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

Traveling Abroad: Setting up a trip with a 20-something grandchild.

06/25/2025

Lucky You! Or so my friends tell me when I tell them my 22-year-old granddaughter has suggested we see a little of the world together. Sounds like a delightful summer travel proposition, and it is. And yet, and yet. Not so easy.

If I were traveling with a friend, we might pick a group tour to take us where we wanted to go or sign up for a cruise or for some other organized means of getting from A to B to Z. We would have all transportation, hotels and sightseeing taken care of and someone in charge should there be mishaps.

But a 20-something is not the right fit for an organized tour. Fellow travelers are likely to be much older than she is. Where's the fun or excitement for her in that?

All of which means the trip is DIY. We start our planning: She and I agree on some basics. We'll meet in Amsterdam where she'll be finishing a study course at a university there. Then we'll head north. I've always wanted to go to Scandinavia and my former travelmate (my recently deceased husband) feared being cold and would never consider Sweden or Norway–even in the summer! She and I settle on Oslo and Reykjavik. Destination determination is the easy part.

We will split the rest of the chores. She will research things to do, see, sip and eat once we get to Oslo and Reykjavik. She is of a generation whose fingers fly over their cellphone keypad. It will take her seconds to come up with a coffee shop near our hotel and the scenic walking route to the sculpture garden. She'll figure out the train or bus schedule for a day trip. Since I have the credit card, I will book flights and hotels.

Therein lies the rub. Booking everything is a week of anxiety, stress and confusion. Finding hotels with the right set up for sleeping arrangements, in a central part of the city, at an affordable price–and without the dreaded little line of red type: "Book now. Only 2 rooms left at this price."

At last, I have booked our flights from Amsterdam to Oslo to Reykjavik plus the flights to each of our home airports and the hotels along the way. To quote Thomas Jefferson (in Lin-Manuel Miranda's "Hamilton"): "What'd I miss?" Are all bases covered? Hotels and flights are still sending me alerts to buy coverage to cover mishaps. All of which feeds into my initial misgivings about traipsing around Europe without a guided tour. To say nothing of worries about infirmities of age–will I sleep OK when it's daylight all night? Will my GI system rebel against the changes to my diet? Will we find quiet places in the cities to sit and people-watch? Should we book day trips in advance? Ah, Oh and Oy.

I leave in two days. I'll let you know how it goes en route or when I get back. Stay tuned for Lessons Learned.

painting: Travelling Companions, Augustus Egg
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Observation: Grandparenting advice in two words

06/11/2025

This two-word bit of advice is a reminder that we walk around on eggshells when it comes to doling out advice to our grown children. Writing in Grand Magazine, Karen L. Rancourt zeroes in on grandparents and the urge to let our grown children (who are now parents themselves) know that there's a better, best or our way of caring for a baby, toddler or even a teen. After all, we've been there, done that. Why not share the benefits of our vast experience?

Not so fast. Rancourt lets us know that such counsel is not a positive path forward. Her advice, no matter the parenting issue at hand, is succinct and easy to remember: "Zip It."

Here's her fuller explanation

Why should you zip it? Because, as a grandparent, you are not in the driver’s seat anymore. You are a passenger ‘riding along’ at the pleasure of the parents. When you were raising your own children, you made the rules. Now your job is to enforce the rules set down by your grown children regarding your grandchildren, whether you agree with them or not. To use a common idiom, ‘There’s a new sheriff in town,’ and it isn’t you.

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

Wedding Celebrations: Is it good news that Gen Z kids are thinking small and DIY?

06/04/2025

I bumped into an old work friend, someone I shared office space with some 30 years ago when we were both reporters at a start-up magazine. He moved on to other media jobs, we lost touch except for an occasional Facebook sighting. That's how I knew his daughter had gotten engaged. When we turned the "bumped into" into a "let's have coffee," I got more details on the wedding.

He and his wife love their daughter's fiancé; they like his parents as well. The only minor flaw in the upcoming nuptials was that the bride's mother was disappointed that her daughter and her fiancé were planning their wedding celebration by themselves. Mother and daughter have a loving relationship so that was not the reason for exclusion. Rather, the young couple were part of a Gen Z trend: small, DIY weddings.

According to an Axios posting about wedding trends, ballrooms are out, "micro weddings" are in. Axios had stats to support the observation:

The average guest count nationwide was 131 in 2024, down from 184 in 2006.

Celebrations with 50 guests or fewer made up 18 percent of nuptials last year, compared to 10 percent in 2013.

There are both charming and practical reasons behind the trend:

Charming: Couples say small weddings in cozy settings let them spend more time with loved ones.

Practical: They're a lot less expensive. Micro weddings run up a tab that's about half the cost of traditional weddings.

More highlights from the Axios newsletter:

The trend is growing: Vegas-style chapels and businesses offering curated micro weddings and elopements have opened in Boston; Dallas; Portland, Oregon, Richmond, Virginia, and elsewhere.

Intimate doesn't mean boring. City hall ceremonies have their own trending aesthetic. Pinterest searches for terms like "city hall elopement" and "courthouse wedding dress ideas" have been surging among Gen Zers.

Then there's this dose of reality:

Many brides and grooms-to-be are bracing for pricier nuptials as tariffs could hike the $33,000 cost of an average U.S. wedding, according to The Knot, a planning and registry site.

As to my friends, I raise a celebratory glass of bubbly to them, to a bright future for the bride and groom and to the young couple's current and practical sensibilities.

painting: Tarsila do Amarel, Brazil wedding
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Wedding Blues: Who’s walking the bride down the aisle?

05/13/2025

Restructured families–divorced parents and step-parents–aren't easy for our grown kids to navigate, especially when their weddings roll around. Traditions and protocols that involve multiple parents and their participation in the ceremony can be a minefield of hurt feelings.

As young couples revise their approach to traditional wedding ceremonies, one ritual that has been inflicting pain is that of walking the bride down the aisle. Who's gonna do it? Should it be done at all? A few posts ago, we looked into the case of how a father felt when his daughter told him that neither he nor anyone else would be escorting her down the aisle. No man-to-man handoff of the bride. That was the bride's point: She was not chattel to be given away.

Now we have an instance where the dad is hurt because his daughter has asked her stepdad to walk her down the aisle. Like the dad in the previous post, he is threatening not to attend the wedding. He writes to the NYTimes Ask the Therapist that he and the bride's mother have been divorced for 36 years but during that time he has been "an active and present dad, and we have a good relationship." Nonetheless, the father writes, in addition to giving the bride away "I’m assuming he will also be the one to have a father-daughter dance. This has crushed me. I didn’t say anything to her other than, “Oh, OK.” But I was devastated."

Psychotherapist Lori Gottleib acknowledges the depth of his wound:

These traditional fatherly roles — walking the bride down the aisle, sharing a dance — can carry enormous emotional significance for some people. Perhaps for you, having your daughter’s stepfather perform these rituals feels like an erasure of your parental identity and all the years you’ve invested in being present for your daughter, as well as a referendum on your daughter’s love for you compared with her love for her stepfather.

Gottleib reminds the dad that there’s another way to look at this.

Given that your daughter wants her stepfather’s involvement in her wedding, it sounds like he has been a warm and meaningful presence in her life. Could you step back, and appreciate him not as a rival or replacement in your daughter’s life, but as a positive addition for her? Can you see both your fatherly roles as a collaborative investment in her life rather than as a competition?

Her main piece of advice is no surprise: The dad should not go AWOL for the wedding.

Skipping your daughter’s wedding would transform your hurt feelings into a story that only you are telling, one of not being wanted, or important to her, and rewrite the narrative of your relationship in ways you don’t intend.

One final piece of Gottleib wisdom to the dad and by extension to any of us who've faced situations where our grown children have inflicted pain on us, however unintentional:

The truest measure of your parenting is in the consistent presence you’ve maintained throughout her life. Don’t let one reactive decision erase that legacy. The wedding day will pass, but your decision to attend despite your hurt feelings will speak volumes about your character and your willingness to be the father your daughter needs. And that, I guarantee, is what she’ll remember long after the cake has been cut and the last dance danced.

Painting: Wedding March, Theodore Robinson
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Sibling Rivalry: When you’re caught in the middle of their spats

05/02/2025

When it comes to growing up together, our kids are often jealous of and competitive with each other. There are power struggles between sisters and brothers. And sometimes our kids just don't like each other. Literature and real life are full of it. As parents, we wish it weren't so, especially when the dislikes between our adult children slop over into our empty-nest lives. All we want is peace and love, but, ah well, sometimes it is not to be.

How responsible are we to bring peace between, say, two adult sisters bearing grudges that date back to their kindergarten years? Should we be helping a son and daughter forgive and forget hurtful insults said in anger when they were in their teens?

Joshua Coleman, a psychologist who treats, writes and speaks regularly about family estrangement–parent to child, child to child, grandkid to, well, anyone who crosses their path–has some answers. (So does Sheila Heen, whose suggestions I wrote about in a previous post and whose book on the topic is Difficult Conversations.)

In a Washington Post column, Coleman addressed a patient's plea for help. Her adult daughters, who had always had a fraught relationship, were refusing to be at the same party the mother was planning for her 75th birthday. The younger daughter said that if the mother didn't tell the older daughter not to come, it would prove the mother's preference for the older daughter. If the mother moved forward with the party, one of the daughters was going to feel hurt and ill-favored.

Coleman had some thoughts. Here they are, edited for brevity.

There are limits on what we can do:

Parents have limited ability to influence or improve relationships between their adult children. As children grow, they develop their own personalities, make their own choices and follow paths that can pull them in different directions. Even in emotionally attuned families, siblings can drift apart — or in some cases, grow actively hostile.

Dispositions differ:

Sometimes what we experience as difficult behavior in others is tied to underlying and partly inherited dispositions. Research on the Big Five personality traits — particularly neuroticism — can offer insight. For example, people high in the trait of neuroticism tend to be more emotionally reactive, more prone to anxiety, and more likely to dwell on perceived slights or injustices, which may be the case with one of your daughters.

When one sibling is easier to parent, that difference alone can unintentionally reinforce feelings of exclusion or comparison in the more sensitive sibling.

Aim for fairness

Research on differential treatment in siblings shows that when children perceive favoritism — real or imagined — it can have long-term effects on their mental health, and can also damage their relationships with each other well into adulthood.

The perception of unequal treatment can be just as impactful as actual differences in the parent’s behavior. From that perspective, a parent can reasonably believe they treated their children equally, while a child can credibly feel that they didn’t receive the same kind of care or attention, based on how they interpret and experience the world.

Show empathy

A parent may not have done anything they consider unfair, and yet a child’s experience of being hurt is real. It’s more constructive to show empathy — not for the facts of the situation, but for the emotions behind them.

Actively listen and respond

Show that you care about their experiences in the family. Then gently pivot to a proposed solution of the conflict.

“You’re both invited to my birthday party, and I want nothing more than to have you there. But if it’s too upsetting to be in the same room, I understand — and maybe we can find another time or way to celebrate together.”

painting: Bonnard
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