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

Vacations and Grown Children: They travel with us to Morocco, but only virtually

03/09/2017

Morning light in blue-rinsed Chefchaouen

There was a time when our grown children were available to travel with us–they were just out of college, thinking about grad school or trying to figure out what they wanted to do with their lives.

Those days are history for some of us. Our kids have grown into their careers, married life and families. Their lives are busy; our grandchildren are heavily scheduled. When it comes to winter travel to exotic, far-away places, we are on our own. As it should be.

That was clear when we took off for a two-week trip to Morocco this February. There was no chance either child and his/her family could come along–we didn't even ask.

But that didn't mean we weren't connected. We didn't stay in touch with postcards (how quaint that would have been!) or phone calls but shared our journey via texted and emailed photos. Did Steve Jobs know about this connectivity when he came up with the iPhone? We sent a photo or two a day; we got back reactions–about the train to Marrakesh, about the blue-rinsed houses in Chefchaouen and the Medina in Fes.

For Paterfamilias–an old softy despite his A-type personality–the emails and texts with his children were the most meaningful part of the trip. "We were looped in and getting interesting responses from them," he told a friend. "We'd send a photo and they'd raise interesting questions in return. It was like they were on the trip with us."

We were all aboard the Marrakesh Express, although only two of us experienced the 7-hour trip from Fes to Marrakesh–which turned out not to be an express at all, but a delightful journey down from the Rif mountains, along the coast to Rabat and Casablanca and then up through the fertile plains to Marrakesh.

In Fes: All aboard the Marrakesh Express

The food, the old-world towns, the introduction to the North African-Muslim culture? An intense and moving experience. The familial comfort of the smart phone connection? Bigly.

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Rif Road Trip – SeenPlaces

6 Of Most Fascinating Cities In Morocco – Lists Diary
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Parenting Grown Children: The Yoga Bond

03/02/2017

Mother and daughter reaching yoga heights

The yoga studio where I practice my down dogs has a newsletter, which is in constant search of material to fill its "Why I Love Yoga" column. I recently helped out and am reprinting it here since I focused on my relationship with my yoga inspiration, who happens to be my grown daughter, and on the ways our relationship with our grown children evolves: the former teacher becomes the grateful pupil.

Here's the column as it appeared in the Unity Woods newsletter:

Blogger Mom Becomes a Yoga Mom

Within weeks of graduating from college, my daughter shipped herself off to San Francisco–to paint, to write, to “find” herself. One of the tools she found was yoga. She started studying with Rodney Yee, then a West Coast Iyengar yogi. Her interest only deepened as time went on.

Moms being moms, and this mom being a blogger on parenting grown children, I had to know more about what was so important to her. She suggested I had an excellent opportunity to do so. “You live right near one of the best yoga studios in the country,” she told me.

So it was that I signed up for Yoga I at Unity Woods. I spent a few years learning triangle pose and Warrior II … then promoted myself to … I-II for a few years of attempts at inversions …

Whenever my daughter came home or joined us for a family vacation in Vermont, we would roll out our mats and practice together. She could bend over backwards; I needed blocks and straps to keep pace with the simplest sun salutations. Even when she took up Ashtanga yoga, she managed to find ways to include me and my Iyengar yoga in a yoga routine.

Then came my hip pain and the replacement of one and, a year later, the other hip. This is where our yoga bond was tied into an even stronger knot. Four days post-surgery, she was figuring out ways I could practice yoga–seated for the first few weeks and then very cautiously using the wall for some easy-does-it uttanasanas.

Three years after the gift of my new hips, I am back in yoga class and, when my daughter and I get together (she still lives far away), we salute the sun, breathe deeply and Namaste over the pure pleasure of our special bond.

Double down dog

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

Observations: Cathy Guisewite on letting our grown daughters know how far we’ve come, baby–and how fragile it is.

02/09/2017

Remember Cathy, the comic strip character that tapped into our worst vulnerabilities about our bodies, ourselves. I still shiver with the sisterhood Cathy brought whenever she freaked out about buying a bathing suit.

Cathy retired–or at least her creator, Cathy Guisewite retired her. But now Guisewite is back. Writing in the NYTimes, Cathy (the person) wants to impress on her college daughter the advances her daughter should not take for granted, the freedoms, as Guisewite puts it, "our grandmothers dreamed of, our mothers hoped for, what we earned and our girls will inherit."

With Mary Tyler Moore as her lodestar, she wants to show her daughter "How change can happen, so she isn't afraid of everything else that's happening now. To protect her by empowering her with an example of what one voice can do."

Here is what she tells her daughter about the doors Mary Tyler Moore and her breakout TV show opened for her and millions of other women:

"…When I was 24, a young woman could either aspire to be a homemaking Betty Crocker or a militant Betty Friedan. We argued about things you can’t comprehend. Should a woman be allowed to have a job? If she got a job, should she be allowed to wear pants to the office? If she got married before 25, was she betraying the new career possibilities for which women had been fighting for a century? If she wasn’t married by 35, was she an old maid?”

When that doesn't seem to grab her daughter's attention, Cathy, waving a DVD of Mary Tyler Moore's show, persists.

“You need to see this right now, honey, when so much of what’s been won for women feels threatened. You need to see what one, sometimes quivery, voice did to move millions. How minds and doors got opened by someone who found a way to gently, graciously shift things just enough so that people could imagine a different future. You need to know that every single one of us has the power to question everything.”

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Refilled Nests: Setting rules when a grownchild moves back home

02/02/2017

"We need to talk." That's what my friend C told her 28-year-old son when he moved back into the bedroom of his youth. He wasn't home because of financial challenges, a career in stall or an inability to manage on his own.. Rather, he and his girlfriend were planning to move in together and get married. The lease was up on his apartment; she was in graduate school in another city until May. They were waiting for her to get a nursing job offer at one of the hospitals in the area before they figured out where to hunt for an apartment.

He would be home for four months. C wanted to make the house rules clear. She'd just "hosted" her younger son for a year while he tried to figure out the road he was going to travel. He'd been sullen and unhelpful and the "stay" had been fairly unpleasant.

Here's what she set out with her older son. It had nothing to do with groceries, doing the dishes or paying rent. They were general principles that she felt cleared the air and set a positive tone for his time at home. They are so simple and clear that I thought I'd share them with those of you who are expecting the unexpected extended home visit of a grown child

Rule 1: Pick up after yourself, especially in public spaces. Don't leave socks, shirts, or other personal items in the living room or family room or dirty dishes in the kitchen sink.

Rule 2: Be helpful. If you see something that needs to be done, do it. Don't wait to be asked. If the kitchen garbage bin is full, take out the trash.

Rule 3: Be pleasant. A friendly greeting, an occasional smile, an acknowledgement that the parents exist and are people deserving of courtesy–these are things that can make a home-stay tolerable for all parties.

Rule 4: Make sure the toilet seat is down in the guest bathroom.

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Parenting Grown Children: We are at our peril when we give advice they didn't ask for
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Social Media Etiquette: Instagram and the risks of sharing photos, part II

01/27/2017

Following on last week's post about posting photos on Facebook, here's another source of unknown ramifications our grown children with teenagers are parsing: the photos on their children's smart phones.

According to a Pew Research Center survey, 24 percent of teenagers are online "almost constantly." They aren't just playing video games. If they are like my teen grandkids, they are spending time posting photos on Instagram and Snapchat. It's a way to stay in touch with friends.

While they're Instagraming or Snapchatting, mistakes can be made–posting a too-sexy photo, say, or forwarding an unflattering one of a friend or classmate. Do parents have a right to edit what their children post?

Many parents–a recent survey put it at just under 50 percent–check out what their child is posting. My daughter and son-in-law do and they require a "take down" of any photos that are deemed to be "inappropriate." But some kids–my granddaughter is one of them–also store photos on their phones in a camera roll and those photos are often the source of Instagram posts. Is the camera roll fair game for parental eyes?

I was witness to a kerfuffle on this point that broke out during a family weekend visit. It was hard to tell–the flash point became red hot so quickly–just what the parents (my daughter and son-in-law) were trying to check out. All I knew as the grannie in the awkward position of observing a family row was that my Grand huffed off to the guest room in tears, phone clutched to her chest, door slammed shut. Everyone was upset and, with my limited knowledge of the issues swirling around smart phones and teens–and no experience with those issues–there wasn't much I could do to ease the situation or to give what could possibly pass as wise counsel. So I did what I do best. I waited a few minutes, asked my daughter if she minded and then knocked on the guest room door.

Here's what I learned. My Grand agrees with the Instagram rule. She is willing to take down any photo her parents don't think should be up there. And she agrees that they have a right to check her Instagram account whenever they want to. But she sees the camera roll as her private domain. For her parents to peer into it: that's an invasion of privacy.

While I have no experience with camera rolls and teen behavior thereof, it struck me that in my Grand's eyes, the camera roll was tantamount to what in my day was a personal diary. Parents wouldn't read their children's diaries. Or would they? One key difference: There is little likelihood that the scribbles in a personal diary would go viral and be read by everyone in a child's high school.

Writing in the Washington Post's On Parenting, columnist Meghan Leahy repeated this piece of tech-parenting advice a friend gave her. It was about texting but it seems to me to apply to photo scrutiny as well.

'Unless you suspect real danger or have real concerns, do not read your child's texts on a daily basis. It will erode the good trust you have with your child, promote sneakiness in your child and create a 'gotcha' atmosphere in your family.'

Then Leahy, who has three children, added a word or two of her own in reaction to that advice. Her words are ones that we, as parents of grown children whose children are online, can bear in mind–and pass along if it seems appropriate:

Do I still glance at texts, Instagram and Snapchat? Yes. But I tell my child when I do it and what I learned, and then I go into listening mode. The main message is: 'I care. I am watching. I know your heart. I love you. You will make mistakes. I will always be here for you. I am listening.'

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Social Media Etiquette: Facebook, Instagram and the risky business of sharing photos on the Internet

01/17/2017

They are so adorable. Of course we want to share the photos of our Grands on Facebook, Instagram and everywhere else our friends may follow. Only maybe we shouldn't–unless we've asked the parents first. There are, it seems, all kinds of ways photos can be misused.

Take this Ask Amy letter from a distraught mom whose mother-in-law has been sharing on Facebook photos she (the mom) has posted of her children. The problem, as the mom tells it, is the way in which the shared photos can get posted, re-posted and spread around to who-knows-what.

Here are the specifics from the mom:

A widowed aunt has been speaking to men over Facebook, and one of these men shared a photo of my daughter to his Facebook friends! This was truly alarming.

I immediately asked this person (whom I’ve never met) to take the photo down. After a day I was still so shaken that I deleted my account. My mother-in-law was heartbroken."

I don’t want [my mother-in-law ] sharing so many pictures, because others in her circle seem to think that by her sharing, they are welcome to do that as well.

There you have it. Inadvertently we may cross a social media line–making the parents of our grandchildren uneasy about the safety of their children. So we're stuck with keeping those photos to ourselves to enjoy–unless we clear the share with our Grand's parents. It can be a dangerous world out there. The tech-safety challenges weren't around when we were bringing up our children, but they are here now, and we may not understand all the ramifications.

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Observation: Philip Galanes on covering the costs when our adult children vacation with us

01/03/2017

I've always felt the genius behind Social Qs had our back–most of the time. Here Philip Galanes covers us again.

A dad writes about his three grown sons–ages 26 to 32. Every year he invites them to vacation with him and his wife, all expenses paid. They always accept, except this year, one of the sons declined. He made plans to go away with friends to pursue one of his hobbies. The dad understood. What he didn't understand was the son's complaint that the dad was not paying for the trip with his friends when he was covering the costs of his brothers' vacation. "Are we being unfair?" the dad wanted to know.

Galanes does not suggest that paying for an adult child's portion of a family vacation is somehow wrong, that it's or spoiling or infantizing a grown child. After all, if we can afford it, it's more of a self-indulgence than a child-indulgence. But let me let Galanes sum it up:

Spoiled brat at Departure Gate 39! Your son is an adult. …The implicit bargain of vacations like yours is that parents cover the costs of their adult children’s travel to facilitate more time together. It is not a voucher to parts unknown.

As to what the dad could possibly say to his son, Galanes offers this bit of tact:

We hope that you know the purpose of these trips is bringing us all together. We'd be delighted to pay for you, if you want to come along."

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Parenting Grown Children: We are at our peril when we give advice they didn't ask for

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

HolidayTogetherness: His. Hers. With which family do your grown kids spend the holidays?

12/20/2016

It's a time fraught with angst. For those of us with children grown enough to be married or in a committed relationship–or with adult children whose parents maintain separate households–now is the time of their holiday splits. It's not just the winter solstice and the Christmas-New Year holiday. It can happen in the fall for Thanksgiving, in the spring for Easter/Passover or the summer's Father's Day.

The puzzle is this: With which parents will they spend all or part of a holiday? It's not up to us: They make the choices; we make the guilt trips.

It has always been so. Friends, now parents of 20-something children, remember back in the day when they first married and announced to their parents their holiday "Treaty of Versailles." They would spend Thanksgiving with his parents; New Years with hers and the next year, reverse it.

It didn't work out well. Here's my friend R to tell you why:

"Our parents never seemed to remember where we had been the year before and why we weren't coming this year. They complained a lot about feeling overlooked or ignored. The worst part of it was that my family did Thanksgiving really well–it was the highlight of the year. Hers did New Years really well. But instead of picking mine for Thanksgiving and hers for New Years, we had this system that didn't make anyone happy."

R tells me this to tell me what his married child decided to do. Rather than split the holidays the way the parents did, the couple are splitting themselves. They live on the west coast and come east for a week over the Christmas-New Year stretch. Both sets of parents live within roughly 50 miles of each other. The plan now is for each child to spend a a day or two alone with his or her parents–without the spouse being there.

R likes the solution. He loves his daughter-in-law and enjoys her company but he and the mom also love having their son to themselves–without interruptions and without having to accommodate others. The old nuclear family: alive and well if only for a brief, shining moment. Except for the occasional lunch or coffee together, most of us have had to adjust to sharing our children with their significant other whenever they come to visit. That's as it should be. And yet, to have time alone with our children is a gift, one that's enhanced by its rarity.

How this variation on the holiday splits will work out once R's son and daughter-in-law have children remains to be seen. But for now, R sees the system as a vastly improved version of his Treaty of Versailles–and he is taking advantage of it as long as it's offered.

How do your children split the holidays? (Worth Mentioning covered one variation this week) Love to know and share with others.

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Grown Children: They feel the pain of our partings–from a house or a spouse.

12/15/2016

They're grown and flown–living in their own homes with their own set of friends and family. What goes on in the old homestead shouldn't have that much of an affect on them. They've got their lives. We've got ours. Or so we think.

What we learned when we sold the house our kids grew up in is that they did care about the loss of their old home–not morbidly or in a let's-stop-them mode. But they did feel the pain of parting. They even referred to the sale as being like a divorce–from the house.

A recent New York Times story tells us our grown children are never too old to feel the pain of another form of parting. With the climb in the divorce rate among couples 50 years old and older, therapists are seeing a rise in the number of their adult children seeking help.

A woman who started a blog on the topic–after finding herself emotionally undone by her parents' divorce after 45 years of marriage–said her blog readers left comments on her posts saying their parents' divorce left them feeling "devastated," that "the pain of my parents divorce has brought me to gut-wrenching tears."

As is often true with a divorce when children are young, the kids get dragged into the messiness of a family break-up. For adult children no longer living in the home, it's a slightly different drag: the parents may want to share their pain with their adult children–something that's a no-no in therapists' view. Their advice: Parent up.

Beyond the no-sharing, the burgeoning field of therapy for adult children of divorce has some common sense pointers for those parting ways with their children's other parent:

–Don't announce the news by email or text–or even by phone. Do it in person if that's at all possible and if there's more than one child, try to tell all the kids together–even if it casts a pall on a holiday when you're all finally together.

–As in divorces where young children are involved, adult children still need to be reassured that the divorce isn't the result of anything they did or did not do.

–A divorce this late in the parental marriage often affects an adult child's perception of their own lives when growing up. What clues to unhappiness had they missed? What does a happy marriage look like?

–If there has been a "betrayal of trust"–one parent, say, is leaving the marriage for a new partner–the "sinning" parent shouldn't be defensive or cast blame on others (especially the offended spouse) but ask for forgiveness. Alienation of an adult child can be devastating and long-lasting.

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Money Matters: How much does it cost if your kids refill your empty nest?

12/07/2016

There are lots of studies that give us the price tag on raising a child. The U.S. Department of Agriculture pegs it at $250,000 for the first 18 years. Now comes a British report that lets us know how much it costs us should our young adults (21-year-olds) return to the nest–or continue to live at home: Each year, British male children cost their parents an average of £2,195 (that's around $2,800 in our currency); women a mere £2,036 (or $2,600).

The study cross referenced those figures with data that suggested that in Britain many grown kids don't leave home until they're 30 years old. In which case, the price tag for providing all the feathers of the nest for an adult child comes to nearly £20,000 ($25,000) –or £19,489 for men, and £19,837 for women.

Here's how the researchers got there. Their survey base was 1,000 parents with adult children over the age of 21 living at home with them. They took into account increases in weekly food bills, utility bills, broadband use and pay TV subscriptions as well as such incidentals as household insurance premiums. The kids weren't total freeloaders. They made some contributions to household expenses and that was factored in.

The point of the research was to study the impact of rising rents and housing prices on young Brits. So the study looked at the reasons children chose to remain living at home. The top answers:

–34 percent were saving for a deposit to buy their first home.

–33 percent weren't earning enough money to move out.

–23 percent liked the quality of life at their parent's home.

–13 percent enjoyed their parents' company.

That said, there were downsides:

–35 percent said there were parent-child clashes over the housekeeping and help or lack of it.

–28 percent argued regularly over money.

–11 percent said the parent/child relationship turned sour.

One Brit financial adviser's solution: Lend the kids money to buy or rent their own place. It's cheaper in the long run.

How relevant is the Brit experience to ours? There are certainly some parallels. And then there's the Brexit vote. I'm just saying…..

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