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© Penelope Lemov and Parenting Grown Children, 2025. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given.

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

    Observations: A Stanford Dean on the effect of helicopter parenting on college students

     

    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.

     

     

    Related articles

    Leaving a Legacy: Are we the guardians of our children's mementos? Three things to ask yourself when you pare down the stuff your children leave behind
    Helicopter or hands-off: today's parents can't seem to win
    Lending a grown child time rather than money. Is there a difference?
    A Former Stanford Dean on the Danger of Overparenting by Parents – and Startups

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

    Leaving a Legacy: Are we the guardians of our children’s mementos? Three tips on paring down the stuff your children leave behind

     

    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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    Bank of Mom and Pop: Wherever they are in the world, parents like to offer their grown kids a helping hand.
    Observation: Candace Bergen on coming to terms with a grown child's independence
    Lending a grown child time rather than money. Is there a difference?

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

    Observations: David Brooks on the post-college struggles of emerging adults

     

    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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    Identifying the path to adulthood: David Brooks
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  • PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

    Lending a grown child time rather than money. Is there a difference?

     

    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.

    Leaving a Legacy: Should we take care of them or should they take care of us?

     

    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. 

    inheritance

     

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

    Bank of Mom and Pop: Wherever they are in the world, parents like to offer their grown kids a helping hand.

    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.

    In South Korea, there are cultural differences but the bottom line is similar. Six out of 10 parents in a recent survey said they are willing to help out their grown children should they face any financial difficulties. 
     
    Did they actually do so? 80 percent of the willing had more than once paid living expenses for their adult children. About one-third paid their children’s credit card bills.
     
    While 14 percent said they deemed it “an obvious duty” to give financial support to their children regardless of the child's age, only 8 percent thought their grown children should solve their own financial problems.
     
    As to the grown children, 87 percent said they were willing to financially help their parents in their retirement years. Half of them said they believed it was their filial duty to do so.
     
    Not sure how widepsread that attitude might be here.

     

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

    Observation: Candace Bergen on coming to terms with a grown child’s independence

     

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

    Emerging Adults: Just when we think they’re launched, they may be floundering

    They've left the nest. They're living with college friends or high school buddies. They're moving toward financial independence. They've thrown off the yoke of parental control and are making their own decisions.

    We can step back and move on with our empty-nested lives. Or can we? They're adults–but not quite. Carl Pickhardt, a psychologist who who writes about adolescence, likens the 18- to 23-year-old stage to Trial Independence–what some call Emerging Adulthood. For our "emerging" kids, it's a stage rife with trials and pitfalls. For us, Pickhardt says, the parenting may be "the hardest stage of adolescence."

    Here's his run down of the stresses, emotions, and the “emotional thinking” that can get in the way of a successful launch–and may require our parenting attention:

    Sudden liberation:  "Somewhere during the process of adjustment most young people abuse this increased latitude of choice by acting unwisely — indulging in excess, giving way to distraction, neglecting obligations, seeking escape, and taking undue risks for the sake of excitement, for example. It’s when the costs of this abuse mount that stress begins to build – there are so many ways to experiment, overdo, ignore, avoid, fall behind, feel exhausted, and struggle to catch up. Now independence becomes a state of over-demand in which young people can feel out of control and under ongoing duress."

    Being in charge of their lives: "At the outset of adolescence the battle cry was in opposition to external authority: “You can’t make me!” But in this last stage of adolescence it is in desperation at lacking sufficient personal authority to responsibly self-govern: “I can’t make me!”

    Signs of trouble: "The young person can become depressed (“I feel hopeless”), anxious (“I feel scared”), angry (“I feel mistreated”), frustrated (“I feel blocked”), disappointed (“I feel let down”), incompetent (“I feel like a screw-up”), guilty (“I feel it’s all my fault”), ashamed (“I feel disgraced”), shy (“I have nothing to offer”), apathetic (“I feel indifferent”), lonely (“I feel alone”), hurt (I feel injured), or helpless (“I feel powerless”), for example. 

    The fallout from the "troubles": "Feelings of depression can advise “give in and give up” instead of “take initiative and get moving.” Feelings of shame can advise “punish myself” instead of “focus on the positive about myself.” Feelings of loneliness can advise “just withdraw,” instead of “reach out for company.” Feelings of anxiety can advise “avoid what is scary,” instead of “engage with what I fear.” Feelings of shyness can advise “shutting up” instead of “speaking up for myself.”   

    What's our role when these kinds of emotional crises hit? Here's Pickhardt's advice:

    Stay in touch: "Because this is such an emotionally vulnerable time, it’s important that parents regularly check in so she or he knows they are still there and care."

    Be encouraging: "Sensitively listen and thereby provide important empathetic support, give encouragement, and even (if asked) suggest ideas for how to constructively proceed."

    Get help if things deteriorate: "If it sounds like the young person is digging themselves into deeper unhappiness by acting on the advice of her or his emotions; parents can suggest seeking short-term counseling to restore better judgment to its rightful place."

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

    Observations: Kenneth Feinberg on keeping a legacy plan up to date

    "I updated my will, something I had been putting off." That's what Kenneth Feinberg, the former administrator of the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund of 2001 and currently administrator of the General Motors ignition-switch compensation program, wrote in the New York TImes. Feinberg, who's nearing 70,had to review in detail the estate plans of those killed unexpectedly. It's given him an up-and-close and personal view of how people leave their worldly goods to their heirs–and provided him with a learning moment or two. 

    "Over half the victims on Sept. 11 did not have a will. Given that they were relatively young and in good health with excellent jobs, they seem not to have thought it was necessary. I suddenly found it necessary.

    "It was also important to me to avoid the problems I occasionally confronted after Sept. 11, when angry siblings, parents and relatives declared war with one another over the victim’s assets and argued over the 9/11 fund compensation. When millions of dollars are suddenly available for distribution, family members, fiancés and same-sex partners sometimes engage in bitter arguments. So I made sure that my wife and three children had a clear understanding of who gets what by providing each of them a detailed memorandum listing all of my assets and an explanation of how my wealth should be distributed after my death."

     

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

    Five tips for rightsizing overstuffed attics, closets and bookshelves

     

     

    We are on a downsizing binge. A bag a day is my mantra. I am purging file drawers full of yellowing papers, closets crammed with outdated clothes, basement nooks stuffed with never-used heirlooms.

    We may sell our house– the one we lived in while we raised our kids; the one our grown kids and their kids visit when they come to town. Whether or not we opt for a simpler life style, the accumulation of 40 years worth of stuff stuffed into our house has to be dwindled down. It wouldn't be fair to leave so many years of papers, photos and assorted junk for our kids to deal with.

    Would that a giant vacuum cleaner would appear and whoosh it all out of here. But of course it can't. And shouldn't. Papers– old tax forms, loan applications, home improvement bills–have to be reviewed before we decide if they should be saved or shredded. Non-paper goods also need to be reviewed. Should my mother-in-law's collection of porcelain figurines be hauled to a consignment shop or do one of my children have a soft spot for them? Do either of my children want my mother's 18 place settings (18!) of gold rimmed bone china with hand-painted serving plates.

    As I work my way through the maze and mess, I cling to five rules to help me downsize with respect for the past and a real-world view of the future.

    Rule One: The shredder, the scanner and the recycling bin are my friends.

    A big part of rightsizing is dealing with files of paper–old tax returns, insurance papers, client files (paterfamilias is a semi-retired lawyer), story files (I was a freelance writer for years) and everything else that's been boxed or put on a shelf in a basement recess. It's shocking how many personal identification numbers are on our papers. I shred what must be shredded, toss what doesn't have to be disfigured and have two small bins handy for the few papers I absolutely positively must save. Many of those I'll scan for a paperless save. I wanted to keep for my grandchildren a few of the magazine and newspaper articles I wrote at various points in my career. It was hard to let go of the hard copy, but in this day of smart phones, iPads and laptops, scanning them for possible future readers makes more sense.

    Rule Two: The smart phone quickens decision-making

    As I sort through "heirlooms," wedding gifts and other bits and pieces of our lives, questions arise about what to toss, give away or save. Does my daughter want her letter sweater from her college diving team? I snap a photo, text it to her and ask for a thumbs up or down. Ditto my son and his deep-water fishing pants with the boots attached. I send my daughter and daughter-in-law photos of my mother's china, complete with lavish serving plates (no takers). I snap shots of my mother-in-laws glassware. My daughter says yes to the oddly funky but graceful goblets. On I go, making decisions with a little help from my heirs.

    Rule Three: Keep a rein on sentimentality.

    Photos are the devil. We have boxes and boxes of them–ours and our parents'. Some are organized and in albums. Some loose but in subject groupings. I start with the stuff that's not organized at all. It is a trip down memory lane. I take Paterfamilias with me. We sigh and oooh and ahhh. Doubles and negatives are dumped as are blurry shots or photos of relatives or friends we don't recognize. It's endless and wrenching. We tell ourselves, one photo from each bike trip we took in Europe; one from each family vacation. There's a limit to how much can you save no less scan. Which leads to the next rule

    Rule Four: Leave a legacy

    Photos, letters, verses read at wedding ceremonies. Some of this I'll eventually scan into digital form, organized and saved for posterity or for that someday when I write my memoir–or pull together scrap books or videos that my children and grandchildren can study at their leisure. As I make my way through boxes of my mother's papers, I am tempted to toss it all out. Then I come across her naturalization papers. From 1922! Her name wasn't Rose, as I knew it. It was Roza. This is the raw stuff of history. Primary source. It may or may not be of interest to future generations but it feels important to save. I found myself applying two tests for what to keep and what to throw away: Would anyone but me be interested in having or seeing this item? If not, it goes out. Does the item have historic interest? As Alpha daughter reminds me, she's an historian. I shouldn't give away her raw materials.

    Rule Five: Be generous to others.

    We have more books than our bookshelves can handle. Libraries might want them. If not (our local libraries are no longer accepting used books), several charities will pick up boxes of books and send them to libraries who need them–perhaps in third world countries. That would be a perfect home for our complete works of Shakespeare and the children's picture books our Grands have outgrown.

    Those towels that are fraying around the edges: animal shelters can use them to comfort pets that come into their care.

    Furniture that won't fit in the new home: Places like A Wider World will pick up dressers, sofas, rugs–even beds–and use them to help furnish a home for someone less financially fortunate.

    Then there is the cache of toys we kept on hand for visiting grandchildren. What they loved to play with when they were two years old is no longer a joy to them at ten. There are places that take used toys in good condition. One of my prizes is a Pony Land house, but it's loaded with sentimental value. One of my Grands played with it endlessly when she was visiting, laying out all the pieces and singing to herself while she played. It's painful to let Pony Land go, but my Grand is now 12. Instead of just sending Pony Land to a charity, I give it to one of the workmen repairing our roof. He has a six year old. It's a comfort to know Pony Land is going to a good home.

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    Observations: Parenting insights from the romantic movie "5 to 7"
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