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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.

Is there a way to avoid making their pain your pain?

01/08/2016

Read enough stuff on parenting adult children and you come across some insightful tidbits. A life coach in California, Tracey Barnes Priestley, was answering a reader query about how to avoid feeling the pain from a grown child's trials and tribulations. The reader wasn't talking about major sources of anguish–divorce, death of a spouse, a child's debilitating illness. She was asking about feeling calmer about the lesser ups and downs of her grown child's life.

Tracey had a 5-point plan to deal with the problem. (Here's a link to the full story). But more than the plan, what struck me was her over-arching message–and one that's on my Notes to Self: Keep up your own interests.

Tracey put it this way: "My best advice? Support your adult children in a manner that is healthy and positive while spending the bulk of your time and attention creating your own best life!"

Not only can that help keep the worry-warts at bay but it gives us something to add to any conversation we have with our grown children. They really don't want a constant focus on them and what they're doing all the

What if they're struggling with major problems? A new University of Michigan study provides insights on the affect of children's problems on their parents.

To assess parental reactions, Kira Birditt, a researcher at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, and her colleagues conducted a daily diary study of 197 middle-aged parents. Among the parents in the study, 60 percent reported having at least one adult child with a problem, and 34 percent reported that all of their adult children had at least one problem.

The parents reported their interactions with adult children for seven consecutive days and also provided saliva samples at different times during the study. This allowed the research team to assess daily fluctuations in cortisol levels, a widely used marker of stress.

Researchers examined the parental affect when children face two types of common problems. One set of problems involved physical-emotional difficulties that included physical and mental health problems and developmental disabilities. The other was lifestyle-behavioral problems that entailed financial trouble, drug and alcohol abuse, trouble with the law, and serious relationship trouble — such as divorce.

Here's what Birditt reports finding: “Interactions with adult children who had physical or emotional problems had more immediate, same-day associations with cortisol whereas interactions with adult children with lifestyle or behavioral problems resulted in more delayed, or next day, associations.”

The findings have implications for parents trying to manage their distress. Those with adult children who have lifestyle and behavioral problems "may want to focus on learning effective coping strategies for reducing stress they already have," the research notes. "In contrast, parents of adult children with physical and emotional problems may spend more time anticipating problems and may benefit from strategies to help prevent stress.”

Another way for parents to reduce the stress of negative interactions with children who have problems is to attempt to balance these interactions with positive encounters, which buffer the harmful effects. “If you have a conversation that makes you feel irritated, hurt, or annoyed, try to follow it with one that makes you feel good,” Birditt said.

The study appears in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.

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Money Matters: Postponing retirement to help out our kids

12/30/2015

A friend worked two or three years past her preferred retirement date. The reason: To help out her grown daughter. The help? $100,000+ to pay for a surrogate-mother pregnancy. The twins that ensued: priceless.

Many of us toil on for similar–if less dramatic–reasons. Before we settle into the tensions of a fixed income, we want the extra bit of wherewithal to help our grown children with ordinary and extraordinary needs. Sometimes it's to help with the down payment on their first house or to pay for top-tier day care for a Grand.

If several of us are guilty of working well past retirement age to aid and abet our grown children, we are not alone. In Canada, half of parents surveyed reported that they will retire later or work longer and one-third said they would save less for their own retirement to support their adult children financially, according to a BMO Wealth Management Report

The report, titled aptly enough "The Family Bank" looked at the financial support Canadian parents are providing their young adult children (aged 18-34) and compared it with the kind of support the parents say they received from their parents when they were young adults.

What kind of support are we talking about?

–19% are providing regular ongoing expenses; only 7% received such support from their parents.

–23% give frequently when help is needed, such as payment of a monthly bill; 6% had received that kind of help when they were young.

–38% help out occasionally, such as in an emergency; 39% got that kind of assistance from their parents.

–20% give little or no help; 48% were totally on their own financially as young adults.

Here's a link to more data in the form of infographics from BMO (which is part of the Bank of Montreal)

The bank's takeaway from its report:

These days, many parents feel they are on track to being financially comfortable but worry that their children are not going to attain the same level of comfort just on their own resources.

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Refilled Nests: Is the e-world to blame for the stampede home? Or is it simply demographics?

12/22/2015

The Census report is in: A higher percentage of young adults have been living with their parents in 2015 than during the recession. Despite widespread expectations, our refilled-nests are not emptying out as quickly and thoroughly as they did a generation ago. (The share of 18-34 year-olds living with parents was 31.5% in 2015, up from 31.4% in 2014.) Major blips in the economy, the difficulty in landing career jobs and the burden of student debt. Those are the usual reasons behind the current trend: a trend that some see as the new normal.

There are additional, counter-intuitive reasons. One is the imbalance in young millennials' lives between offline and online worlds. The youngest millennials are the first generation to grow up as dual citizens or, as Carl Pickhardt,puts it, "Two-worlders." That is they have, since infancy, learned to live in the overlapping and interconnected worlds of offline and online realities. Pickhardt, a psychologist who specializes in dealing with adolescents and young adults, writes that "Since birth they have inhabited the smaller Interpersonal actual world where communication and interaction are directly conducted, and the vast virtual Internet world where communication and interaction are electronically mediated."

He suggests that they are having a hard time balancing one against the other. Their computers are an auxiliary brain–an electronic enabler that serves a multitude of functions –information retrieval, communication, social networking, entertainment, shopping, creative expression, and problem solving. "It is an integral part of a millennial young person’s functioning, and that isn’t going to change," Pickhardt writes.

In consequence of our children growing up in these two worlds, parenting has become more than doubly complicated. We have to help our kids keep the two worlds adequately separated, adequately integrated, and adequately balanced.

What's that got to do with millennials living at home in greater numbers than usual? It may be that online escape or reliance has come at the experience of offline education and experience. As Pickhardt sees it, "it might be that much of the hard work of growing up (building practical offline skills, problem solving offline experience, assuming offline responsibilities) requires laboring in the fields of relatively unglamorous and comparatively boring offline life. In this way, they may have slowed down the development of functional independence."

Thus some millennials may choose to live a while longer at home where they can continue to be sheltered and defer self-support and direction. They may need more offline time and practice before feeling ready to move out and live independently.

Perhaps it just takes longer to grow up in two worlds than it used to in one. Maybe learning adequate separation, integration, and balance required by today's dual citizenship just takes more time.

If this is so, the new normal may be here to stay. We might not want to convert their bedrooms to our own private dens quite yet.

There's another reason to keep those rooms available.

Housing economist Jed Kolko addresses the question: Why Millennials Still Live With Their Parents

His concern is with first-time home buyer demand, but here's his take on millennials (who are not flooding the housing market) :

"The increase in young adults living with parents over the past twenty years can be explained entirely by demographic changes. The increase since 2005 is not an aberration; once demographics are taken into account, the aberration is the bubble years of the mid-2000s, when an unusually low share of young adults was living with parents."

"Unless demographic trends reverse, the share of young adults living with parents is unlikely to fall much. Today’s millennials will leave their parents’ homes as they age — they’re not going to live there forever. But it won’t be the sudden unleashing of pent-up demand we might have expected if the increase of living with parents were only about the housing bust and recession and not about longer-term demographic shifts."
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Refilled Nests: Our grown daughters are living with us–just like it was the 1940s

12/14/2015

We've all heard the numbers: our nests are not emptying out as quickly as they did a generation ago. What with the major blips in the economy, the difficulty in landing career jobs and the burden of student debt, lots of grown kids who've completed their college days are living at home–saving for the future or just riding out a low-income job till something better comes along.

That's been true of both sexes. But now a new Pew Research study finds our daughters are heading home at a faster pace–and for longer stays–than our sons. According to Pew, you’d have to go back 74 years–to the 1940s– to observe similar living arrangements among young women. Young men are also living in the same situation, but their share hasn’t climbed to 1940's levels, the highest year on record. Back then, 36.2% of young women lived with their parents or relatives. That percent dropped over the next couple of decades (as low as 20 percent in 1960) as marriage rates increased and women began joining the workforce in larger numbers, becoming financially able to live on their own. In the 1940s, even if a woman was single and able to support herself, it was culturally unseemly for her to live on her own.

A study out of Australia finds almost one in four young adults– between the ages of 20 and 34–are living with their parents, but the split between percent of men and women sticking to the home front is wider. About 18 per cent of women were still living at home compared to 24 per cent of males.

A researcher at Melbourne University, Associate Professor Cassandra Szoeke, sees the worldwide trend of grown children living at home as having a huge impact on the parents of those still-at-home grown children. She looked at research involving 20 million people across the world and found children living at home were causing parents financial stress and personal anxiety and that there was deterioration in the relationship between parent and partner and between parent and child.

She also looked at which children tend to hang around ye olde nest the longest. Those with happily married parents are more likely to live at home than those who have a stepmother or father. Wealthier parents are also more likely to have their kids stick around.

Some charts from Pew that detail changes in women's lives:

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Observations: Don Johnson on cooling the parental advice

12/07/2015

When actor Don Johnson's daughter Dakota (who stars in Fifty Shades of Grey) told him she wanted to be an actress, Johnson (Miami Vice) reacted with neither alarm nor excitement. He holds–according to an interview in Parade Magazine–a hands-off view of parenting grown children:

"I learned a long time ago that your children have their own journey, separate from yours, and even though you want to live their lives for them, you can't. So, I tell them–to quote Joseph Campbell–'Follow your bliss,' and I don't care what it is. It's about their happiness."

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Leaving a Legacy: Updating the digital side of our estate plan

12/02/2015

photo: courtesy Palo Coleman

We're making our list, checking it twice: where the deed to our house is, what our bank account numbers are, who insures our health, house and car.

This is not for a phantom Santa. It's our attempt at a 40/70 list–the one our grown kids are supposed to ask for when they're 40 and we're 70, or thereabouts. Ours haven't asked yet, but we're getting ready. A sometimes overlooked part of that list: passwords and other cues for digital access to our accounts.

It used to be that when "the time" came, our grown kids could walk (tearfully, of course) through our home and find all the valuable physical objects and important papers, check our snail mail for account statements and bills, and otherwise get their hands on what they needed to pull together our estate. Today much of that is either delivered via email, stored in the cloud or kept in a folder on our computer. That means it's probably protected by passwords–for the accounts themselves as well as for our smartphones, laptops, email and social media accounts (where sentimentally precious photographs may be stored). Gaining access to those privacy-protected accounts could cost our estate time and money.

All of which means access to the digital side of our estate should be part of the 40/70 list. But not necessarily, estate planners say, part of our will. That's because wills are changed infrequently–or at least they should be–while online info needs regular updating, especially when we "forget" a password and have to change it, yet again.

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Holiday Gifts: Thinking outside the usual gift box.

11/17/2015

Thinking big this holiday season? Here's a really huge one: Gift your grown child the down payment on a house.

Too big a dent in your retirement reserves? You could loan them the money (toward a mortgage) at rates advantageous to you but better than they'd get at the bank. Or you could co-sign the mortgage so that they qualify for a loan where they might not otherwise.

Here are some key points to take into account on each option (with thanks to a NYTimes article):

Gifting money for a down payment: Some of us consider this a "here's your inheritance in advance" gift. If it's a recent gift, though, the borrowers–your kids–must prove the origin of the funds and provide a letter affirming that the money is a gift and does not need to be repaid.

Lending money: With current interest rates on CDs just over 1% and mortgage rates around 4%, you can loan your kids money at a lower rate than the bank and still earn more than a super-safe CD. It's a win-win, as they say, except that it isn't always comfortable to be the banker collecting a debt payment. Three initials of warning: IRS. A family loan needs to be at arm's length, meaning it follows the IRS's proscribed interest rates based on the terms of the loan.

Co-signing the mortgage: If your grown child isn't earning enough to qualify for a mortgage, your co-signature could bump them up into qualified. Some parents exercise this option so they can sleep better at night: It helps their kids live in a more stable or safer neighborhood than they might otherwise be able to afford. Co-signing may not cost the parent cash but it does figure on the debit side of their credit rating and could complicate refinancing or buying another home in the future. To say nothing of the drain on parental funds if grown child misses some mortgage payments.

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Grandparenting: We’ve already raised our children. It’s up to them to raise theirs.

11/10/2015

We've all had that moment when we wanted to intervene, when we've wanted to tell our son or daughter–or their spouses–a better way to handle our grandchild (also known as their child). To put a nice gloss on it, we've wanted to share the benefit of our experience.

Bad idea. (See Notes to Self in side column). We're not talking about abuse here–that's a whole different subject. We're talking about all the little things they –the parents — could be doing better from our perspective.

Here's a reminder from a Philip Galanes Social Q columns (Galanes being my favorite and most amusing social adviser) about using our critical abilities to turn a negative view of our child's parenting approach into a positive –or at least neutral– one.

The case in point: A reader wrote Galanes to complain about her daughter-in-law for whom English is a second language, one she speaks well but not the one she uses to converse with her 4-year-old child. Both the DIL and the reader's son want to raise their child to be bilingual–a worthy goal in this interconnected global world. The reader's complaint: the DIL speaks to her child in her native language all the time, even when the grandparents, who live across the country and who do not speak the language, are visiting. "We sit clueless for long stretches while they talk," the reader complains. "The same thing happens to my son, who barely speaks their language. We don’t object to our granddaughter learning another language, but we don’t want to feel so left out. Do you agree that this behavior is totally rude?

Galanes does not. Nor does he see the linguistic approach (a basic way to raise a bilingual child) as an attack on the grandparents. He suggests the grandparents ask their son (who speaks to his daughter in English) or DIL how they can be more part of the conversation when they're visiting. "It may be cumbersome for a little girl to translate chats with her mom into English," Galanes writes, "but pretending your ride to the mall is a session at the United Nations sounds like fun."

His bottom line is one for all seasons and moments of grandparenting displeasure: "You had your crack at raising children. Now it’s their turn. And raining on their parade will only make you an unpopular houseguest."

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Parenting Grown Children: Roz Chast, Atul Gawande and the 40/70 talk about “Something Unpleasant.”

11/03/2015

Roz Chast was coming to speak at a community center near me. I signed on immediately. Love the New Yorker cartoonist's humor and outlook on life, but wanted to go especially because she would be talking about her latest prize-deserving tome, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant. The title refers, of course, to her parents' refusal to discuss with their grown (and only) child what they would do if and when they became frail and could no longer manage on their own–which eventually happened.

This is a long way of saying the book was lying around my house when Alpha daughter flew into town on a combo business-home visit trip. She breezed through parts of the book. (Despite the heaviness of its topic, the book is funny, emotionally frank and touching.) I mentioned that I was also reading Atul Gawande's Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, (not so funny, brutally frank and downright scary) a book her brother, aka Uber Son, had read this past summer and recommended.

So it shouldn't have come as a surprise when Alpha daughter sent an email suggesting we all–daughter, son, dad, mom–read both books and have a book-club like discussion about them. The way she phrased it made it seem a charming idea: the togetherness of a book-reading adventure with our grown children.

I saw it as something else as well. The opening to discuss exactly what both authors were writing about–the "something unpleasant," and "what matters in the end" as it pertains to Paterfamilias and myself. In some circles, such discussions are known as the 40/70 talk. That is, by the time the grown child is 40 and the parents are 70, they should have had–before a crisis occurs–a “talk” about the parents' living and financial choices, health, driving and end of life care.

I haven't ask Alpha daughter if that's what she had in mind (she had also included in the reading list a third book, The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and living like the world's healthiest people), but it's something that's on mine. Paterfamilias and I have started to compile our 40/70 financial list: where our assets are, what our passwords to online accounts are, where our will is, where we've stored the deed to the house and car ownership papers. We haven't handed it over yet. But even more important than that list are the more anxiety-provoking Chast-Gawande issues: Do our children know and understand how each of us feel about end of life care, about what we do and don't want done if we are no longer able to make clear and rational decisions or are just not able to care for ourselves or each other.

Our book club discussion may be the perfect opening to a conversation that needs to take place while we're still the active, busy people our kids are used to. The end may not be in sight but we need to share with our grown children how, when the time comes, we see ourselves ratcheting down our life style and aging with whatever grace we can muster. It may be an unpleasant subject for them (It made me uneasy whenever my mother handed me an updated list of the banks where she had parked her money), but it's downright anxiety-provoking for us.

Let that not be an excuse, I tell myself. Let these books be the entry point for saying what needs to be said and understood. Then we can put the whole business behind us and get on with our lives.

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Parenting Grown Children: Do they still need our help?

10/29/2015

The debate goes on: when it comes to money and time, should we offer a helping hand or impose tough love on our adult children? Of course, we all want our children to be independent adults who are able to make mature decisions about their lives. But does one approach best the other?

Posts and comments on this blog have explored the issue (most recently here and here) –some of us gratified by the pleasure it gives us to help our children (either monetarily by, say, helping with the down payment on a house, or time-wise by, say, babysitting the grandkids so both parents can work); others feel good about their hands-off approach and the way their kids have struggled but eventually overcome their financial or time issues.

A recent article by Dr. Cecilia M. Ford takes a slightly different tack. Noting that "the further a family is from their immigrant roots, the more likely they are to be steeped in the ideal that we must make it on our own, and as soon as possible, live apart from our parents," she raises questions about whether separation and financial independence are sign posts of maturity or rather a cultural signifier of the past half-century.

Here are some of her points:

History suggests inter-dependence. Cultures have always promoted inter-generational support–except in recent times. French economist Thomas Picketty's 2014 book Capital in the 21st Century points out that in the latter half of the 20^th century, in which the middle class flourished and many of us were able to achieve economic success, was the anomaly and not the rule. For most of human history, wealth has been controlled by the 1% (or less) and the current swing back in that direction is more of a return to business as usual. Given that perspective, helping out our kids financially or with our time is not "a crazy new idea but returning to age-old customs."

The culture is shifting. We are in the midst of a cultural norm-shifting moment toward greater interfamilial connectedness. Our kids are working more hours than ever before and need us to be around more than we needed our parents. "People on the lower socioeconomic rungs of the ladder accept this out of need. Many children are raised with the help of extended family and resources are shared because they have to be. More and more of the rest of the population may be faced with similar needs."

To each his own home may no longer work.We may have to change the way we see ourselves in relation to others. "In the United States, the giving or receiving of help (“free stuff”) has a particularly bad reputation. There are times when it’s OK to get it, (when you inherit, for example) and times when it’s very much not OK. The norm that we have lived with, in middle-class America is that the ideal is for each family unit to have its own dwelling."

To help or not to help is a personal. While independence is a fine ideal, there is a thin line between independence and isolation. Parents need to judge when their help is useful and necessary versus a potential “crutch” that may lead to an unhealthy dependence.

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