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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.

Downsizing: How attached to our house are our grown kids? Is it just the storage space?

03/18/2016

"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.

Empty Nest Refilled: A reversal of a housing trend

03/04/2016

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.

Vacationing with Grown Children: A universal truth from Oaxaca

02/24/2016

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.

Money Matters: Is there a new normal for supporting adult kids.

02/19/2016

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.

Observations: Novelist Penelope Lively on the angst when children grow up and away

02/05/2016

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.

Our grown children’s pain is our pain, and it’s worse as we age.

01/25/2016

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.

The different world our grown children face as parents–and their different attitudes

01/16/2016

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

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."