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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.
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."
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PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
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.
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PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
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.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
"Why are we doing this? This is the question Paterfamilias asks as he sits by the kitchen window, looking out over our still-winter garden. What we are doing is downsizing our worldly goods, dumping the paper trails of our lives and otherwise dismantling our house. We are moving from a 4-bedroom home in a car-dependent suburb to a two-bedroom apartment in an urban setting that has a high walkability factor.
We moved into this house when our children were 5 and 6 years old. Now they both have children of their own who are older than that and homes of their own in cities far from ours.
Uber Son put the germ of selling into our heads. His message: Move while you're still young and energetic enough to enjoy an active life style. Don't let the house–and its memories–be an anchor.
Alpha Daughter, more attached in her way to the house, seemed sad to hear we were taking up her brother's idea, but she did not try to talk us out of it.
It's not emotionally easy to sell a home that's filled with memories of family occasions celebrated, achievements gained and disappointments acknowledged. The process is hardest on us–we get to do the de-cluttering work and page through the detrius of our children's school lives. (It's with a sigh that we toss out their soccer and gymnastic "trophies.")But it also has an impact on our grown children. We have asked them whether they want any of our furnishings, art works or the treasures our parents left with us that we have been storing for lo some 20 years. No surprise. The answer is no. We have also asked what they intend to do with the boxes of their papers (diaries, high school essays, masses of photos). We will not be taking those to our 2-bedroom apartment in the city.
They may have little interest in some of the valuable goods, but Alpha Daughter is sentimental about a handful of items. She would like to have the painted tea cups: They remind her of her grandmother. But, for her and our son, the porcelain figurines, the cut glass candy bowl, the silver-plated candelabras are simply signifiers of a time gone by. Not that we want to keep storing them, but they pack an emotional wallop for us: These were things that lined the shelves and sat on the tables of our childhood homes, that signaled our parents' accomplishments. Clearly, they are less evocative for our children.
But some of the things Paterfamilias and I acquired carry emotional weight for them. The grand piano, the painting over the fireplace, the Korean chest in the dining room. These are things they grew up with, pieces that formed the background of our family's life.
While selling the house is a venture that involves Paterfamilias and myself–we're closing the sale, arranging for movers, and deciding what to sell–on another level it involves our children and their sense of home.
Alpha Daughter and family are coming here for a visit this weekend–in part to say goodbye to the house. We'll see if she's uneasy about the goods we plan to give away–and if she wants to parse out her limited storage space to save some of it for her children.
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PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
Just when we thought we were getting used to the re-filled nest–our college kids moving back for a few months or even years–comes now a reversal. No, it's not that they are moving out of our homes. It's that we're moving into their's.
The trend today, the research reports tell us, is for aging parents to move into the homes of their children, where the Grands are still be in residence.
According to an Erie Insurance report, out of the 76 million family households in the United States, 4.3 million (or 5.6 percent) were multigenerational households. That's a 10.5 percent increase from 2006.
Their findings are backed up by the National Association of Realtors. In its 2015Home Buyer and Seller Generational Trends Report, 13 percent of all home purchases in 2014 were by a multigenerational household, consisting of adult siblings, adult children, parents and/or grandparents.
Clearly, we're not moving in with our kids in those early empty-nester days–when we're still working, traveling and living an active life and our 20-somethings are figuring our what their careers will be and with whom they'll be sharing their lives. But as we age and they move into the maturity of their child reading years, the press of health or wealth issues may make multi-generational living sensible and desirable.
The Pew Research Center found the long-term increase in multigenerational living is in part a reflection of the country’s changing racial and ethnic composition. Asian-Americans tend to live in multigenerational arrangements (27 percent) and one-in-four Hispanics and African-Americans do as well. Other reasons for the rise in multigenerational households: more Americans are struggling with health and disability issues and need easy access to caregivers; Baby Boomers seem to want to provide for their aging parents by moving them into their homes.
Our kids, in short, are willing to take care of us in our dotage but on their turf.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
Paterfamilias and I have fled the February chill of the northeast for a week in Oaxaca, Mexico. It's deliciously warm here but it's dry–and that takes a toll on nails. Which is a long way of saying I found myself sitting in a little salon in the shadow of the Santo Domingo church having my fingernails shaped by a pleasant señora who used the slimmest and smallest of emery boards and a small wooden stick to shape my nails.
Nearby sat a fellow-American woman who answered to the name Lisa and whose feet were submerged in a pink plastic tub of soapy water. Her complaint: she had been traveling around Mexico for a month now and the dry weather had cracked the skin on her feet. There was hardly room for another customer until Linda walked into this teeny, old-world nail shop. She sat down and submerged her feet in a similar plastic bowl of soapy water. She too was suffering from cracked skin on her heels.
Three female gringas gathered in the intimate comfort of a manicure-pedicure shop–without massage chairs or other high end, techno-accoutrements of an ultra-modern salon—are bound to start talking, strangers though we were.
Lisa spoke of the weariness of traveling for a month and how she had another month to go before she could return home–she had rented out her house in Puerto Vallarta for two months. Three of those remaining weeks would be in Oaxaca where she was taking language and cooking classes. But the last one would be in Colorado, visiting her grown children. At this point in her travels, the last week would be the cherry to top the end of her wanderings.
Linda had been in Oaxaca for a week–with her adult children as visitors. The pedicure, in effect, was marking the beginning of her vacation: the children had headed home that morning. "What a relief!" she said and sighed loudly. She and her husband had rented a house for a month. It was big enough to accommodate her guests, but the day-to-day planning, the constant company, the responsibilities to make sure food and beverages were in supply, that the daughter was getting along with the son, and their spouses were getting along as well were stressful.
It's always like that when kids come to visit but it's double the stress, Linda said, when you're on vacation in unfamiliar surroundings (she was from Canada) and where you speak the language rudimentarily or not at all. She stretched her legs out, wriggled her toes in the water, and let out another sigh. We love our grown children, she seemed to say on behalf of all of us. We treasure the time we spend with them. But we also reach a point where, oh what a relief it is to not to have them and their energy around.
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PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
When is it time to close our wallets, tie up the purse strings and let our grown children make it on their own? A lot of us help out the first year or two after college–as our kids wrestle with career choices, entry level jobs and paying off college debt.
But it can go on longer than that: 40 percent of adult millennials in the U.S. currently get financial help from us, their parents, according to a Bank of America/USA Today survey. Across the pond, a survey finds that a large cohort of parents in Britain are supporting their grown children even as those children pass the 30-year-old mark. A quarter of the "grown children" in the survey said they did not feel financially stable by the age of 35 and still need the assurance of their parent's financial help.
It's not necessarily support via free rent at home. Nine out of ten of grown children in the British survey who were older than 35 said they live away from home. By comparison, a recent survey of young adults (18 to 30) in Europe found that half of them reported living with their parents.
What's behind the late launch into financial independence? Among the reasons that the Brits put out there: low wages, high rental costs, zero-hour contracts, university fees, rising living costs, an unwillingness to take on responsibility, a generational lack of ambition, or plain old inertia.
Despite the delays in setting off on their own, the British study had bright spots. Once they were launched, 70 percent of the 35+ year-olds said they felt indebted to their parents for their financial support over the years. And here's the really heartening stuff: 60 per cent said they sometimes picked up the tab at restaurants and outings. A quarter have paid for a holiday for their parents, helped their parents with rent or bought them clothes when money was tight.
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PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
In her novel Family Affair, Penelope Lively's leading lady, Alison, the mother of six children, has perfected the persona of doting parent. Her greatest ambition has been to create a home that's domestic perfection–a shrine to togetherness. But of course, the children start to age away from the home fires. Here's Lively writing about that moment when Alison recognizes that she is close to being an empty nester:
"Alison is oppressed by age. Not her own. The children, who are no longer children, except for Clare, and perhaps Roger, who is on the cusp. The others are disappearing over the horizon, and she is aghast. This should not be happening. Not yet. Oh, of course they grow up but somehow one had always felt that that was way, way off. And now, suddenly, this summer, it no longer is. It is not just their size, their new concerns–it is the sense that they are moving into foreign territory, places of which she knows nothing. Once, they were infinitely familiar, predictable; now they are alarmingly volatile, one does not know what they are thinking, or, half the time, what they are doing."
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
The parenting is never over–nor is the pain of setbacks for our kids, even when they're grown up and in charge of their lives. A few posts ago, I looked at some insights about our kid's pain becoming our pain–bearing witness to the adage, we're only as happy as our unhappiest child.
That said, researchers at Cornell report yet another study on the topic. The findings: The ramifications of our children's pain goes well beyond causing us unhappiness. The parent-child relationship is a two-way street throughout life, with adult children having a profound effect on their parents’ psychological well-being.
The study reports that older mothers–women well past those menopausal and empty nester years–are prone to depression if their adult children struggle with serious problems such as financial difficulties or alcohol or drug abuse. According to co-author Karl Pillemer, a professor of gerontology in medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, the lifelong bonds of attachment are so powerful that, even among mothers (dads were not included in the study) in their late 70s and 80s, problems in their children’s lives profoundly affect their mental health. Pillemer says he has interviewed 100-year-olds who were still worried about their 78-year-old children.
The researchers had expected that the mothers–they interviewed more than 350–would be more depressed if the adult child they felt closest to or expected help from struggled with serious issues. It turned out that worry is an equal opportunity angst. Regardless of favorites, the moms were deeply concerned about what happens to all of their offspring. A ne'er do well is still an open wound that moms fret and worry about–even when those ne-er do wells have children and grandchildren of their own, children and Grands about whom they worry and whose pain afflicts them.
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PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
When I think of the pre-Internet days when we raised our children, I realize how easy we had it: Exposure to pornography? We checked under their beds to see if they were hiding any risque magazines. The danger of strangers? We told them not to take candy from anyone they didn't know. Bullying? We called the offender's parents and talked to them about the problem.
The Internet changed that calculus. But that's only the beginning of the challenges our kids-as-parents face. A recent Pew Research Center report looked at the different landscape and attitude changes our kids face in or have about raising their children. Spoiler alert: It's not all bad news, especially the last point.
Among the findings:
Non-traditional living arrangements. Today, 69% of children younger than 18 are living with two parents, down from 87% in 1960. In 2014, fewer than half of children lived in a household with two married parents in their first marriage, down from 73% in 1960.
Everyday worries. Six-in-ten parents say they worry that their children might be bullied at some point. At least half also worry that their children might struggle with anxiety or depression (54%) or that their child could be kidnapped (50%).
White parents are more likely than black parents to say they worry that their children might struggle with anxiety or depression (58% vs. 35%) or that they could have problems with drugs or alcohol (40% vs. 23%). Black parents, in turn, are about twice as likely as white parents to say they worry that their child could get shot at some point (39% vs. 22%).
Child care. Across all income groups, majorities of parents with children under 6 years old say it’s hard to find high-quality, affordable child care in their community. Four-in-ten parents with school-aged children say it is hard to find high-quality, affordable after-school activities and programs for their children. This is especially the case for lower-income parents.
Involvement with school. 46% of those with school-aged children say they wish they could be more involved, while slightly more (53%) say they are satisfied with the way things are. There are no clear links between parents’ income or education and views of their own involvement in their child’s education. However, black parents (58%) are more likely than white and Hispanic parents (43% and 41%, respectively) to say they wish they could be doing more when it comes to their child’s education.
How they rate themselves as parents. They seem to be more confident than we were. According to Pew, the younger they are, the more likely the moms are to give themselves high marks: 57% of Millennial moms say they are doing a very good job raising their kids, compared with 48% of Gen X and 41% of Baby Boomer moms–and 43% of Millennial dads.
They care what we think. 72% of those with a living parent want their own parents to think they’re doing a good job raising their kids. Smaller but substantive shares also care a lot that their friends (52%) and people in their community (45%) see them as good parents.
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