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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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Bank of Mom and Dad: Lending our grown kids money for a mortgage

10/22/2015

We are the helping-hand generation. All the surveys say so. Even when our kids are adults, we are ready–if we can afford it–to lend them money or gift them cash, especially for what we consider the Big Things. Chief among those biggies: buying a house. A survey this past spring reports that three out of four of our grown kids who recently bought their first home needed our help to afford the down payment, closing costs or other expenses.

For some of us, it's a guilty (should we be helping them out, still?) pleasure (we get to visit them in their nice home) that pays off. Yes, we might have struggled to do it on our own when we were young, but a whole lot of things have happened since then–including wild inflation in the cost of housing and a shakier economic foundation in the work place. Besides, many of us get a healthy return on our investments. Not necessarily in legal tender but in seeing our kids–and grandkids– living in a solid house in a stable neighborhood.

Sometimes, though, that investment can run into trouble.If our children are married, there can be a divorce; if our child's spouse gets the house, where does that leave our gift? Or, if our child refinances and takes out $50,000 to pay for a five-star vacation or $100,000 for a BMW sports car, where does that leave our investment?

Some of those issues were addressed in a recent NYT story that warned of cautions to take when we help grown children with the purchase of a house.

Here are two key points from financial planners and mortgage experts:

–The divorce contingency: If the gift or loan is specified in writing as being a gift/loan only to one's child (and not the couple), in case of a divorce, the gift should not be considered mutual property available for division. Your kid's spouse may get the house, but the gift has to be repaid. If it's a loan, a repayment plan should be in place and both divorcing partners should be obligated by it–regardless of who is living in the house.

–The refinancing issue: If parents think their child may have over-spending issues–or that the spouse might–they can take the control-freak route. As terms of the gift or loan, they can require that their name by added to the title at closing. That gives them the right to be notified if there is an application to refinance as well as the right to approve or disapprove the refinancing–though not necessarily how their kids use that money.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Helicopter Parenting: Is hovering over adult kids a big problem or a bad rap?

10/13/2015

Despite the anecdotal data–the stories about parents setting up job interviews for their grown kids or, worse, accompanying them to the interview; of parents calling their kid's college professor and making a case for a higher grade–we are not as overly involved as we're made out to be.

Writing in Salon a few months back, Alfie Kohn went beyond the tales of outrageous helicoptering to see what the research says. It shows that, yes, we're in touch with our kids at a higher rate than the pre-cell phone, pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook era. But communicating–even at a "hovering" rate–isn’t the same as intervening, which, it turns out, is fairly rare (but makes great blog posts). Kohn points to the National Survey of Student Engagement, which asked some 9,000 college students about parental intervention issues. Only 13 percent of college freshmen and 8 percent of seniors said a parent had frequently intervened to help them solve problems.

As to the workplace, Michigan State University researchers found that 77 percent of the 725 employers they surveyed “hardly ever witnessed a parent while hiring a college senior.” But the Michigan study had this interesting aside:

Several employers could not resist adding comments on their experiences with involved parents. One employer had advice for parents submitting resumes, “Please tell your student that you have submitted a resume to a company. We have called a student from our resume pool only to find they did not know anything about our company and were not interested in a position with us.” Another talked of a lengthy discussion with a mother on why the company could not arrange a special interview for her son who could not make the scheduled on-campus interview. Employers acknowledged that they were more likely to see mothers collecting company information and making arrangements for interviews, company visits, and other contacts with the company. Fathers usually appeared during negotiations, when the hiring decision did not favor their child.

No one said there's a sudden moment when we go from controlling parent to advisory parent, from being in charge to letting go, but the gradual easing of the reins does eventually take place–though not necessarily the many ways of keeping in close and almost constant touch.

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

Marriage Vows: How much influence do we have on their choice? “Meet the Patels” tells all.

10/05/2015

We went to see Meet the Patels last night. A delightful documentary: Witty, insightful, one family's dilemma but universal in its message–especially for those of us who think (or whose parents thought it for us) we have any sway over who our children decide to marry.

The Patels are an Indian family living well and successfully in California. The dad, who came to the U.S. to study and stayed on to make his fortune, and the mom are a well-suited, arranged-marriage couple who've been happy together for more than 30 years. They want the same happiness and sense of Indian-culture family for their son (and daughter–but it's the son's story that is the focus of the film, which was filmed by his sister).

We who do not believe in arranged marriages–the Patel son does, or thinks he does–can sit back and laugh with the film's story teller (the son) who does not disparage his parents or make fun of them but takes us along on some of the real-life arranged dates, which includes a speed-dating event for Indian singles. We may laugh at the folly of trying to set up for marriage an American-born and very California-ized son. But the reality that underlies the movie and its message is how universal the parents are: What they want–what motivates them in what they consider to be their modernized marriage-arrangement journey–is for their children to be happy.

Isn't this true of all of us. Or to put it another way, we are only as happy as our unhappiest child. Let joy be unconfined.

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