives with presumably there own reservoirs of disposable income.

Turns out the headline is a tad more provocative than what Brown is doing. Many of us give our grown children financial gifts in the here and now–or "loans" that we do not expect them to repay. Most of us do it on an ad hoc basis. Brown is more organized. He gives each of his children an annual check. He reports that the money is used by each of his kids in different–albeit responsible–ways: to buy a house, to fund a college account for a newborn, to start a business, to boost a savings account.

He seems to be saying what paterfamilias and I have long believed: If we are fortunate enough to have raised children who don't feel entitled –as Brown says his children do not–and who don't have wild or crazy spending habits, then why not share the wealth now when they need it. It's all well and good to believe they should be independent and stand on their own two feet. But how pleasurable it is to help them out.

Here are three reasons Brown gives for giving himself that pleasure:

They can use the money now

They are going to get the money anyway, in the form of an inheritance.

Who wants them waiting around for you to…… Brown spells it out this way: "Why, as a parent, would you want your children — even if it is on some tiny, tiny, tiny subconscious level — waiting around for you to die, so they can inherit money they could use now?"

Brown also notes that he and his wife have prepared the best they can for the future, saving money for retirement and carrying good health insurance. They are giving their children money that is expendable. It brings to mind a post I wrote about a question Carl Richards (the "Sketch Guy" financial adviser who also writes for the NYTimes) raises about money: How much is enough? When we can answer that query we may want to share the excess with those we love.

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

Money Matters: Gift-giving for the Grands and Step-Grands. Are all kids equal?

06/22/2017

Are all things equal? We love our Grands: We may like some of them more than we like others but we love them all. Those of us who have step-grands love them too. Even if we don't, we learn from the step-parents who are our adult children, that the step Grands will be treated equally–at the risk of a family breach.

Friends of ours, whose daughter has two tween step kids as well as toddler twins of her own, figured this out recently. They invited the daughter, her husband and the twins to celebrate their 40th anniversary with them at a resort in the Caribbean. They did not initially invite the step kids since the Steps spent most of their time living at their mother's house. Our friends knew those kids only fleetingly. But it was spring break and their daughter "asked" her parents, who were picking up the tab for the trip, to include the two step kids as well. This was not something their daughter could afford to pay for. Our friends agreed to do it, but out of earshot of their daughter, they groused at the additional expense (two more air fares and a larger townhouse) and at the intrusion of two kids they didn't know well into the family mix. (Their son and his family were also coming, also on the grandparent tab.) But their daughter made it clear that the step kids were her kids, even if they only lived under her roof on alternative weekends, and that her parents should not think otherwise.

I'm reminded of that extravaganza (it turned out to be a lovely vacation and a delightful 40th anniversary celebration) by advice in a recent Carolyn Hax column.

The writer, who says she loves her son's young teen children as well as the new wife and her two tween kids, wants guidance on birthday gift giving. Her query, "If I give everyone the same amount or same gift, I feel the “grans” will feel slighted because I am THEIR grandmother. If I give the “step-grans” a lesser gift, I feel they will feel slighted. Any suggestions would be helpful.

Carolyn Hax's answer reflects the ultimate decision our friends, despite the grousing, came to: "Kids are kids and grandparents are grandparents. Love is love. Equal gifts for all."

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Observation: Anne Lamott on curbing the urge to help grown children live their lives.

06/16/2017

In a TED talk she gave recently, Annie Lamott served up some advice for parents of grown children. I wish I could capture the plaintive quality of her voice–and the slyness of her humor–when she recited her "12 Truths I Learned from Life and Writing." You can listen here but I'm stuck with delivering the words I transcribed as she spoke.

This is what Lamott, the author most famously of Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year and Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life , had to say about hovering over our adult children and trying to help them–or anyone we hold dear–find their way:

There is almost nothing outside of you that will help in any kind of lasting way unless you're way inside an organ. You can't buy, achieve or date serenity or peace of mind. This is the most horrible truth and I still resent it. Faith is an inside job. We can't arrange peace or lasting improvement for those we love most in the world. They have to find their own way, their own answers. You can't run alongside your grown children with sun screen and chap stick on their hero's journey. You have to release them. It's disrespectful not to.

And if it's someone else's problem you probably don't have the answer anyway. Our help is not very helpful. It's often toxic. Help is the sunny side of control. Stop helping so much. Don't get your helping business all over everybody.

That was rule number 3. Rule number 2 was more succinct but also lands a punch:

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes. Including you.

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Bank of Mom & Dad: We make irrational decisions about helping out our kids. But there’s a reason for that.

06/09/2017

Financial advisers tell us to squirrel away money for our retirement, and yet we spend it on our adult children–paying their cell phone bills, letting them live rent-free in our houses. Friends (especially those without children) are shocked (shocked!) when we give a grown child a lavish gift or pay one of their outstanding bills.

Yes, it may not make financial sense; it may run counter to a life-long parenting goal of our children becoming independent adults. Yet a recent outgrowth of economic thought understands why we do it: It has a whopping pay off. In short, it makes us feel good.

The slightly longer answer goes like this: When it comes to money, the getting and saving matter–how much longer we need to work; how much money we need to keep in an emergency account. But so do emotions. In the long run, they may overwhelm our rational judgment about long-term goals, but they also bring us happiness in the here and now. For some of us, there's a deep pleasure in paying off a chunk of our kids' college debt or car payments or offering a wad of cash for the down payment on a first house. (For that matter, putting aside money in an emergency account doesn't make all that much sense, but it does bring us comfort to know it's there.)

As parents we are more than a spreadsheet and by-the-book counselors.

In his financial blog Michael Kitces points to research and makes a point about money and happiness:

Yet contrary to the conventional wisdom that “money can’t buy happiness”, a recent new book entitled “Happy Money” by researchers Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton suggests that there may be far more opportunity than we realize to derive greater happiness by changing the ways we spend our money. How we spend – on ourselves, and others – really does impact the enjoyment and emotional well-being we derive.

In fact, the research of “Happy Money” suggests that sometimes, the best things we can do to improve our happiness may lie in not trying to maximize our wealth, but instead focusing on experiential purchases (rather than “stuff” that appreciates in value), spending money to buy time, and even spending money to support family and relatives instead of ourselves (which may not be cost-effective, but can be remarkably happiness-effective!).

For more on the the latter point Kitces raises, see my post : "Can we afford to share our wealth with our grown kids in the here and now? There's a way to measure that."

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Observation: Hanya Yanagihara (“A Little Life”) on parental expectations

06/01/2017

What do we expect of our grown children: That they'll return our affection; that they'll want to spend time with us; that they'll be there for us in our dotage? Hanya Yanagihara, the New York-based grown child of parents who live in Honolulu (as well as the new editor of the New York Times Style Magazine, "T"), says her parents don't see things that way. Here's what she writes about their attitude toward the duty of children.

Last July, I went to Honolulu …to spend the summer with my parents. My parents and I have a warm relationship, even though, or perhaps because, I don’t speak to or visit them frequently; until my most recent trip there, the previous July, I hadn’t seen them in six years. I live in New York, and they live in Hawaii, and while it’s true that traveling to the islands requires a certain commitment of time, the real reason I stayed away is that there were other places I wanted to go and other things I wanted to see. Of all the gifts and advantages my parents have given me, one of the greatest is their understanding of this desire, their conviction that it is the duty of children to leave and do what they want, and the duty of parents to not just accept this but to encourage it. When I was 14 and first leaving my parents — then living in East Texas — to attend high school in Honolulu, my father told me that any parent who expected anything from his child (he was speaking of money and accomplishment, but he also meant love, devotion and caretaking) was bound to be disappointed, because it was foolish and selfish to raise children in the hope that they might someday repay the debt of their existence; he has maintained this ever since. It is, in a culture that cherishes familial proximity, a radical way of thinking by people who otherwise pride themselves on their conventionality (though, lovably, their idea of the conventional tends to not actually be so at all).

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Social Media Etiquette: The cellphone rules when a Grand comes to visit

05/26/2017

When a 14-year-old Grand hopped a plane and came to visit her Gramps and PenPen during spring break, the trip was all about indulging her–giving her the chance to decide what we would do, where we would go and the kind of food we would eat. Freedom Hall. A visit without the parents in tow is a liberating experience for us as well as for her. But there was one rule that her parents insisted we enforce: No cellphones, laptops or other screens in her room at night.

When our 16-year-old Grandson flew down here last week for a quick 36-hour visit (Sunday soccer games must be accommodated), a similar admonition followed him. Cellphones had to be parked in the kitchen (or wherever we plugged our charging station) at night and during dinner.

I hate being a policeman. I want my visits with my teen Grands to feel like we are a staging for the almost-adults they are almost becoming. I want them to feel I trust them to be responsible and to follow the sensible rules their parents lay down–that I don't need to check up on them.

But the cellphone rules are there for good reason. The science (and we believe in science!) finds that screen time at bedtime is disruptive to sleep patterns. A European study of nearly 10,000 16- to 19-year-olds found that the longer the time in any given day that a teenager spends using electronic devices such as tablets and smartphones, the worse their sleep will be.

Closer to home, an article in Science Life (a publication of University of Chicago Medicine and Biological Sciences) looked at sleep patterns for children and adolescents. After delineating a variety of reasons why adolescents don't bed down as easily as their younger siblings (circadian rhythms and that sort of stuff), the article ran these family-friendly Q and A paragraphs:

Is it okay if the phone is in the room but it’s just plugged in and charging? Or is there something about the presence of it, knowing it’s there and you might get a message?

That should be fine, but if your kid knows it’s there and might be tempted to check it in case a friend texts, you might as well charge it in the living room. Even if it’s on vibrate, their brains are cued to hear that and it could wake them up. They’re going to want to get up and check it, so it’s removing the temptation by taking it out of the room.

Is there a rule of thumb for how long before bedtime you should turn off the electronics?

If you could do at least 30 minutes that’s great. An hour or more is wonderful, but that’s not terribly realistic for a lot of people, including myself. I know the rules and I break them myself sometimes. But give your brain a chance to unwind, to reduce the effects of the bright light and recover from that. Give yourself at least 30 minutes to not be staring at a bright light or doing anything particularly stimulating like playing violent video games. Watching TV from a distance isn’t necessarily as bad because it’s not as bright, unless what you’re doing is very stimulating, so watching a horror movie in bed isn’t always a great idea.

Which is more of a problem: the light from screens or the stimulation from using electronics?

Both. Light is particularly bad because it suppresses melatonin. It’s also an alerting signal to the brain of it being daytime. It can confuse the brain about what time of day it is. The brain is thinking it should be alert and awake because it’s bright and something is going on. So it’s doing both at the same time.

Turns out we didn't have to police the situation too closely. Both our Grands (one our daughter's child; the other our son's) understood the rules. They voluntarily brought their phones to the charging station when they went to bed. There was a little more fudging on the laptop front–I won't say by whom. We did have to close it down when we did a bed check before we went to bed. But there were no whines or complaints. We could rest easy: Our Grands have learned and are practicing proper digital device behavior. Are they sleeping the sleep of the good? We assume so.

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Vacations with Grown Kids and Grands: Update on easing the stress of too much togetherness