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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.

    Emerging Adults: One reason why they may drag their heels at job-hunting time.

     

     She's a close friend. We have lunch almost every week. So I hear her pain when she talks about her second son–he who graduated from college in May, is currently living home and earning his spending money by delivering pizza. It isn't the pizza that bothers her so much as his seeming inertia about applying for career-type jobs. For all she knows, he is sending out his resume and just refuses to discuss it with either her or his father. But she sees little action and wonders if kicking him out of the house would force him to take job-hunting action. The dad has talked to his son about job hunting but has learned little more about what the son is up to than the mom. He suspects his son is stuck in a procrastination bind, that he just can't seem to get going.

    I thought of my friends and their son when Carl Pickhardt's newsletter on adolescence and procrastination arrived in my email queue. Pickhardt talks about how adolescents tend to make it a practice to put off tasks they don't want to do, but that the objectives of such procrastination shift from stage to stage of growing up. So what does it mean when they graduate from adolescence into "emerging adulthood" (ages 18-23)?

    Procrastination, Pickhardt suggests, may be used to avoid encountering the challenges that come with growing older. For some young people, he writes, it becomes a game of sorts: “How long can I put it off before I manage to pull it off?” That is, it can "scare up an emergency effort by waiting until it feels too late to delay any longer, or else."

    It isn't, of course, just teenagers or young adults who put off doing things. We all procrastinate sometimes, but 20 percent of people chronically avoid difficult tasks and deliberately look for distractions–as do 70 percent of college students, according to psychologists and researchers Timothy Pychyl  and Joseph Ferrari. "Procrastination in large part reflects our perennial struggle with self-control as well as our inability to accurately predict how we'll feel tomorrow, or the next day," Pychyl writes on Psychology Today's Web page. "Procrastinators may say they perform better under pressure, but more often than not that's their way of justifying putting things off."

    Pychyl suggests that some procrastinators attempt to avoid the anxiety or worry aroused by a tough task with activities aimed at repairing their mood, such as checking Facebook or taking a nap. Unfortunately, the pattern of "giving in to feel good" ends up making them feel worse–especially when a deadline is missed.

    All of which dovetails with observed behavior of my friend's son (who just missed a deadline for a grad school application)–and many emerging adults.

    Pickhardt's approach of encouraging a young adult to timely action is to point out, "Promptness proves a surer path to freedom than procrastination."  Pychyl advises the way to move forward is to "just get started, and make the threshold for getting started quite low."

    Charles Dickens had some advice as well. Wilkins Micawber (in “David Copperfield”) exhorts those who would delay this way: “My advice is, never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time. Collar him!”

    Just don't try to do it on Facebook.

    Related articles

    The Procrastination Puzzle
    The Procrastination Monster
    Emerging Adults: The questions you can't ask about their job hunt.
    To Stop Procrastinating, Look to Science of Mood Repair

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

    Wedding Plans: A changing role for parents of the bride

    A friend's daughter is engaged. Joy to her world. She loves the guy her daughter will be marrying–a young man her daughter has been with for the past five years, the man she moved with post-grad from the east coast to west, then back east for grad school and now south for a new job. The wedding, scheduled for November, has been in the planning-works for several months now and my friend is wondering when she's going to have to start "doing stuff," wedding-wise. She's even put that question to her daughter.

    This is not going to be a home-town wedding. The couple–both in their early 30s–are getting married in the southeast town where they went to grad school. That's where most of their good friends are and it's a picturesque town that reflects the couple's values.

    My friend isn't complaining. She doesn't feel left out–her daughter keeps her up-to-date on plans as they progress: the place they've rented–a big barn on a farm; the bridesmaid dress colors she's thinking about. But it's the couple–not the mom and dad–who are making the choices and decisions. The parents are chipping in a defined amount of money but other than that, their role is small so far. The mother of the bride, an art director at a magazine, is helping out by reviewing photographer portfolios and giving her daughter a short list of the best of the bunch. But other than that, she and the dad just listen to plans as they evolve.

    Does she feel badly about this? Not really. She's working full time and has never been a person who has lived for the day when she would plan her daughter's wedding. Besides, the daughter is 30, living 500 miles away and fully capable of taking charge. It is, in fact, her and her fiance's adventure together. 

    And that's the point. When our children marry young–early 20s would be young for this generation–we probably have a bigger role to play in wedding plans, especially if our daughters choose to marry in their hometown and we're cast in the role of active hosts. But once they've reached a certain age, they're mature enough to figure things out. They don't really need wedding-planner mom. And if they're living and marrying elsewhere, well, it's their party. (Of course, if we the parents are picking up the tab and the budget is unlimited–well,that's a whole other issue.)

    Here's what I learned from hearing about my friend and her daughter's marriage plans: The key to familial happiness is inclusion–not being in charge.

     

    Related articles

    Parenting Grown Children: When it comes to their wedding, it's a hands-off moment
    Social media playing a bigger role in wedding planning
    Their Wedding Plans: How much say do we have over the guest list?

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

    Gifts for Adult Kids: One indulgent present that spreads the joy

     

    This past November, I offered Alpha Daughter a holiday present: Would she and her family like airline tickets to come home for the Holidays–to our house in a leafy suburb where she grew up. It was not a small offer. Her family (herself, my Grand, my son-in-law and grandpup) is living in Berlin for a year. I advanced my idea on the theory that they might be lonely spending the holiday break so far from home. They had "friends" in Berlin–they've been living in the city for four months–but not "spend the holidays with us" friends. Besides, most of their friends and acquaintances would be scattering to their parents' homes in other cities in Germany and Europe.

    That's what I was thinking when I asked if she would like three flights home as a Holiday present. She thought about it for a minute–"We'd have to find someone to take care of the dog"–and then said "I do."

    And so it was that Paterfamilias drove to the airport at 4:30 on Christmas day to  pick up the little contingent of travelers–everyone but the dog, for whom a temporary home had been found. The minute they stepped through the front door, it was clear how much the trip meant to my Grand, who is 11 years old. Turns out, she sees our house as a second home: no matter where she and her parents live–in some city or country far from us–there's always the same house in the same leafy suburb where she knows the best nooks for reading and the crannies where she can sit when she wants to be alone. She knows the dogs in the neighborhood and runs out to greet them when she sees them from our kitchen window.

    We were a happy reunited family, hunkered down in the living room in front of the fireplace, every throw blanket in the house wrapped around someone. We read by the fire, we watched Runway reruns on a laptop, we talked, we exchanged gifts, we had lovely meals. By the second or third day in, all the travelers came down with colds–such are the joys of international flight–which meant they tended to stay inside to nurse their sore throats and stuffy noses.

    Which was fine for me since there is one point I've left out. My own personal holiday gift was a new hip to match the one I got last year. It arrived in mid-December. I knew from the "unwrapping" of a new hip last year how time hangs heavy when you're sitting around recuperating. So having my daughter and her family at our house–to enjoy their company, to have her supplement the care provided by PF [post-shower lotion rubs on the feet], to be able to talk about all things big and little–was, as Sarah Silverman might say, beyond beyond. My daughter helped me figure out a yoga routine I could do seated in the kitchen chair. She talked about the projects she was working on. We talked about families we were once friendly with–and what a burden it had been for her to have to be with their children–and about other friends and family. My Grand ate up every bit of chitchat about people who had once loomed large in her mother's life–and how her mother had suffered through enforced socializing just as she did with some of her parents' friends. We lit candles to toast in the New Year. My recuperatory time didn't just fly by. It was time well and delightfully spent.

    The gift I gave my daughter? I knew when I offered it that I wasn't being all that generous. It was mostly a gift to myself. Best one ever.

     

     

    Related articles

    Parenting Adult Children: Here's to six great New Years resolutions
    Parenting Grown Children: The question of pressure on our kids to produce Grands
    Grandparents' crown and children's glory – Proverbs

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

    Parenting Grown Children: When it comes to their wedding, it’s a hands-off moment

    Our grown children are several years into their marriages, but who can forget some of the conflicts during the planning stage of their nuptials. Tensions run high, so do feelings about what is right, proper, best, appropriate. Friends of ours got off to a rocky start with their new daughter-in-law when they tried to insist that their daughter's toddler be invited to the wedding–even after their son and his bride explained that they saw the evening wedding as an adult affair, not one to which children would be invited. And then there are friends who wanted the wedding venue–a white clapboard church on a hill in the bride's home town–moved to a non-religious setting so a rabbi could co-officiate. Never mind that the bride had always dreamed of marrying in the neighborhood church and that their son didn't care who officiated at the wedding, so long as his wife-to-be was happy.

    When I saw that Sheila Heen–a conflict solver who has penned such books as, "Difficult Conversations: How to discuss what matters most"–posted a column on the New York TImes entitled Parents at a Wedding, I thought I'd check it out and see if there were insights to share with other parents of brides and grooms.

    There were. Our job, she seems to say, is to de-escalate tension and be supportive–no matter what. Easier said than done. The two reader-questions she addresses in her post are quite different. One bride was alarmed that her divorced parents weren't communicating with each other and that her stepmother was trying to step into the role of 'equal mother.' The other came from parents whose daughter was marrying her partner, another woman, and an aunt and uncle were refusing to attend the same-sex wedding. While Heen's answers were specific to the issues at hand, there were also some generalities that we all—when and if we're parents of a bride or groom–might keep in mind.

    –Heen notes that a theologian had told her, “Planning a wedding is a microcosm of the marriage itself. All the things the couple is going to fight about or struggle with – money, disagreements, family dynamics – are at the heart of the wedding planning process.” It also sets up all the things we may struggle with in developing an adult-to-adult relationship with the couple. The way wedding-planning disputes are settled, Heen sugggests, establishes expectations about how the new couple will handle their families' conflicting interests. So there's more at stake than whether we walk the bride down the aisle or all our cousins are invited. 

    –As to the no-show uncle at a same-sex wedding, there's nothing that spoils the day for parents than a slight to their child. Heen reminds us–the parents–not to escalate the tension. Whatever the cause of the slight, "what the daughter needs is continuing support from her parents and continuing efforts over time to encourage positive contact with the no-show relatives….What won’t help is to respond to your sense of judgment from them with judgment of them. That will cause everyone to retreat in hurt and anger."

    Caveat parentus. Keep your eye on the prize–a healthy future relationship with your children and their spouses–and the spouses parents.

    Related articles

    Grudges: When our grown kids won't talk to each other–or us.
    Ask an Expert: Negotiating Conflicts, Part 4: Parents at a Wedding

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

    Emerging Adults: The questions you can’t ask about their job hunt.

      Graduation was 8 months ago, but my friend C's son is still living at home and still delivering pizza–despite a B.A. in international studies and an impressive grade point average at a respected state university. It may or may not be bothering her son, but it is causing C all kinds of anxiety. It's an anxiety that gets no relief from information, since information about the job search is not available.

    "I have tried to stop asking because it doesn't go well," she says. "The least question about jobs or graduate school is met with massive resistance. He must be worried."

    And that's what really worries C.

    Related articles

    Top Four Job-hunting Mistakes New Grads Make
    Getting your head into the job-hunt game post-Christmas
    10 survival tips for new graduates

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

    Parenting Adult Children: Here’s to six great New Years resolutions

                        

    Aside from our promises to ourselves to shape up (exercise more, eat smarter) and spread joy (smile more), there are some New Years resolutions we can make vis a vis our role as parents of adult children. I've borrowed the suggestions below from an impeccable source: Carl Pickhardt who writes about parenting adolescents for Psychology Today. From his list of "beneficial efforts" parents and adolescents can make with themselves and each other, some seem right on for those of us whose children are in the post-grad world or moving even further along the maturity path.

    You can read all 23 of his resolutions here. I've cherry picked six that seem just right for parents of grown children. (Some of them reflect the ideals in my Notes to Self, which you can check out in the list in the left column.)

    –GIVE A LISTEN. The gift of listening is letting someone know they’re worth your time and undivided attention and are not alone. HEAR WHAT THE OTHER PERSON HAS TO SAY.

    –CHECK SUPPOSITIONS OUT. False assumptions about what each other may be thinking, feeling, or intending can lead to serious misunderstandings. BEFORE REACTING, ASK WHAT IS GOING ON.

    –BE CONTENT. Go after what you want if that is what you want, but don’t make getting all you want a condition for feeling happy. FOR EVERYONE, SOME HAS TO BE ENOUGH.

     –GO WITH THE FLOW. If you can’t alter events or circumstances you wish were not so, learn to live with what you’ve got and make the best of it you can. ADAPT TO WHAT YOU CANNOT CHANGE.

    — MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS. Unless the other person is harming themselves or you or someone else, are ignorant of consequences their choices bring, or want help, don’t interfere. LET EACH OTHER BE.

    –FORGIVE. Holding on to anger toward yourself or others is punishing to do. Relieve the burden of guilt or resentment with forgiveness. LET HARD FEELINGS GO.

     

    Related articles

    Parenting Grown Children: The question of pressure on our kids to produce Grands
    Money Matters: Inside the bank of Mom and Dad
    Parenting Adult Children: Staying on the sunny side even during a long-running dispute

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

    Parenting Grown Children: The question of pressure on our kids to produce Grands

    Happy willa

    In the middle of a four-way coffee get together of my former office mates, one of the coffee drinkers passed around the photos of her first Grand–a very cute baby who's now two months old and belongs to her son. After a pleasant few minutes of oohing and aahing, our former office mate talked about driving her grown daughter to the airport–her daughter lives in a city down the coast from her parents and her brother. The daughter had come to town to be there for the birth of her first nephew.

    On the drive, my friend tells the three of us, her husband announced he wanted to ask his daughter, who is in her 30s, single and self supporting, a personal question. My friend says she clutched for a minute–what could he want to bring up? His question: After being here for the birth of her brother's child, did it make her want to have children?

    Her answer was a simple 'no." She said she had never particularly wanted to have children and though her nephew was adorable, cuddly and the most wonderful baby ever, she didn't want one of her own. She said she knows what it takes to be a good parent and she didn't feel that was a road she wanted to take. And now, with her brother having brought a child into the world and into the family, she felt relief: the pressure was off to reproduce.

    How did my friend feel about that? It can be disappointing for a parent to here her–or his–child is not going to participate in the warmth and charm of growing her own family. "I wasn't surprised," my friend says, and then offers this kicker: "What I am is happy that she lives at a time when she has alternatives, when she doesn't feel she has to have children to be validated–the way my generation and my mother's generation did."

    We who grew up in those 'bad old times,' can only add our Amen–grateful though we are to have the children we have. It doesn't mean we didn't feel an unseemly pressure to have children–pressure from our parents,from society at large and probably from ourselves as well.

    Although Tina Fey talks about the pressure to have a second child in her essay Confessions of a Juggler: What’s the rudest question you can ask a mother?, (in her book BossyPants)  her point rings true for women who opt out of becoming mothers.  Fey describes the constant questioning–from friends, acquaintances, store clerks and the like, about whether or not she'll have another child. Her answer to an issue that produces personal angst suggests that the decision is an on-going and ever-mutating one. Fey writes: "My parents raised me never to ask people about their reproductive plans. 'You don’t know their situation,' my mother would say. I considered it such an impolite question for years I didn’t even ask myself.”

     

    Related articles

    Holidays with Grown Kids: What won't we do to be–and feel–helpful?
    Their Wedding Plans: How much say do we have over the guest list?
    Hanky PANKy

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

    Money Matters: Inside the bank of Mom and Dad

    Piggybank

    So the kids have made their way through college. They're launched into the world of work and creating their own families. We're still their parents, of course, but the financial part is over. We can now center our financial plans around us and our retirement needs. At least that's what we're thinking.

    Think again. Turns out that for many of us, that was an incorrect assumption.  A Merrill Lynch Retirement Study, conducted in partnership with Age Wave, finds that 62 percent of those of us older than 50 have provided financial assistance–a helping hand–to family members during the last five years and that most of us never budgeted to do so.

    A few other points from the report ("Family & Retirement: The Elephant in the Room.")

    Payback: Those helping family members rarely do so because they expect future help or financial payback. Older adults are 20x more likely to say they are helping family because “it is the right thing to do” than because “family members will help me in the future.” They are 5x more likely to stop family support because the recipient is not using the money wisely than because of worries about being paid back.

    –The Now Factor: Those giving money to family members are 3x more likely to feel “appreciated” than “taken advantage of.” This generational generosity also extends to a shift in mindset regarding inheritance and giving to family. Three in five (60%) people age 50+ say it is better to pass on their assets now rather than waiting until end of life. Age 50+ women are even more likely than men to say it is better to pass on inheritance during retirement (65% vs. 53%).

    –Favorite Subsidies: We tend to help out our adult children by paying for rent or mortgage payments, insurance, cellphone bills, car purchases or leases and tuition expenses. These subsidies averaged a total of $9,200 over the past five years among people with less than $250,000 in investible assets, and $19,100 for people with between $250,000 and $500,000 in investible assets. Among the very wealthy (those with more than $5,000,000 in investible assets), the average five-year family outlay was $313,000.

    –The Stepkids: Adults age 50+ generally feel some financial responsibility for stepfamily members (most particularly stepchildren), but usually less responsibility than they feel for biological relatives. That said, three in ten (32%) also say that they and their spouses have different financial priorities for their own children than they have for their stepchildren. Those with stepchildren are less likely to divide their assets equally than those without stepchildren.

     

    Related articles

    Grandparenting: The gift of helping Grands understand how children in other parts of the world live.
    The Elephant In The Room When It Comes To Family And Retirement
    Are You The Family ATM? 60% Of Boomers Helping Out Adult Relatives With Money, Averaging $15K
    Your Kids Will Still Ask for Money When You're Retired

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

    Grudges: When our grown kids won’t talk to each other–or us.

     A friends son and daughter stopped speaking to each other. It lasted more than a year. It wasn't just talk. They refused to come to the same Thanksgiving meal together–a meal my friend prepares for a large group that includes her two other children, their spouses and children.

    One of her sons tried to mediate a peace. Her husband tried talking to each of them. No luck. The offended daughter even approached her offending brother to spell out her complaint against him. It only made matters worse.

    Though the siblings have since come to terms with each other, I thought about my friend and the bad blood that existed between two of her children when I came across a Sheila Heen column on Family Grudges. I've been reading a lot of Heen recently (more on that in another post). She's got some very commonsensical suggestions on how to work around family conflicts. After reading her recent column, I sent it off to my friend. It turns out, her kids–as well as my friend and her husband and their other children–had been taking the wrong tack.

    Heen's suggestions for working through a grudge match start with a Do Not Do. Specifically, do not write a letter or email spelling out your perspective–or even apologizing for something you may have done wrong.

    Sounds counter-intuitive, but here's Heen's rational: "Inevitably some aspect of what you describe will feel “off” to them (“That’s not what happened!”) or will leave out parts that they feel are most important. And their interpretation of your motives for writing the letter is colored by emotion. Your desire to reconnect is seen as a desire to absolve yourself of guilt, to manipulate, or to appear to be righteously taking the high road….Remember that email and letters aren’t dialogue. They’re monologue. And they’re the channel of communication that can escalate conflict most quickly."

    So what can you do to ease the path of reconciliation? Here are some of Heen's basic approaches, which can be adapted by an interested parenting hoping to give grown children a chance to reconcile–or to make peace with a begrudging child:

    Strategy 1: Don’t talk, just do. Often family members cut off contact not because they like conflict, but because they hate conflict. Avoiding the stress seems most easily done by avoiding the people who produce the stress….Sometimes, depending on the personalities involved, the best approach is to avoid the “big conversation” altogether, and just to start acting “normal” again.

    Strategy 2: Propose a conversation just about the future. Sometimes it’s not worth sorting through the details of who did what and reacted to what. It may simply be that you want to propose talking about how to move on.

    Strategy 3: Initiate a conversation to understand the rift. Let them know that you’d like to talk. Not so that you can talk them out of their feelings or their behavior, but so that you can better understand what’s happened between you. …In that conversation, first listen to them. Why? Because people simply do not take in what you have to say, cannot question or shift their perceptions, until they feel understood. To get meaningful communication moving, someone has to be the first to listen and that someone is going to have to be you.

     

    Related articles

    Ask an Expert: Negotiating Conflicts, Part 1: Family Grudges
    Holidays with Grown Kids: What won't we do to be–and feel–helpful?

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

    Grandparenting: The gift of helping Grands understand how children in other parts of the world live.

    A host of brochures are spread out on my desk. I'm looking for just the right gift for the Grands. One of my favorites: Give a Goat, courtesy Oxfam. Would or would they not be charmed by giving children in another–and less developed–part of the world a cute cuddly animal that could also support and feed them and their family?

    The goat wasn't the only child-appealing possibility. Another charity was offering to send a heifer in my Grand's name to a child in a third world country. 

                           

    My Grands are among the very fortunates of this world who have almost everything they need, want or could dream of. I thought they would be intrigued with the story of how the animals would become part of a family–and help them understand how life is lived in other parts of the world.

    Turns out, I am part of a burgeoning trend: using gifts as a means of opening our Grand's eyes to the world–especially to the needs of those who live in economies that are not as fruitful as ours. It is also in keeping with a story that ran recently in the New York Times about grandparents giving their grandchildren the gift of financial awareness.

    The NYTimes story was about a more sophisticated concept–teaching the grandkids about financial literacy. Most grandparents, the article argues, have an advantage over parents: They can talk more freely with their grandchildren and, in return, their grandchildren tend to open up to them.

    So how do you do it? If you don't want to read the full story, here are the how-to highlights:

    One grandparent gave his grandchildren “money savvy pigs,” which were created to show children the four uses of money: save, spend, donate and invest. He asked them to divide their allowances into the four categories and then talked to them about their decisions. Eventually, he introduced the idea of giving away some of the money in the donate bank by introducing his grandkids to various catalogues and brochures for helping people in developing countries–such as a flock of chickens, mosquito nets or vocational training. When one of his Grands didn't have enough money to buy what she wanted to donate–a latrine for a neighborhood that didn't have clean water–the grandfather suggested she write to family members who might want to donate to her cause.

    A less formal approach might be to start a conversation about the difference between a need and a want. Or, create a financial memory bank by talking about how you [the grandparent] struggled or failed, what your first car or house cost and the like.

    The main point to remember is to clear what you're doing with the parents. Ultimately, it’s up to your grown kids to be involved in teaching their children about money. What we, the grandparents, can do is strengthen their message–which, presumably, they learned from us in the first place.

     

    Related articles

    Grand Advice: Helping Your Grandchildren Set Their Best Savings Goals
    Wealth Matters: For Grandchildren, the Gift of Financial Awareness