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© Penelope Lemov and Parenting Grown Children, 2025. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given.

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

    Vacationing with Grown Kids: Doubling down on the Pirates of Penzance and the performing arts

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    There's nothing quite like an upbeat ending to a family vacation to make you smile whenever you think about the time together.

    You never know where those moments are going to come from, but we stumbled into one–and almost let it get away–on a three-day mini-vacay with our grown daughter and her daughter.

    Weeks before we convened for a planned get-together in Williamstown, Mass., I had spotted an ad for the Pirates of Penzance at a theater in nearby Pittsfield. Pateramilias and I are Gilbert and Sullivan enthusiasts. During our hands-on-parenting days we had converted our daughter to an appreciation of their pointed silliness. The hope was to pass the baton to the next generation, specifically to an almost 14-year-old currently enthralled with the score and lyrics for Hamilton. (Can I note here–yes I can, it's my blog–that there is a similarity in the cleverness of the rhymes of both lyricists.) For all I knew, though, this show in Pittsfield would be an amateur production that might be more of a turn off than a turn on.

    That was one of the reasons I did not advance-purchase the tickets. Another was that there's many a slip 'tween the cup (vacation plans) and the lip (actual arrival of all parties at a given place and time). In our case, our daughter and her family would be getting back from a business/pleasure trip in Europe two days before our scheduled get-together. Would they be too jet-lagged to drive the nearly three hours from their home to Williamstown?

    I may have put off the purchase, but theater was very much on my mind. Our Grand has an interest in it and what better place to be than Williamstown, which has a first-rate summer theater. So when daughter and Grand showed up as scheduled on a Tuesday, I bought tickets to a show at the Williamstown theater. We weren't terrifically interested in the play (The Chinese Room)–Paterfamilias went so far as to refuse to have a ticket purchased for him–but on Tuesday nights, the director and cast stay around after the show to talk to the audience about the production. I thought my Grand would love a glimpse of the inside story.

    No doubt she would have, except that by 6:00 p.m., as we picked our way through a pre-theater dinner, it was clear neither mother nor daughter would be able to stay awake for the show. Jet lag was upon them.

    I tried to turn the tickets in for a refund but that was a no-go. After some polite pleading and the addition of a $3 a ticket fee, the theater let me exchange the tickets for the next night–upping my investment in seeing this show to nearly $200 for three of us. But Wednesday night would be our last one together–we had to make our separate ways home on Thursday. There would be no time to see Pirates, which both PF and our daughter expressed a great preference in seeing.

    What to do? I knew when to fold 'em. I am usually very conservative when it comes to parsing out my entertainment dollars. But the $200 for The Chinese Room was spent whether we saw it or not. Wednesday morning I called the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield and snagged four of the last tickets for Pirates available that night. We were double booked, so to speak.

    What a great decision that was. This Pirates of Penzance was like a bubbly tonic. The director and cast milked it for every bit of nonsense in it–even some that was not. (The NYTimes reviewed it a few days later and called it "exhilarating.") But more than that, it made PF and I deliriously happy: we were all together; our daughter laughed out loud all the way through it and so did our Grand, who , even as she enters her teen years, retains "a capacity for innocent enjoyment." We came away from the show feeling light of heart and exhilarated.

    We talked about nothing else on the ride back to Williamstown and through breakfast the next morning. By the time we parted for our separate journeys home, we had gone over almost every bit of scenery, choreography and song we could remember. Since then, PF and I have clicked on YouTube and heard many another version of the songs. Every time we hear the trumpet's martial sound (Tarantula, Tarantula) we smile at the remembrance of the show and how much fun we had together–even though the three-days of togetherness had its ups and downs.

    Is my Grand a new G&S fan? The music, she allowed, was not to her taste but she found the show "really funny." She was delighted with the policeman's lot, despite it being "not a happy one," and with the swaggering of the Pirate King. "It is, it is a glorious thing"–not only to be the Pirate King but to end a vacation on such a high note.

    Related articles

    Vacations with Grown Kids and Grands: Update on easing the stress of too much togetherness
    Review: 'Pirates of Penzance' @ Barrington Stage, 7/20/16 – Arts Talk

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

    A Lesson from Yoga: How we see our grownchildren and our Grands.

    Willa pool queen

    On vacation in Vermont with paterfamilias plus one grown child and his family, I take a yoga class. The yogi (a woman who also teaches paddleboard yoga–yoga on a board that's bobbing in a lake. I'm just saying….) starts class with thoughtful time. She talks about the integration of inner independence with outer-world dependence, about how feeling the quiet of the inner self connects us to others.

    It's a lot to take in before a round of Vinyasas, but her words come back to me that afternoon. I was at the swimming pool observing my three Grands and their parents at play in the water. The teen-aged boy (15) likes testing his dad–who can throw the pool-drenched tennis ball harder, dive deeper for a stone, make a bigger splash. The two girls (13 and 8) are young enough to spend inordinate amounts of time practicing their underwater handstands and challenging each other to one silly game after another. Then while everyone's attention was at maximum outer-dependence, the 8 year old was in water just beyond her swim abilities. Thinking she was in trouble, her brother rushed over and whisked her up. She hadn't been floundering, she insisted, and there was much ado about who did what to whom against their will. Family relationships can be as shaky as yoga on a paddleboard.

    These  mundane bits and pieces of their day-to-day lives are for us–their grandparents who live far from them–a rare moment of pleasure. Sitting still and enjoying the simple act of watching, we see how the parents (our grown kids) and kids (our grandkids) push and pull toward and against each other. Lucky us to b part of these moments of integrated inner independence and outer dependence that keep them (and us) connected.  

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

    Giving Advice:The fine line between when to do it and, mostly, when not to

    Grandfather_teaches_his_grandchildren

    One of the hardest parts of parenting grown children is keeping our advice to ourselves, unless asked.  It's hard because we've stored up a lot of real-life wisdom. We know a thing or two. Why shouldn't our children have the benefit of our experience-informed opinion?

    That was a question raised by a dad whose 25-year-old daughter had a master's degree, was living abroad (self-supporting via small jobs) and had a history of churning through one romantic relationship after another. Now she was involved with a Frenchman and the dad felt her life was "centered on guy-security." He was worried, he wrote to advice-columnist Carolyn Hax, "that she isn't seeing the long view and that each new guys is an emotional crutch, helping her defer a future." His question to Hax: "Should I bug out? Should I ask her to defend her choices?"

    Hax's answer was one we usually don't want to hear: "Bug out. She's 25, self-supporting and hasn't asked your opinion." Readers also chimed in with a bug-off message: "As long as she's taking care of herself and safe about it, let her live her life."

    I'm in total agreement. And then I went out to dinner with a friend who was still reeling from his son's negative reaction to the dad's attempt at advice–advice on the verboten subject of grandchildren.

    Here's the back story, according to my friend, the grandfather: The son, who was adopted at birth, developed attention deficit problems–ADD–when he was in the 4th grade. The parents had him tested, made efforts not to have their son labeled as ADD and worked with the schools and special teachers to help him make his way through school successfully. Which he did. Now the son's son–my friend's grandson–is in 4th grade and showing the same signs of ADD that his father had shown. His report card at the end of the year told the story devastatingly–at least it did to the grandfather. So he pulled together all the reports and tests that they–the grandparents–had on their son that their son had never seen and suggested the son read through them and have his son –their grandchild–tested.

    That's when he was told to butt out, that it was none of his business.

    So, like the Hax-writing dad, here's a dad whose son and family are self-supporting and haven't asked their dad for advice. And yet, the grandfather sees his grandchild in pain and has information the son and the son's wife don't have–a whole file of data about a problem that is likely inherited.

    Is there a difference of degree here between the Hax dad and my friend? If there is, does it matter in terms of bugging out or butting in?

    Maybe there's a middle ground. It's one thing to withhold advice ("bug out"); it's another to withhold information that might be helpful. Maybe the answer is to share an observation and hand over the file so that the son and his wife can digest it and either use it to make an informed decision or toss it aside as irrelevant to their son.

    Bottom line: it's not easy to sit by and believe something can be done to ease a grandchild's pain–and not have the parents act accordingly. But the child is, after all, his grandson, not his son. The parents  may have a very different perspective on their son's behavior.

    Related articles

    Grandparenting: Being careful what we say to our grownchildren about their children
    Parenting Grown Children: We are at our peril when we give advice they didn't ask for
    Extended Visits: The tricky business of hosting grownchildren and their families

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

    Vacationing with Grown Kids: The magic behind a parent-child weekend away

    High_Line_20th_Street_looking_downtown

     It's more than a decade ago, but I remember with an almost tearful fondness a weekend spa vacation I took with Alpha Daughter. She was living on the west coast; I was on the east. We met somewhere in the west-middle. She was six months pregnant; I was excited about the granddaughter-to-be. It wasn't necessarily The Best Vacation Ever–the spa food was okay; the exercise classes so-so; the hikes either too challenging or not challenging enough–but it was a precious time. I already had an inkling how rare time alone with a grown child would be. Once they have a career, a Significant Other, children or a home in another city or country, such times are prized because they are so rare.

    Nostalgia for that trip kicked in when a friend came back from a weekend in New York City with her 30-something-and-single daughter. Her daughter used Airbnb to book an efficiency apartment on the lower tip of Manhattan for the two of them. Mother and daughter took in the High Line, waited two hours in line for discount tickets to a Broadway show, met up with an aunt and niece for dinner and walked from the tip of Manhattan to mid town. The camaraderie, the unpressured time for exchanges of confidences, the insights into how her daughter feels about her plans for the future (she's shipping out to Zambia for a two-year assignment in a few months) gave my friend some solace over the geographic distance that will make weekend get-aways together improbable for a while.

    Not that it always works out. A dad I know, divorced from his grown daughter's mother, took his daughter for what was planned to be an extravagant weekend in New York–except that she was hostile and generally uncooperative about going anywhere or doing anything. If the underlying relationship is dysfunctional, the together-time may be as well.

    As we get older and our children have children that are reaching their teens, many of us are taking our Grands on getaways. Those trips can be bonding, insightful and altogether delightful–but they aren't a substitute for time alone with a grown son or daughter.

    Related articles

    Observation: Candace Bergen on coming to terms with a grown child's independence
    Literary Insights: Alice McDermott on empty nests and backing off the control button
    Vacations with Grown Kids and Grands: Update on easing the stress of too much togetherness

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

    Refilled Nest: The grown kids are moving back home. It may not be the economy

    Remember that slogan from the 1990s?

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    Well here in the 2016s, maybe it isn't–at least not when it comes to our grown kids moving back home after college.

    A May 24 story on the Pew Foundation's website trumpeted this headline: For the First Time in Modern Era, Living With Parents Edges Out Other Living Arrangements for 18- to 34-Year-Olds.

    The broad survey finding: In 2014, for the first time in more than 130 years, adults ages 18 to 34 were slightly more likely to be living in their parents’ home than they were to be living with a spouse or partner in their own household. Census data backs up Pew findings. In 1960, less than one in six 25-year-olds still lived with mom and dad; in 2014, nearly one in three did.

    What holds true for the U.S. is also a global phenomenon. Across much of the developed world, young adults are living at their parents’ homes for longer periods–either they never left or they're back after being on their own in college or the working world.
     
    What's going on here? Researchers say it isn't the difficulty in landing a career job or the burden of college debt (though those have some influence). Rather, it's a demographic and cultural shift. Kids are continuing to marry later, with this change. Or as Pew so delicately put it, there has been a "dramatic drop in the share of young Americans who are choosing to settle down romantically before age 35."
     
    The Pew headline needs close reading. It's not that a greater percentage of grown kids are living with mom and dad than ever before. That peak–35 percent–was hit in 1940. (Today it's 32 percent.)  What's at an all-time high is the relative share of grown kids adopting non-traditional ways of living in early adulthood.
     
    Those living arrangement differ significantly by gender. Since 2009, the dominant living arrangement for young men has been living at home with mom and/or dad. Young women are edging close to that point but are still more likely to be living with a spouse or romantic partner (35%) than they are to be living with their parent(s) (29%).
     
    Meanwhile, 14% of young adults are heading up a household in which they live alone, are a single parent or live with one or more roommates, and 22% live in the home of another family member (such as a grandparent, in-law or sibling), a non-relative, or in group quarters (college dormitories fall into this category).
     
    Here are some more statistical breakdowns from Pew:

    • More young women (16%) than young men (13%) are heading up a household without a spouse or partner. This is mainly because women are more likely than men to be single parents living with their children.

    • Young men (25%) are more likely than young women (19%) to be living in the home of another family member, a non-relative or in some type of group quarters. (Employed young men are much less likely to live at home than young men without a job, and employment among young men has fallen significantly in recent decades as  has young men's earnings.)

    • In addition to the rising median age of first marriages (a decades-long trend), as many as one-in-four of today’s young adults may be eschewing marriage altogether. The overall share of young adults either married or living with an unmarried partner has substantially fallen since 1990.

    • Young adults in states in the South Atlantic, West South Central and Pacific areas of the U.S. have recently experienced the highest rates on record of living with parent(s).

    If you like charts and stats, here are some from Pew that spell out their findings on our millennials and their living arrangements.

    Living with a parent is the most common young adult living arrangement for the first time on record

    Young men are now more likely to live with a parent than to live with a spouse or partner; not so for women

     

    Related articles

    3. Shifting roles, responsibilities and relationships
    For young Americans, living with their parents is now the norm
    Parenting Millennials: How are they doing? See the stats on their work, school and love lives.
    A Generational Guilt Shift: Our sons seek a better work-life balance than their dads did.

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

    Subsidizing Grown Kids: The view from the other side of the helping hand

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    The debate over whether or not to support our grown kids financially–all, in part or an occasional bit of help–falls into two camps: The Tough Lovers (not at all) and the Helping Handers (all of the above). Many of us who fall into the latter group like the way an occasional hand out feels. If we can afford it, it gives us pleasure to see our child use our gift–their legacy delivered early–to do something important or meaningful: buy a house, a safer car, top-quality day care for their child.

    The key, of course, is not to overdo it and to feel comfortable that our child isn't demanding help–isn't asking for assistance out of a sense of entitlement.

    I was reminded of the dangers of entitlement when I was reading one of my favorite columns in the NYTimes Sunday Business section: the Q and A with an industry or company leader. The interview almost always starts off with a question about the leader's youth–early leadership anecdotes or lessons learned from mom or dad. A recent one had a bit of kicker in the answer.

    Carter Murray,the CEO of an international ad agency and a son who grew up in a comfortably well-to-do household in England, talked about how it felt to be at the receiving end of parental largesse. He lived in London as a child, went to college in the U.S., after which–well, I'll let him tell his story.

    "After I graduated from Duke, I moved back to London. Our family business is high-end real estate. I just had a lot of fun. And my mother and stepfather, in particular, were being very nice. I lived in one of the properties they developed. I had an allowance. It’s quite ridiculous when I think about it now.

    "If you come from a privileged background and you’re taking the financial support, you start to think it’s your right to have it. I just became entitled. I had a credit card for emergencies, and it’s amazing, over time, what gets considered an emergency. Like, how often am I going to be in South Africa with this view? I need to order a bottle of wine.

    My parents sat me down one day, and said, “You know, this isn’t free.” And after that sank in, I decided I was going to do it on my own. I cut up the credit card. I actually got even closer to my parents as a result because there wasn’t that financial bond. I think entitlement is the kiss of death for the soul of a human being."

     

     

     

    Parenting has changed to obsessive paternalism over time. Wellmeaning parents are taking over the financial lives of young adults. They are driven by the notion of having enough money, measuring their money in terms of today's rupee. Two personal financial dictums to remember here are: money is a limited resource and inflation is a killer. Also, Indian parents do not enjoy government-sponsored retirement benefits or social security.

    Every rupee spent doting on an adult child cuts ..

    Related articles

    Bank of Mom and Pop: Wherever they are in the world, parents like to offer their grown kids a helping hand.
    Bank of Mom and Dad: The trend line on supporting grown children
    What do our Millennials worry about when they worry about money?

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

    Observation: Pema Chodron on setting goals for our grown children

     

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    "Set no expectations for others." That's the gist of what Pema Chodron, the American Buddhist nun with a gift for expressing Buddhist teachings simply, says about our desires — and natural inclination — to set goals for others. In my little Pocket Pema Chodron (ideal for a quick thought-provoker before meditating) she writes about her experience working with a drug addict. After weeks of progress, he relapsed and went on a binge. Chodron was angry at him and frustrated.  Her teacher, Trongpa Rinpoche, set her on on a different path. That path, it seems to me, applies to our dealings with our goals for our grown children.

    "You should never have expectations for other people," he told her. "Just be kind to them." Rather than have big goals for someone, invite them for dinner, give them little gifts, and do anything to bring a little happiness into their lives.

    Rinpoche told her that setting goals for others can be aggressive–really wanting a success story for ourselves. When we do this to others, we are asking them to live up to our ideals. Instead, we should just be kind.

    Could this be any more relevant to our relationship with our grown children, especially when they choose a path that's different from the one we envisioned for them–whether its in their life goals and career or just the way they choose to dress.

    Related articles

    "The root of suffering is resisting the certainty that no matter what the circumstances, uncertainty is all we truly have." — Pema Chodron – Don't Count Your Eggs
    Pema Chodron's Story – Meditation Practices for Healing and Well-Being

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

    Observation: Cartoonist William Hamilton on parenting grown children

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    He did it in a cartoon. But his observation of our adjustment to dealing with grown children is the equivalent of a thousand-worder.  The late, great William Hamilton, the New Yorker cartoonist who skewered the oblivious among us, drew a cartoon with mom and dad and two adult children sitting around a restaurant table having cocktails. The tag line spoken by one of the parents: "It’s so much easier now that the children are our age."

     

    Related articles

    Bob Mankoff Picks Three Jokes
    Grandparenting: Being careful what we say to our grownchildren about their children
    Vacations with Grown Kids and Grands: Update on easing the stress of too much togetherness

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

    Downsizing: Selling our house brings an unexpected boost from the grown kids

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    We've been feeling down, Paterfamilias and I. We are selling our house of 40-odd years and lamenting the losses–of so much space to live in, of a house we love, of a viewscape of cardinals feasting at the bird feeder and squirrels romping on tree limbs.

    Our grown kids reassure us. We're going to love our 2-bedroom apartment and the new life style of walking to stores, restaurants, coffee shops, the Metro, the library. It's only natural to feel down, they tell us. You're only experiencing the losses right now. You haven't gotten to the gains yet.

    To boost our morale–and to say goodbye to the house they grew up in–they've both taken a day off and flown home for a just-the-four-of-us day of togetherness. We are having lunch at the kitchen table (just like old times) and they start talking about all the things that took place in our family at that table. Not just the meals–the table was the center of family life. We read the newspaper here, they did their science projects; we had heart-to-heart chats with them, they teased each other. Innumerable punchlines were thrown at this central point.

    "You taught me how to write at this table," my son tells me. "I was in fifth grade and writing a book report. My first line was 'This book was interesting.' You told me that wasn't saying anything. You made me come up with a list of words that described the book. I tell my kids that story all the time."

    My daughter talks about all the hidden and hiding places in our house. The closet that goes from one room into another. The bathroom that leads into another bathroom. She loved to read books under a comforter on the top bunk bed in her room–and then jump off. That's why we used to call her Thumper.

    A house holds so many memories–their whole childhood and our years of parenting them. So does the neighborhood. We live on a dead off a dead-end street with woods at the end. They tell us how they used to play near the creek that runs through the woods, even though there were times when it had a less-than-pleasant smell. "We were so lucky to grow up here," both our children tell us. But they are also very clear. It's time for us to move on. Time to let another family live in the house and for us to gear into a less car-centered life.

    We move out in a few days. We're all saying good bye to the house. They may feel the loss a little, we may feel it a lot, but there comes a time to keep the memories stored in our hearts and head and all the photos we're taking with us. The family who's moving in have a middle school boy who plays soccer and a 10-year old girl who's a ballerina. When they first came to see the house, the ballerina walked in the woods with her dad and told him, "This is my enchanted forest."

    Yes, time for a young family to grow up here. We'll miss this home but we're lacing up our walking shoes. And are grateful we have grown children who cared enough about their childhood home–and the turmoil their parents face in leaving it–to spend a day to say goodbye to all it represents and to cheer us on.

    Our son reminds his dad, who would rather not move, that many people our age stay on in their homes out of inertia and that doing the same old, same old is to stagnate. We should be bold and try something new.

    The shoe is on the other foot: It's always been our job to be there for them whenever they face major or minor turmoil in their lives. Now they're offering us emotional support at a wrenching time for us. Makes all that investment in parenting worth the while.

    Related articles

    Vacations with Grown Kids and Grands: Update on easing the stress of too much togetherness
    Five tips for rightsizing overstuffed attics, closets and bookshelves

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

    Downsizing: Our grown kids are more attached to our house’s memories than we think

    Babygrand

    It has come down to this: the piano. A Knabe baby grand that we bought for our daughter when she was 10 years old and an aspiring pianist. When she played–a Mozart divertimento, a Bach fugue, a Szymanowski song–the gorgeous sounds filled every corner of the house.

    As we downsize and purge our belongings — as paterfamilias and I ready ourselves for a move to a 2-bedroom apartment–a lot of our possessions aren't coming with us. The house itself and much that is in it are painful to lose but the fulcrum of that sense of loss–the touchstone of the collective memories of our family growing up together in this house–has become the piano.

    Alpha daughter would take the piano if she could. But she can't. Her house is too small. When she came home last weekend–in part to say goodbye to the house and to see which of her grandparents' or our possessions she might want–she agreed to our selling the piano. It is just too expensive to store for who knows how many years.

    As we got that process underway, we shared with her an over-the-phone appraisal of our beloved musical instrument. It was quite modest: there's a glut of piano's on the market; baby grands and grands have almost no homes to welcome them. When Paterfamilias mentioned the possibility of a give-away–if we couldn't sell it–our daughter teared up. For her, the value of that piano was beyond a monetary one. She was shaken by the idea that we might be careless in handing off the piano to someone else. Who would love, cherish and play the piano with as much joy as she had–appreciate its stiff keyboard action and its splendid tone.

    So here I am–three weeks from moving with listicle upon listicle of things we have to do to get ready–obsessing over what to do with the piano, waking up in the middle of the night wondering what will happen to it and will it happen on time. I feel sad at the thought of parting with it and the music our daughter made on it.

    Why the obsession? In part because the piano means so much to our child. She has–and  rightly so–chosen some meaningful items from the heaps of precious things my mother and mother-in-law had in their homes. I was ready to sell them. "We should keep them in the family," she said. By the time our grandchildren–or her or her brother's children–come of home-making age, they may be back in style. A few symbols of our grandparents' lives should stick around–even if it's in the storage space above Uber son"s garage, which is where the cut glass bowls and gold-rimmed bone china are headed.

    But not the piano. It raises the question of how much we owe our children in terms of honoring the possessions they grew up with and grew to love–but can't take with them. The answer: A lot. We can't be negligent with these bases of shared memories.

    Two days after her visit here, Alpha daughter called. She will take the piano. She will squeeze it into her dining room–a small room that nonetheless is almost half of her downstairs living space. It will be tight, even overwhelming. But she is overjoyed to have the piano in her house, to be able to feel its touch and hear its wondrous tone whenever she sits down to play.

    There's a lump in my throat. I can't speak, except to say, this feels right and that  I can't wait to visit her and hear the Knabe fill a house with music again.