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

Cellphone-itis: Do we have too much access to our adult kids and they to us?

04/23/2025

A friend's college-age daughter called her in the middle of the night. The daughter had been out drinking with a couple of girlfriends; one of those friends passed out on the sidewalk and couldn't be roused. The daughter was in tears and wanted her mom to call an ambulance for her friend. The daughter was in Paris; the mother, in Philadelphia.

When I told my son the Parisian drinking story, he asked me, "Did you and dad know stuff like that about me?"

We did not, at least not until those stories had been honed–months or years later–into well-told anecdotes. I remind my son, whose 20s are well behind him, that we were not a cell phone generation. When he was studying abroad in the 1990s, he couldn't have called us at midnight from a street corner in Budapest no matter how drunk or sick he or a friend was. He had to solve problems without our help. Lessons were learned, presumably.

Which raises the question: Is the ease with which our adult children can reach us whenever there's a problem a positive or negative? Do we know too much or is it better to know too little? Between our 24/7 access by cell phone or our ability to track them via a phone app, are we hindering their growth toward independence or keeping them safe in a fraught world?

Studies of college-age and older kids suggest that frequent (several times a day) communication between parent and adult child can blur boundaries and undermine the development of independence. For parents, it could hinder the ability to let go. An article published a few years ago in Psychology Today suggested that the combination of teenagers, cellphones, and a constant connection to parents could produce a “nation of wimps.”

That seems a bit harsh, and yet it's another reason to think through the implications of constant cellphone communication and the use of tracking apps to know what's going on in our adult kids' lives all the time.

As to the Paris to Phillie call for help, it was resolved on the scene in France. Before the mom could launch emergency aid, four American college boys came by and helped the girls get back to their apartment. The mom, in Philly, didn't know this detail–the daughter's cellphone battery had run down so voice-to-voice communication was lost. But the mom used her cellphone app to track her daughter's arrival back at the Paris apartment.

In another year or two, mother and daughter will likely have a well-honed anecdote to tell about the incident. For now, the mom can't wait until her daughter is safely back home and with a fully charged cell phone.

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

Wedding Blues Update: The joyous upside of a daughter’s nontraditional wedding

04/07/2025

Consider this the antidote. In my last post, I blogged about a mother of the bride who was distraught that her daughter was breaking all the traditional rules of a wedding (no bridal gown, no attendants, no celebratory dinner reception plus the father banned from walking his daughter down the aisle–the latter not an easy break to accept). The parents of the bride threatened not to attend the wedding.

On her substack, Deborah Copaken (author of Ladyparts, a book and a blog) takes her daughter's upcoming wedding (low on the usual trappings of tradition) and writes of the joy she finds in planning the wedding with her daughter and how that joy–any joy in our lives–should come before the deep distresses we may currently be experiencing.

Here are a few quotes from the piece, "Planning a wedding during the apocalypse," that parents (not just moms) of grown children might find relevant and comforting.

If I told you how many hours my daughter and I each spent searching every corner of the internet for the right “vibe” of tablecloth over these past several months, you might wonder, as she recently did, why bother? Why bother to care about whether or not we add a runner to a tablescape in a hellscape? Why create a DIY wedding canopy out of seven-foot birch logs and a piece of fabric from our former ally, France, when the protective canopies of NATO, Medicare, healthcare, and social security are being strip-mined from the fabric of our lives? ….how can you even think about what fabric of tablecloths should be at a wedding?

But think we continued to do. And do. And do. Until we suddenly landed on a solution.

…Burlap: the fabric of both the people and potatoes. … The fabric that says, I’m not trying to make a fuss here at my wedding, okay, I just want to be free to live, work, and love, is that too much to ask?

Copaken leans into religious tradition to unspool her feelings about the upcoming wedding and its rituals:

In Judaism, the Talmud teaches us that if a wedding procession meets a funeral procession at an intersection, the wedding revelers must always be given the right of way. And if a death in the family occurs on the same day as a wedding, the celebration of love takes precedence. Simply put, happy, future-looking events should always eclipse sad, backward-looking ones.

And here is how she acknowledges the importance of tradition, even if it's not celebrated in a traditional way:

So, this May, as spring flowers push through thawing soil, and Earth asserts its resilience while it still can, we will gather among her trees. And we will smile for the camera. And we will cover our tables with burlap and fruit. And we will don dresses and suits and comfortable shoes—my daughter’s encouraging all of her friends and family to wear sneakers to dance—to bear witness as two humans profess their love for one another, out loud, under a cotton cloth supported by thin logs held up by their best friends: a canopy that represents their home, the strength of their loving bond, the importance of community to help them uphold it, and an open-sided fragility to elements beyond their control.

painting: Renoir, Dance at Bougival
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Wedding Blues: When the bride and groom break with family traditions

03/14/2025

Some of us dream (this writer excluded) of planning our child's wedding, especially if our child is the bride. Oh the bridal gown we'll buy, the party we'll plan, the food we'll serve, the band we'll hire, the flowers we'll choose. And if we have clear and happy memories of our own extravagantly traditional wedding, we're probably even more excited to hit the same high notes.

Except, maybe our daughters (and sons) aren't. A very disappointed mom wrote to Nichole Chung, Slate's Care and Feeding column, to complain about her bride/daughter's very different idea of what her wedding will be like. The mom and dad are threatening to boycott the toned-down event. Read on to get a sense of the mom's complaint [edited for brevity]

My daughter is engaged to a nice enough man but has thrown out every tradition that is important to us: They refuse to create a registry, so my friends have no idea what to get them for wedding presents—turns out she is not even inviting my friends to the wedding, just their own friends and family. She isn’t having a bridal party, and her sisters are hurt because they wanted to be bridesmaids. I was so looking forward to shopping with her for her bridal gown, but she bought a plain white dress. Worst of all, she won’t let her father walk her down the aisle because, in her words, she’s “not property to be given away.”

There is no reception, just champagne (no bar either!) and wedding cake in the basement (!!) of the church. She and her fiancé are both refusing to do anything we want. They are both doctors and can pay for what they want. Her father and I are not sure we want to be there. How do we navigate this without alienating our daughter?

Here's part of what Chung had to say:

The only thing to do here is to get over yourselves. Your daughter and her fiancé are adults, they’re paying for their wedding, and they get to have the kind of celebration they want. Their special day is not about you; it’s about them and the life they want to build together.

They want to throw a smaller and far simpler affair than you’d envisioned—so what? This should be super obvious, but not everyone values the same traditions or wants a huge to-do. I understand feeling a little regretful that your daughter’s wedding won’t be just as you expected.

I don’t understand getting so worked up about it that you’d consider boycotting her day entirely. If you’re really willing to risk hurting and possibly becoming estranged from your child because she wants to get married without a bunch of arbitrary and ultimately unimportant “traditions,” your priorities are seriously, deeply messed up.

I stand with Chung. What would you tell the mom?

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

Refilled Nests: Do we help or hinder our kids if they move home again.

03/07/2025

Okay. So Gen Z kids are living under the parental roof again and in greater numbers and percentages than our generation did at their age. I wrote about that in my previous post. The reasons are mostly economic–housing costs are high; they're saving money for their future. The good news from a Pew Research survey is that two out of three of our kids who live at home say they look to us for financial and career advice.

That's heartening of course. They're still willing to come to us for our pearls of worldly wisdom. Does that mean they're acting on our advice or that living at home is helping them develop solid financial habits and become independent–as in living in their own pad.

That's a question michelle singletary tackled in her column on adult kids who live at home. (Her three 20-somethings were living at home at the time she wrote her column.) She wanted to know where, as a parent, the help versus hinder, the supporter versus enabler line was and what to do if you're on the coddler side of that line.

Here's some of what she shared from her own experience:

Set up a situation where you’re helping, not enabling, your young adults.

Set goals. Make sure they have a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-based plan (SMART goals). Are they living at home to pay off student debt? If so, they should have a reasonable plan in place that moves them to financial independence.

Set rules. For instance, in our home, everyone has a night to cook. If you are going to be out, you still have to provide dinner. It’s a home, not a hotel, so everyone has to do their fair share.

Make a deal. We carry some expenses to allow them to save. For example, my husband and I aren’t charging our children rent because they are saving most of their pay and/or investing it. That was the deal. We won’t charge rent as long as they are saving as promised. If we see wild spending sprees — rent will be charged.

Ask questions. We get to ask money questions within reason. We check to make sure they are meeting the goals they set in exchange for free rent. Trust, but verify.

Respect their boundaries. We are constantly checking in to make sure they are on track. When the kids think we are overstepping, they say so. And we back off.

Situations deteriorate. When is it time for the enabler to cut the cord.

You are being overprotective when your adult child is eating out all the time and planning a trip to Mexico for spring break, but can’t find the money to pay for her own car insurance. Or he is not paying down his student loans at a reasonable pace because he’s overspending on entertainment or eating out.

Bad financial habits develop if your adult child is using all his pay for all play. The financial umbilical cord has to be cut if leaving it in place ends with an overindulged adult treating you like his or her personal ATM.

The bottom line for rolling out the welcome-home mat

It is important for young adults to learn to be good money managers, but it does not have to come at the expense of them spending their 20s setting up a household they can barely afford, even with roommates.

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

Refilled Nests: Our adult kids are coming home to live with us again. What’s up?

02/26/2025

Our Gen Z kids are nestling into their old bedrooms, sleeping in our basements or otherwise making themselves at home in our homes. The post-college life is unfolding under the parental roof. It isn't just our kids here in the U.S. Parents in other first-world countries are finding their 20-somethings–and even 30s–reversing trends and coming back to live at home.

Many of us find it shocking. It's so unlike what we did when we were their age: We couldn't wait to break free and live independently. At least that's how I remember those heady days–I got a job, I rented a walkup apartment with my best friend, we furnished it with her aunt's cast-off sofa. We felt like we were living large.

Today our kids are migrating back to their parental homes in significant numbers. Here are the numbers:

87 percent more adults between the ages of 25 and 34 were living at home with their parents compared to 20 years ago, according to 2024 census data.

Nearly half of young adults live with their parents, a rate that hasn’t been seen since the 1940s; that’s about 23 million adults between the ages of 18 to 29.

American kids aren't the only ones traipsing home. Macclean's, the Canadian magazine reported, in a cover story entitled, "Why Gen Z Will Never Leave Home," similar findings. Here are the numbers from StatsCan.

46 percent of all twentysomethings lived with a parent in 2021, ; 30 years ago only a third of twentysomethings did.

Nearly a third of people aged 25 to 29 are still living at home compared to 11 per cent in 1981.

Why the push to be homeward bound? After all, many Gen Z kids have jobs that pay more than minimum wage; they could, in theory, eke it out on their own with a roommate or two or three. But other factors are pushing them home.

Bloomberg reports three top reasons young adults are choosing to live with mom and dad again:

To save money.

To take care of older family members.

Because they can’t afford to live outside of the home anymore.

Axios expands on the first point:

Rent, especially in desirable big cities, is very expensive and not improving. So staying home helps young people save money for a future down payment or future rent.

Bloomberg interviewed several young adults and found there was concern that the job market was deteriorating.

By remaining under our roofs, kids are, in effect, pushing off home ownership, marriage and parenthood.

Macclean's looked to Jeffrey Arnett, an American psychologist who studies the transition from adolescence to adulthood, for some wisdom on what young adults are thinking.

In 2000, [Arnett] proposed that people in this life stage weren’t even full adults. Instead, they were “emerging adults,” finding their place in a world that no longer held just one or two possible paths. When he first coined the term, he set the age range at 18 to 25; he now considers this life stage to last until about age 29. “People are taking longer to find a stable place in the adult world,” he says. He’s experienced this firsthand: one of his 25-year-old twins moved home last year.

The Gen Zers themselves seem to be less judgmental about living at home than we were. But the effect on us today is profound. Here's Macclean's take:

For parents, it means those heart-tugging memes of “only having 18 summers with your kids” are a load of crap. They’re emotionally and financially supporting their kids for much longer than expected, forcing them to reimagine their retirement years. Instead of an empty nest, they now have a roommate who keeps forgetting to empty the dishwasher.

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

Sharing the Wealth: What do we owe our adult kids?

02/11/2025

Do we have to share our wealth–be it a dollop from our savings, income or investments–with struggling grown kids? If we don't have to, should we anyway?

Many of us have answered the latter question with a "yes." That is, we want to if we can afford it. (Never mind the Boomer, Gen X or Millenial nomenclature: We are the Wealth Transfer generation.) Some of us have said yes even if we can't quite afford it. But a woman writing to Slate's Kirstin Wong can afford it. A widow, she writes that her husband left her financially comfortable. She owns two homes, takes one or two cruise vacations a year and cares for two beloved French bulldogs that, in her words, cost more to maintain than a small child, which her only child has as well as a wife, a small apartment in a dicey neighborhood and health-related debts.

The grandmother/mother is in a quandry: Should she help them out if they have not welcomed her into their lives? Should she just write them off.

Before we rush to judgment, let's get more of the details she shared in her letter.

–She and her son have been "extremely distant ever since he graduated college," she writes, "and especially since he got married. He didn’t even have a wedding to invite me to, and I’ve never met my 7-year-old granddaughter in person."

–The granddaughter needed surgery shortly after birth and the parents have been paying that off as well as college debt. They would like to send their daughter to a more challenging school in a safer neighborhood but can't afford to do so.

–When she asked him recently why there was such a coolness between them, "I was shocked when he told me he and his wife have always felt that I don’t care about them because I’ve never helped them financially."

–Her daughter-in-law comes from a poor immigrant family, "yet they have a very close relationship with her parents, who watch my granddaughter every day after school. Apparently, if you can’t afford to give them anything, they won’t expect it!"

–She is thinking of leaving her worldly goods to her church instead of to her "greedy and materialistic" son.

The French bulldog reference pushed some hostile buttons for me, but Slate's Wong wisely moved away from the judgmental. Her advice revolved instead around the symbolic meaning of money and the importance of communication. Here are some relevant excerpts:

Money issues are rarely just about dollars and cents. Money holds symbolic value for all of us, and to your son and his wife, financial support could be tied to emotional support, care, or even love. It’s easy to characterize them as greedy and resentful, but consider another explanation: Maybe, given all their struggles and your relative ease, he feels unimportant and neglected.

Money is a resource, and it seems to be one that’s readily available to you, so I can see why your son is interpreting your lack of financial help as a lack of care. He and his wife might not expect the same from her family because they support them in other ways, using other resources, like time and child care—both of which are immensely valuable.

Talk to your son without holding judgment or making assumptions. Figure out what care means to him and what he needs from you to feel it. Chances are, it’s about not just money.

painting: "Bacchus and Ariadne" by Frank Auerbach
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Good Manners: Who’s to blame when grandkids don’t say Thank You? What if they’re step-grands?

02/04/2025

When we don't get a thank you for gifts sent–holiday presents, birthday gifts, Confirmation, Bar Mitzvah, whatever–resentment becomes an unpleasant visitor in our lives. Why should it be an effort for our adult kids or grandkids to text, email or phone in a "Thanks"–never mind penning a note on thick vellum paper. (That's a wish too far.)

We can also be quick to enter the blame game. If it's the grandkids who haven't responded, we often point a finger at the mom, especially if she's our daughter-in-law. When there are step-daughters involved, it can get even trickier. Here's the complaint of one woman who is grandmother to three families. She writes to Sahaj Kahur that two of the families not only say thank you but are interactive with her, often bringing her their artwork which is hung all over her home. It's the third family that's the problem. Her stepdaughter–her husband's child–is not, in her eyes, bringing up her children to have good manners. There are no thank you's for gifts or other treats from the grandparents and no offers of the children's drawings to hang in the grandparent's house. The stepdaughter complains that the grandmother is not treating her children equally with the others. The grandmother writes that her husband promised to talk to his daughter about the problem but hasn't. What is the grandmother to do to stop her resentment from growing worse?

Here are three of the suggestions (edited for space and clarity) Kahur makes, some of which may highlight issues many of us have in our relationships with the parents of our grandchildren.

ONE: If there are two parents in the picture, it’s not just on your stepdaughter to raise the kids with manners. Try to avoid zooming in on your stepdaughter being the problem.

TWO: Strengthen the relationship you have with her. Focus on the positives in the relationship you do have with her and her kids. If that doesn’t feel like enough, be honest with her. Just remember that you want to approach the conversation with care, not with the intention to “prove” that you treat all your grandkids similarly.

THREE: Kindly tell your husband that something needs to change and you would appreciate working together to create a realistic, yet more specific and time-bound, plan on approaching his daughter.

REMINDER: You’ve been stuck in limbo and the only way for something to change is for something to change. So take some time now to consider how you can approach your stepdaughter and her kids differently, or how to have a more structured plan in place with your husband.

painting: "The White Cat," Pierre Bonnard
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Talking Points: Chats with our grown kids about our sex lives.

01/24/2025

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? What could be more uncomfortable–and possibly more inappropriate–than a chat with our grown kids about our sex lives and theirs? This is not the sex education conversation that we may have dreaded when our kids were teens or pre-teens. Talking about our sex lives–isn't that socially and familialy verboten or close to it? And yet, two Brazilian filmmakers have videotaped parents and adult children doing just that. The filmmakers suggest that we parents and our adult children be more open about our sex lives and eventually about "other lost opportunities for intimacy."

As the lead to the NYT story on the subject put it, "Most of us would probably rather die than talk with family about our sex lives."

Before we dismiss the idea out of hand, the NYT writer notes that the point of such a chat is meaningful. Here's what she says:

This film begins with all the giggly, seat-squirming cringe you might expect. But once the awkwardness subsides, the film quickly reveals something more profound: loved ones sharing real, meaningful moments from their lives. Sexuality offers life lessons about confidence, trauma and happiness. The film asks the viewer to imagine other conversations left unspoken, from family finances to death.

In making the video, the filmmakers provided questions to facilitate conversation and filmed as their subjects took the plunge. As one of the filmmakers said:

Listening is not only what you want to hear about or don’t want to hear about. Across all strong friendships and relationships, you need to be able to say hard things. You need to be there to listen.”

Although many of us think of our adult children as people we're close to, the filmmakers point out that "people that should be very close are actually far away. You are more likely to talk about sex with strangers.”

Can you see yourself talking to your children about your sex life–or asking them about theirs? I did an informal survey of several friends: The answers ranged from the expected "never" to one friend, the mother of two 20-something sons, who said the only thing she thought her sons would be interested in was how old she was when she first had sex. She then referred me to the father of the boys for further discussion of the question.

So I'm asking you, dear readers. Have you ever had such a talk? Would you ever? How would you begin?

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

New Year Blues: The pain of holiday visits with adult kids

01/14/2025

The holidays were barely over when the calls for help started pouring into Jane Adams help line. Parents of adult children had had a rough time during the "joyous" December celebrations. Adams, a social psychologist, reports that she had more inquiries for coaching "from parents whose grown kids disappointed them by not showing up, blaming them for their own problems, calling them toxic, or ignoring them completely."

Ugh. Holiday visits can be devastating, especially when those visits go on for too long and there's over-exposure to–and resentment of–the role each family member plays in the family dynamic. Many adult kids regress when they're home for the holidays. As one psychotherapist put it, "It’s not a question of if the regression is going to happen, it’s when." Or as a NYTimes writer, writing from the adult child's perspective, put it:

Psychologists even have a term to describe the way we fall back into predictable, maddening behavior patterns when we’re with our family of origin. It’s called family systems theory — the notion that families have an equilibrium, and each person has a fixed role that “is in service of keeping the family system intact,” said psychiatrist Pooja Lakshmin. So whatever your established role is — whether you’re the appeaser, or the family clown, or the petulant one — you’re going to be thrown right back there the second you walk through the door of your childhood home.

And that's only one piece of the difficult stuff that can surface when our grown kids come to visit for the holidays..

No wonder that for most families there's what Adams calls "a mismatch of expectations and reality." The silver lining in this reality–and the hope held out by Adams–is talking through the issues but with a particular perspective in mind. Here's Adams:

Starting the new year with a thoughtful, honest, conversation about how to heal the relationship instead of a blow by blow recitation about what transpired and whose fault it was makes it more likely that 2025 will be happier for everyone.

Here's to a New Year graced with family peace, love and joy.

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

Mind the Gap: When our child’s new love comes from a different background

01/07/2025

Some of us count ourselves lucky. Our children find their future Mr or Ms Right next door. Or within the same time zone. Or in the same country. Or from a similar culture. But what happens when none of that describes our child's important love interest. Instead, it's someone with a very different background and from a faraway country. If our child is living in that country and we're living here, that may complicate chances to get to know and embrace the person our child loves.

This is not just a thought problem. A reader of ask sahaj wrote to say her daughter is living abroad and is in a serious relationship with a man who lives there. He lives with his parents and the daughter has become close to the family. The reader feels an emotional gap growing between the boyfriend/daughter/second family and herself. She asks for advice on how to get to know the boyfriend despite the geographical and cultural distances.

Much of Sahaj's advice is specific to the reader's situation but it is also general enough to be helpful to any of us who are struggling to get to know our adult child's boyfriend or girlfriend from a seemingly different world. Here are some of Sajaj's tips, paraphrased and edited for brevity:

If you're worried about saying the wrong thing when you talk to the boy/girl friend: You can ask your child, “Are there cultural differences I should be aware of, or that would help me understand him or her better?” Or, saying something to your child like, “I feel nervous about saying the wrong thing and making things worse. I don’t want to bite my tongue because I really care about you. Can we talk about what I’m feeling?”

While it can feel like an unfamiliar situation, you want to be a support to your child. This may sound like, “I’d love to learn more about them. What are your favorite things about them?” And/or you might tell your child that you’d like to talk to the boy/girlfriend the next time you and your child have a call. Even if it’s just asking how they're doing, or learning more about them, this can build intimacy and comfort with them — and vice versa.

Regardless of if there are cultural differences, remember the values that are important to you — kindness, openness and so on. These can help you have empathy while also finding micro ways to continue to nurture your relationship with your child — and by default her boy/girlfriend. These smaller moments, questions and conversations can help build the foundation for something deeper, and bridge that gap you feel.

painting: Frank Auerbach