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PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
We look forward to it all year long and then, suddenly, there we are: three generations of family packed into one vacation spot.
Last year, I shared six tips on how to ease the tensions that sometimes intrude on the joys of togetherness. This year those tips are part of a vacation package pulled together by NextAve, the PBS website for those of us over 50. You can check out the whole shebang here
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PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
When it comes to giving our grown children advice (the unsolicited variety), it's seller beware. Paterfamilias, for one, thought he had mastered that elementary lesson, especially after giving Alpha Daughter his best lawyerly advice about an insurance claim. He had offered his counsel in serial fashion, which is to say, several times to make various legal points, until she finally cut him off: "I don't want to talk about it anymore," she told him.
He forgot that lesson when there was a small claims court suit Alpha Daughter needed to bring against an airline that wronged her, our son-in-law and our Grand Pup. (As they were checking in for their flight from Boston to Berlin–they were going to live in Berlin for a year–the airline told them it wouldn't let the dog on board, even though our SIL had discussed size of dog and crate with them in advance and had met all their requirements. SIL and pup had to purchase another ticket and fly another airline the next day. No refund from the first airline!) It wasn't so much PF's offering of advice on how to file a claim–that was greatly appreciated–it was the timing of that advice. She was temporarily overwhelmed by her workload and family demands and just didn't "want to talk about it now."
So did PF know better than to offer advice when Alpha Daughter–a woman with a responsible job, 12-year-old child, house and mortgage–needed to replace her 13-year-old car? It was very tempting to tell her what to buy: PF had not only just published his book on the history of automobile safety (Car Safety Wars: 100 years of technology, politics and death), he had bonded with many experts who follow the day-to-day safety records of cars currently on the road.
This time, though, he wised up. He used email to send buying suggestions from a friend at the Center for Auto Safety and links to government and other sites that rank cars for various aspects of their safety.
The next morning, he was a little uneasy about opening the return email from his daughter. "I thought she was going to tell me to butt out." Instead, her return message was simple and elegant: "Great advice. Thanks dad."
As I see it, PF dodged the advice bullet by not giving direct suggestions–buy this, not that–but rather by leading her to the sources that she could use to make a good decision. That's why he wanted to intervene in the first place: "All I care about is the safety of my daughter, my grandchild and my son-in-law." He didn't mention the GrandPup.
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PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
Words matter: When we talk to our adult kids, when we talk to our Grands and, most especially, when we talk to our adult kids about our Grands aka their children. Some of us, it seems, blur the line between parenting and grandparenting. We may even stumble into that biggest of verboten areas: telling our kids how to raise their children.
On her website, Empowering Parents, Debby Pincus hands out some advice that keeps the parent/grandparent line sharp. Her basic point: "Unsolicited advice is rarely welcome, and if it’s coming from one’s own parents or in-laws, it will most likely be heard as criticism."
Similarly, one word that's been raising a ruckus in parenting circles and on advice columns and grandparenting blogs (such as Susan Adcox's grandparents.about.com), is "my"–as in the grandparental use of "my baby" or "my darlings" to refer to our Grands. Some parents–usually the moms–take umbrage at our presumption of possession. The children are, of course, theirs. For grandparents who like the warmth of the use of "my" to refer to their Grands, there's a common sense recourse. Ask the mom whether she minds or how she feels about it. Ditto– particularly for grandmothers — the use of a grandparent name that edges too close to being the mom, such as Big Mommy or G-Mommy.
In her column on this point, Adcox acknowledges how irritating our commandering of the parental role might be, but she also suggests the parents in question could back off a bit. After all, we play an important role in our grandchildren's lives. Adcox suggests we say something to the effect that, 'We're not perfect. Be prepared to forgive us as we make some missteps.'
A reader of Carolyn Hax's column on that point also has a personal response. "I've also upset my daughter-in-laws (as well as my daughters) by saying "my baby." When hit with the inevitable "It's not your baby," I respond with, "Of COURSE that's my baby. Just as much as YOU are, my little (insert silly nickname here)!" Amazing things happen during that exchange. Mom stops feeling threatened, "Granny" lets Mom know she will always be there and Mom realizes that Granny loves her just as much as she does the baby. It doesn't hurt to throw in, "Can I do something for you so you can get some rest?"
It's all about balancing those boundaries.
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PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
Did we hang around the college campus too long when we dropped our child off that fall of freshman year? Did we call too often? Visit once too many times? That's not what Julie Lythcott-Haims is talking about when she talks about overparenting and overprotecting college students or, to use the trendier term, helicopter-parenting them. A former Dean of Freshmen and Undergraduate Advising at Stanford University, Lythcott-Haims has seen the effect of helicopter parenting on Stanford students. Here's some of what she had to say about it in her book, How to Raise an Adultand in an interview with Tech Crunch
FROM THE BOOK:
"Too many of us do some combination of overdirecting, overprotecting, or over-involving ourselves in our kids’ lives. We treat our kids like rare and precious botanical specimens and provide a deliberate, measured amount of care and feeding while running interference on all that might toughen and weather them. But humans need some degree of weathering in order to survive the larger challenges life will throw our way. Without experiencing the rougher spots of life, our kids become exquisite, like orchids, yet are incapable, sometimes terribly incapable, of thriving in the real world on their own. Why did parenting change from preparing our kids for life to protecting them from life, which means they’re not prepared to live life on their own?
…The dean in me may have been concerned about the development and prospects of young adults who had been overparented—and I think I’ve made better choices as a parent thanks to spending so much time with other people’s young adults. But the parent in me has struggled with the same fears and pressures every other parent faces, and, again, I understand that the systemic problem of overparenting is rooted in our worries about the world and about how our children will be successful in it without us. Still, we’re doing harm. For our kids’ sakes, and also for our own, we need to stop parenting from fear and bring a more healthy—a more wisely loving—approach back into our communities, schools, and homes.
FROM THE TECHCRUNCH INTERVIEW:
You were at Stanford a long while. At what point did you think: It’s weird how involved all these parents have become?
I began to see it more and more over time – parents who were coming to the university with their sons and daughters and sticking around, sometimes literally and often virtually. I found it bewildering. My own experience as a student in the ‘80s didn’t include much involvement from my parents at all, and I began wondering what if my parents had been expected to register for my courses, settle roommate disputes, talk with my professors about my grades. Not that long ago, 18- to 20-year-olds had the capacity to do those things for themselves, and now, they seemed not to.
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PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
Am I my child's repository? This is not an existential question. Now that the kids have moved out and we're empty nesters, many of us are clearing out closets, purging storage spaces and lightening the load of stuff stored in our house. We may move to smaller quarters or stay put and reuse the now-unoccupied bedrooms. Downsizing or rightsizing, we're going through our stuff–which leads us to all the papers, books, photos and assorted junk our kids have left behind.
We've probably already threatened them with a "take it now or it gets thrown out." They may opt for the garbage default or stop by to carry away an old teddy bear or two. That doesn't mean we shouldn't go through the leftovers and sift gold from dross. By that I mean, kids marry, have homes of their own and children. When that happens, some of the items piled in cardboard boxes and stuffed in bureau drawers may take on a new value.
Having gone through the Big Sift recently, I relied on three criteria to make save or dump decisions.
Would they want to share this memento with their children?
Taped-up hockey sticks, scarred action figures, Barbie dolls minus a part or two, tomes of poetry from high school English, a prom dress–they will not age well. Case in point: When my son was a wee lad he loved Matchbox cars–played with them endlessly. I saved the best of them–how could I get rid of something that was a huge chunk of his childhood. But years later when I took them out to let his children play with them, the cars were a chipped-paint mess. You couldn't tell one car from another. Beyond their politeness in hearing how their dad loved to play with them, the Grands had little interest in the cars.
But it ain't always so. My mother-in-law hit the savings jackpot. Years ago when she told her college-age son–my future husband–to get rid of the stuff that was littering his room and closet, he was ready to dump his set of Lionel electric trains. (See photo above). He no longer had any interest in them. She looked ahead and wrapped each train car and the tracks in newspaper and stored them in a sturdy box. Years later, when our son was born, she delivered the train set, which not only provided great bonding moments for father and son but, 30 years later, delivered similar thrills for–and bonding with–visiting grandchildren.
Will they need it some day?
Should they reach their dotage and want to write their memoirs, some of the letters, reports, diaries and photos would be a necessary part of a primary historical record. But not everything. Such as the boxes of photos, particularly from their pre-smartphone college days. If they don't take them away, a smattering of photos can be scanned and sent their way as a digital memory book–or they could become part of a celebratory e-book for, say, a Big Birthday. They are never too old to have a look back and see who they were when they were young.
As to letters from friends, you never know what will be meaningful years from now. A recent –and very moving–young adult book, “I Will Always Write Back: How One Letter Changed Two Lives” is based on penpal letters between a school girl in New Jersey and a school boy in Zimbabwe. It traces the enormous impact that correspondence had on both their lives. Someone in the New Jersey family had the good sense to save those letters from the downsizing demons.
Does the sentimental value overwhelm the practical?
There may be letters from friends or grandparents that speak of important reminiscences or life's values. There may be objects that embody a special time in their life. It might be the hand-knit blanket a grandma made especially for them or a weird sculpture that always sat on their desk or a stuffed animal that saw them through the traumas of growing up. No matter how scarred or worn, those mementos don't lose their power.
The shelves of soccer trophies or drawers of swimming ribbons, the high school yearbooks and college textbooks may bring back a range of emotions, but a photo of them scanned into a digital record will suffice. That space can be cleared, shelves cleaned. The Lionel trains, though–wrapped and boxed–are a keeper.
(For more on paring down, see Mary Quigley's blog on AARP, How to Rid Your Home of Your Adult Children's Stuff, and my previous post Five tips for rightsizing overstuffed attics, closets and bookshelves.
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PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
After they graduate from college, many young adults give their parents a scare: They bum around–travel the country, try out non-career jobs, test-run relationships. It's a drop-out moment–a sudden roughness on the road to what we assumed would be a smooth adulthood.
Should we worry? David Brooks puts it in perspective for us in this excerpt from a column in the New York Times.
"As emerging adults move from job to job, relationship to relationship and city to city, they have to figure out which of their meanderings are productive exploration and which parts are just wastes of time. This question is very confusing from the inside, and it is certainly confusing for their parents.
Yet here is the good news. By age 30, the vast majority are through it. The sheer hardness of the “Odyssey Years” teaches people to hustle. The trials and errors of the decade carve contours onto their hearts, so they learn what they love and what they don’t. They develop their own internal criteria to make their own decisions. They fear what other people think less because they learn that other people are not thinking about them; they are busy thinking about themselves.
Finally, they learn to say no. After a youth dazzled by possibilities and the fear of missing out, they discover that committing to the few things you love is a sort of liberation. They piece together their mosaic.
One thing we can tell young grads and their parents is that this is normal. This phase is a thing. It’s a not a sentence to a life of video games, loneliness and hangovers. It’s a rite of passage that makes people strong.
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PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
Some of us practice tough love when it comes to money and our grown kids: Once they're adults, they stand on their own two feet. They live within their means. If they're cash poor, it's because they've made unwise financial decisions. Let them live and learn.
Does the same rule apply when our grown kids are time-poor? That is, they don't have enough time to take care of all their responsibilities. Over at grandparenting.com, Susan Adcox posed an interesting question: If we don't believe in bailing out our children when they run out of money–on the theory that they should learn to make better spending decisions–should we bail them out when they run out of time?
Following tough-love logic, the answer would run something like this: if they're time-poor, they need to learn to manage their time better. Let them live and learn.
Being time-poor afflicts many of our grown children, particularly working adults between the ages of 30 and 49, according to a 2011 Gallup poll, and more particularly mothers in that age group. Gallup also reports that those with higher incomes and more education are more likely to suffer from being time-poor.
Helping them out by giving them the gift of time assumes that, like a gift of money, we have some to spare. We have time to run errands for our children–say, getting their car inspected or picking up clothes at the cleaner or waiting at their home for the washing machine repairman to come.
Carl Richards, a financial adviser who writes for the New York Times, has gotten into the time = money trade off. "When and how we exchange time for money, or money for time, is incredibly personal," he wrote recently. "The decision doesn’t fit neatly into some formula. Instead of assuming there’s a right or a wrong answer, we need to put the exchange in the context of what’s right for us right now. Some days, money will matter more. But other days, we’ll consider the money well spent for the time it buys us. That’s the way it should be."
So if we're at a time in our lives when we have time, why not spend it on our grown children and their needs?
For Susan Adcox, helping out with time is worthwhile "if it enables our children to spend more quality time with their families." But if our time is used to afford them the time to, say, binge-watch a television show, would we be less likely to help?
Which, when you get down to it, is often the value line many of us draw when it comes to helping our kids with money: It depends on what they're going to use the money for and whether it will help them or their family in a meaningful way. A trip around the world? Maybe not. Help with a down payment for a safer car? Maybe yes.
The time-money exchange tends to happen more frequently as we get older, Richards notes. "We still need money, but we often start to value time more. We care about time spent with family…. We have the money that gives us the time with the people we care about, doing the things we love."
And, I would add, using that time to help those we love as well.
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PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
Yesterday, I posted about the international bond we parents of grown children have: Wherever we are in the world and whatever our cultural base, a majority of us are willing–if we're able–to help our kids out financially. Most of our kids appreciate the help, even if they're sometimes embarrassed about taking it–at least that's what the surveys here and in Australia and South Korea found.
Does the same underlying theme hold true for leaving a legacy?
According to a Pew survey of grown children and their parents here and in Germany and Italy, our kids have Great Expectations: American kids–more so than German or Italian–see it as our responsibility to leave them an inheritance.
Kids ages 18-29 have the highest sense of entitlement. That percent declines as they get older–to a mere 28 percent once they reach their 60s and presumably have kids who will have Great Expectations of their own. In Germany and Italy, the percentages are much lower–only 27 percent of Italian bambini and 20 percent of German kinder in the 18-29 age range see a legacy as their parents' responsibility. (The chart below has all the numbers.)
One upbeat note for those of us who may find ourselves struggling financially in old age: The survey found that an overwhelming majority our kids–three out of four–feel a strong obligation to look after us. Germans and Italians had more faith than American kids did that government programs would help financially in old age. That faith may be at the crux of why our kids say they feel it's their responsibility to be there for us. But not necessarily why they may think we should be building a nest egg to pass on to them.
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PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
The trend line in the U.S. is in one direction: Most of those of us who can afford it, like to help our grown kids financially–even as society takes a dim view of it. It's the same in Australia, where the name for financial help flowing from parents to grown kids is Sponge Society. But there's a very different attitude in South Korea. Here are findings from surveys in those countries that inform my point.
In Australia, a recent survey found that 86 per cent of the parents of grown children provide financial help to their adult children. Loans and cash head the list, but rent, credit card bills, vacations, major appliances and down payments on a house are also part of the assistance roster.
Meanwhile, 40 percent of the adult children surveyed admitted to receiving financial support from their parents. One in five of them said they were embarrassed to be getting help from mom and dad.
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PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
In her memoir, "A Fine Romance," Candace Bergen (aka Murphy Brown) reflects on her closeness to her daughter as her child grew from a cranky baby into a creative young woman. Mother and daughter had struggled together through the painful illness and death of Louis Malle, Bergen's husband and her daughter's father, and the mother-daughter challenge of Bergen's remarriage and relocation from Los Angeles to New York. But it is the breach of her child's growing independence that Bergen observes in this passage:
"We do not have the intense intimacy, the giddy banter we once had. I remember friends telling me years ago that this is what happened with their relationships with their daughters. They become friends. There is a distance. There are boundaries. That will never happen to us, I thought. Our relationship is unique. Our bond will go the distance. But it has happened. I have to cave on this."
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