PenPenWrites

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

Parenting Adult Children: We no longer get to make their important decisions

10/12/2012

When our children were young and living in our house, we made decisions about their lives–where they would go to school, how they would dress, whether they would be allowed to drive our car. As parents of adult children, that's no longer our terrain, and that can be painful when our children make decisions that run deeply counter to what we would do.

It can be especially hard to take when the decisions involve our grandchildren. A friend told me about a man in her memoir-writing class. He talked about how his daughter's only child, now 13, was gifted in math and science. To the grandfather, his granddaughter's mind worked in the same way his did and he enjoyed working out problems with her. When she applied to and was accepted at a competitive school for math and science, he was thrilled–his beliefs in her potential were confirmed and he could see the school as a launching pad for a brilliant career.

His daughter saw things differently. She thought it was more important for her daughter to continue at the religious school she had been attending since kindergarten. There was no argument the grandfather could present to his daughter that would persuade her that the math-science school was a golden opportunity, that religion could be taught at home–how much more of it did she need after eight years of it?–and that it was foolhardy to throw away this chance of a superior education.

And yet, there it was. No was no. He was helpless to change the course of his grandchild's schooling–he who had always put a premium on education and seen it as the way he, as an immigrant, had been able to make his way in the world.

It's a tale of frustration. Maybe the writer's workshop will be cathartic, help him work through his feelings by writing about the offending events. One thing that can't be reworked, however, is that he doesn't have the standing to make the choice. And that's what can be so anxiety provoking about being a grandparent. We may see our children making a mistake in the way they are bringing up our grandchildren, but they are the parents and all we can do is hope to be kept in the loop of what's happening. If the stake's are high enough–and the grandfather in this case thought they were–we can double down on persuasion and reason. But in the end, we have to limit the amount of conflict we take on.

A few days after I heard this story, I came across a metlife survey that asked grandparents about the values they hoped to pass down to their children and grandchildren. Not too many surprises here: most of us–88 percent–want to pass along honesty, then came good behavior (82%), self-sufficiency (70%), higher
education (69%), and good health habits (68%). We may have more input in these values than we do in day-to-day decisions. So maybe we're not as helpless as we think.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Vacation Time: Finding the formula for a stress-free family vacation

10/08/2012

Midway through our family vacation in Vermont, the Grands put on a magic show. As dusk fell, we adults–Paterfamilias and I, Uber son and wife, Alpha daughter and husband–sat inside and nursed our wines and hot teas. The Grands were outside on the lawn plotting and putting together a grand extravaganza for us.

As darkness fell, we were called outside.

The opening act–courtesy of my son-in-law–had the four kids (11,10,9 and 4) running around with tiny sparklers flaring, their whoops of excitement filling the night air. Then came the main event, with each Grand parading before us with his or her trick. They had, for props, a magic set that one Grand had gotten for her birthday. While we had been sipping our drinks, they had worked together to teach each other the tricks and practice them. They coached the four-year-old on the "disappearing ball" trick and supported each other in ways large and small for the more complicated tricks. When a trick didn't work the first time out, they re-grouped, talked it over, re-read instructions and came back for a second try.

The cool Vermont night, well-lit by a starry sky, was the perfect stage. This was our Norman Rockwell moment. I can report–and not just because I'm the grammie–that the Magic Show was brilliant and heart warming–not for the sleights of hand or "amazing" tricks, but for the way the Grands worked together and helped each other without adult interference.

And it mirrored the way this, our ninth family vacation together in Stowe, went this year. No flare ups, no mis-communications, no hard feelings, no sour moments.

It hasn't always been so. Over the years, we've tinkered with the right formula to make the vacations refreshing and full of good family will. We've made our mistakes: rented condos that were too small for three families or too far from the swimming holes, mountain brooks, bike-riding paths and wild raspberry bushes. Three years ago, we finally got the physical configuration right–two condos in a community that is walking distance to everything. But families being families, we've also had to tinker with the right combination of togetherness. Two weeks–too much. Friends who have second homes they own or rent for an extended period have long advised serial visits–one family and its grandchildren at a time, with a weekend overlap to give the inter-family Grands time to run wild together.

But even with the seemingly right combinations in place, our vacations were still marred by something or other. And then this year, it wasn't.

Did we get the formula right? The amount of time we spent with each family and they spent with us and with eachother and in the right size houses near the favorite frog ponds and walking trails? Yes, but we had those things in place last year and the year before and we still had our sour moments.

What made the difference? Here's my theory: our grown children. This year both of them were at a good place in their careers. They were still under pressure, still had the stresses and tensions inherent in being in the prime of their work lives. But both made decisions this year about their careers that helped alleviate some of that strain. And the easing of that tension permeated up to us and down to the Grands and made eveyone happier,more adaptable and less remote.

When our grown children were growing up and we took them on vacation [in, yes, Vermont], the success of those trips depended on how well or ill we were feeling about our work lives–whether a black cloud from the office followed us up the mountain and onto the hiking trails. But the center has shifted. It's now those children, grown up with children of their own, who set the tone for the vacation. And it isn't anything we can control by how big or small, convenient or inconvenient our vacation house is. The magic of a great vacation is in their hands now.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Lending Money: The family fund that offers a helping hand and a living legacy

10/01/2012

Many of us want to make things easier for our grown children–pave the road for them with a little help here and maybe even a lot of assistance there. That is, if we have the wherewithal to do it.

Recently, the New York Times weighed in on the issue, taking as its news cue presidential candidate Mitt Romney's remark, "I have inherited nothing." The initial point Times writer Ron Lieber makes is that a living inheritance comes in many forms. "It exists along a range
from the free room and board for a 23-year-old intern to a stay of years
for a 43-year-old single parent who has lost a job or recently
divorced. The contribution can be as small as a first month’s rent or as
large as the 25 years of payments that many parents now make on college
loans they took out so their children would not have to."

The larger point is that the harder a young adult has to work to make the next geographic, career and economic step up, the more difficult it is to make that step. And repayment of student loans–a crisis that is raging among college graduates, both recent and long-time–is one of those hurdles that can keep a grown child from making that next step up. "The lack of any family help can have a
compounding effect on the millions of people who have negative net
worths well into adulthood thanks to their student loan debt," Lieber writes.

Meanwhile, even as college costs rise, today's economy is marked by a distinct lack of opportunity for college grads to move into career jobs that pay enough to cover living expenses. And that's why so many of us are helping our grown children. Recent data shows that nearly
60 percent of 23- to 25-year-olds report receiving some kind of
financial assistance from their parents–even when it's sometimes a stretch for the parents. As one 70-year-old parent told Lieber, he didn't want any of his three children "to go so far downhill that they’ll never get out.” In other words, those of us who can afford it are, in effect, trying to guard our children against downward mobility.

Lieber ends his piece with a suggestion for providing family funds for college students: a loan pool set up by the family. He noted that George Lewis, an 82-year-old
lawyer in Quincy, Ill., along with his nine siblings set up an education fund in honor of his grandmother who "had a
strong belief in education." Today, the nearly 50-year-old fund, with holdings of $111,000, lends money interest-free to scores of members of the extended
clan.

SInce that piece ran, Lieber has updated it with other examples of family funds. Some of the examples are of fairly prominent people–Berry Gordy (the founder of Motown Records), for instance–who set up family funds to lend money to the upcoming generation. But one made it all seem within reach to the non-prominent among us. Lieber reports that Suzette Haden Elgin, in a book called “The Grandmother Principles,” offered her own notion
of a family loan fund that grandmothers can initiate. She suggests
asking for a small deposit from everyone in the family, including
children. Having the younger ones pitch in can help give them a stake in
the process and a reason to track the fund’s growth and its
beneficiaries.

Put that way, it doesn't seem so formidable and even has the frisson of bringing the family along on a daring step toward the future.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Parenting Grown Children: An adage to remember when arguments get messy

09/26/2012

Here's a line to remember when we have a spat with our spouses or kids: "Conflict is inevitable but combat is optional."

Susan Adcox posted this Max Lucado line on her grandparents.com blog. She says she tries to remember the maxim when she has disagreements with her husband but "when it comes to family disputes, there's no surefire way to avoid them and no single best way to deal with them."

When we push one of the hot buttons we have with our grown children–or they push ours–the conflict may escalate into combat before we know it, and we may find ourselves powerless to stop it. It's much safer to go have a conflict with a spouse, with whom we have a one-on-one track record of 30 to 40 or more years. Been there, done that spat before. And we know we'll lay down arms and get back to our normal non-combative selves before long.

But with our grown kids, the relationship is somehow more volatile. Yes, we've got a long track record with them, but the stakes couldn't be higher. An argument with them carries the ultimate threat: They could cut off contact with us. Combat may be an option but loss of visiting privileges is not one we want anyone to exercise.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Parenting Adult Children: Will grown children ever appreciate their parent’s world view?

09/13/2012

When Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club came out, I sent a copy to my mother.

It was an interesting choice. The book, which details the lives of four women born in China and their daughters who grow up in America, covers the travails the younger generation [me] face when the immigrant mothers [my mother] are too firmly rooted in Old World ideals and ideas. I thought it would be a chance to discuss with my mother the tensions that lay between us.

She called after she read it. She loved the book. It was, she told me, just like her relationship with her mother. Turns out, we both saw ourselves as the younger generation jousting against our parent's Old World disciplines to find our place in the new culture.

More recently, I read Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin, a South Korean writer. [The book won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011].

In this book, all the children love the mother–mom–who goes missing. [Elderly and ill, she is parted from her husband by crowds at the Seoul subway station.] The book is partly about how we children take our mothers for granted, how we see them only as "mom", with no other life than that of being our mother. We hardly know our parents, Shin seems to be saying. And yet, the impact of Mom on her grown children is pervasive, powerful and dynamic. It seeps in everywhere–even though the Mom in Sook's book was an unassuming and uneducated woman.

In its way, it is the same struggle depicted by Amy Tan, although told in the voice of the grown children and with more of a guilt-trip edge to it. The children ask themselves, now that their mother is missing, why they took her for granted and why they treated her questions as intrusive inquiries into their lives rather than as her quest for knowledge. It certainly laid a guilt trip on me who kept my mother at bay with terse answers to her questions about my career and any parts of my life I feared sharing with her.

I think of both books now that the shoe is on the other foot–now that I am the mother with an older generation's ideas and the thirst to know more about my adult children's lives. Dare I share Please Look After Mom with them? Would we both see ourselves as the children fighting to set our mark and keeping our mothers at a distance so we can move forward unencumbered–and without their generation's disapproval? Maybe I should send them the pair of books. We could really get after that generational question.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Parenting Adult Children: Accepting the direction or misdirection their lives take

09/07/2012

Some twenty years ago, Anne Lamott chronicled in "Operating Instructions" her first year as a single parent. It's been a mothering favorite–it has an almost cult-like following–since it appeared. Now comes the bookend, "Some Assembly Required," which lets us know how the baby, Sam, who's at the center of O.I., became a father himself at 19–making Lamott a grandmother.

In discussing the new book, an olnline panel of New York Times readers (Motherlode book club panelists) talked about how they were drawn to the question the book raises: acceptance of what grown children choose to do with their lives. "The peculiar thing about it, and the thing that makes Some Assembly Required so different from Operating Instructions," they suggest, is that "the parent of an adult child with a problem is 'one step removed from desperate.'”

It can be the harder step. It's so difficult to stand by and see our grown children make their way through troubling situations or suffer the consequences of an unfortunate event or from an illness. It's harder to watch than to be the one in a position to act–and we're the watchers now. This was brought home to me recently when a friend's daughter was diagnosed with a chronic and debilitating illness. My friend's suffering is palpable and yet, she writes in an email, her daughter "is being so brave–unrealistic?–and is pushing herself to be active. It's painful to observe. I'm trying hard to compartmentalize and force some thoughts out and others in. And I have to think positive thoughts and hope that wonderful new treatments can be effective. I'm not always so morbid. It comes and goes."

The Motherlode panelists make a similar point: “Accepting” that your son will be a father at 19, or that he will travel the world without your help, is a different kind of acceptance" than memoirs usually deal with. Which dovetails with the real-world acceptance my friend has had to find with regard to her daughter. And the pain she feels being "one step removed from desperate."

While the crux of Operating Instructions was unexpected single motherhood, Some Assembly Required is in itself "one step removed": Lamott has less power to control events. This time around, it's her story to tell from the outside looking in–it is, after all, her son's life (and he writes some chapters of the book). But it's just another way in which, no matter how close we are to our grown children, we move off–forced or voluntarily–from the center of their lives.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Misunderstanding Social Media: The isolation of the Internet connection

09/01/2012

I checked in with the Educated Grandparent, a site that's on my blogroll. The two women who write it–both grandparents and social workers
–recently posted on a topic that is a hot button issue for many of us
with grown children (and grandchildren as well): the invasiveness of social media activity, or as they put it "the technological world
of internet, Android phones, iPads and instant gratification."

In a post they title Help! Help! Our Children Are Drowning in Technology, their worry is that "we're living in a world of virtual
reality. It separates parents from children and us from each other. Talk TO me,
not AT me. We definitely do things faster but not better. The internet, with
its Facebook and blogs, is supposed to unite us but it really isolates us."

It's especially frustrating for those of us of a generation that expects visitors–our grown children, our grandchildren–to chat with us when they're sitting at our kitchen table.The Gameboy should be stored in the backpack; the cellphone set on mute–unless we want to let them play a game on our cellphone with us. Competitive BrickBreaker, anyone?

And yet, though our sense of social interaction demands eye to eye contact, we need our visitors to keep us up to date on the new tools. We can complain all we want about how unsatisfying a virtual Facebook friend is and how limiting twitter communication is, but personally, I also feel a need to be with it. I have a nephew who's in college. I can email him all I want and never get an answer. I can call him on his cell phone and reach a dead end. But if I text him, a reply comes right back at me. That's the way of their world.

So we can joke, complain and even sit back and marvel at the silliness of some smart phone apps, but they are part of our children's reality. Do we lose communication with them if we cut ourselves off from the technology?

Educated Grandparent ends with a wonderful little anecdote, one that makes you wonder what the point of keeping up is. "A friend of ours just bought a brand
new smartphone," they write. "He showed us all its tricks and then said, “Look at this!” He
typed in the name of our restaurant …and sure enough, there it was
on the screen of his phone. “Isn't this the greatest thing you've ever seen?”
he gloated, “This is right where we are.” The only problem was we already knew where
we were."

Yes we do. But the frustrating thing is that where we are is not where the world is going. Do we also need to adapt to move forward in our grown- and grand children's wake?
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Guilt Trips: There’s a price our grown daughters pay for trying to “have it all.”

08/27/2012

My heart goes out to Alpha Daughter: her daughter is in tears. There's one more week before school starts and my granddaughter just learned that she has to go to camp that week. Dad's work is starting up again; so is Mom's. After a long vacation, it's back to the real world. But now my granddaughter is sobbing in the back seat of the car and my daughter is wrestling with her real-world obligations and that awful feeling that her career is forcing her daughter to do something she does not want to do.

Now my daughter is offering her daughter some "sweeteners"–something to make the mandate easier to bear. She could pick her up early; they could Skype us every night. My granddaughter isn't buying any of it. For now, she's inconsolable.

And so am I. How I wish we weren't heading for the airport, that I lived nearby and could fill in. The lousy feeling travels up and down the generations. At least the female generations. It's a terrible guilt trip, and we've all been on it. Women having it all? There's a price to pay for every little bit you get. As Anne-Marie Slaughter put it in her article in the Atlantic, Why Women Still Can't Have It All,

"The women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed."

At the airport, Paterfamilias hugs his granddaughter goodbye and tells her that her mom needs her help and she should do what she has to do to make things easier for her mom. I can't bring myself to say anything such thing–though "easier" is what I wish for my daughter. That and a painless way to cut herself in half.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Money Matters: How much do we tell our grown children about our finances?

08/23/2012

Cathy and Ben had to make a key financial decision: how much of his paycheck was he going to apportion to his 401k. Ben had been unemployed for five months, and now had a new job that would be paying him less–by about 30 percent–than his old job. How much could they put into a retirement savings account and still have enough cash to pay the their monthly bills? So when Cathy brought up the subject of the 401k while Ben was watching a baseball game with his 21-year-old son, Ben balked. "I don't want to talk about it now," he told Cathy. When she persisted, he was franker: "I don't want to talk about in front of [my son]."

"This is one of problems between me and Ben," Cathy says. "He's uncomfortable talking to his kids about family money. I think they should know. I don't see why it should be a secret."

This reluctance to discuss family money matters has been going on since Cathy and Ben's son and daughter reached young adulthood. When they were college bound, Cathy wanted to level with them about what she expected them to contribute to college costs. Ben said nothing, preferring to pick up the whole tab. A few months ago, with one child out of college and the other in his senior year, Ben lost his job. Cathy was frank with the kids: You can no longer expect any financial help from us. Ben once again evaded the issue. He didn't want his children to feel the weight of his job loss. Costs for his kids were the last thing he would trim from his budget.

Cathy sees her tell-it-like-it-is attitude as part of her midwestern heritage. She grew up in a small city at the edge of farm country. Where she comes from, she says, people were frank about everything, including money. Ben grew up in a sizeable city. His father supported the family of four boys in a style that was more than comfortable. Ben's dad never discussed finances with or around his children, and Ben is carrying on the family tradition.

He's not alone. Martin Kurtz, former president of the Financial Planning Association, says most families have trouble talking about money. "There's no way to talk about it and not have emotion involved," he says. "It reflects our personal belief system." And when young adults on the cusp of independence are involved, it's even harder to sit down and chat about family finances. "When your child is heading toward become independent, you're transitioning from the end of one thing and the beginning of another," he says. "It's difficult because parents don’t want to give up control around money."

On the question of the 401k, business was as usual in the Cathy-Ben household. Their son left the room so Cathy and Ben could make a decision. But as soon as Ben left town the next day on a business trip, Cathy talked to her son about the issue. "He–and his sister–should be more familiar with how our finances work. By hearing us talk about it, he'd have a better idea how to set up his finances when he starts a family."

Sounds like a no-brainer, but not many of us are comfortable doing it. And those of us like Cathy who are usually end up having to do it alone.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
Vacationing Togetherness: Tips for renting a big house for the family vacation

08/20/2012
Lots of us do it–we rent a big vacation house with lots of bedrooms and access to entertaining things to do and we fill it with our grown children and their families or significant others or important friends.

The idea is always the same: to relax and enjoy down time with our nearest and dearest. For those of us whose grown children live further away than a quick visit any day of the week, the week or two away together is a special time to reconnect.

Always sounds better than it works out. Sibling rivalry has an ugly way of breaking out; the young cousins don't get along or leave one of their own out. Or siblings reconnect and you feel left out or irrelevant. And then there's the question of who's paying the bill. And how does that affect who gets the master bedroom suite.

NextAvenue, the new PBS website for those over 50, had a recent piece it dubbed, "How to Share a Vacation Villa and Remain Friends." If you don't want to read the original piece, here are highlights of questions the author suggests you ask before you book a shared holiday home with friends or family. I've culled or rewritten them for relevancy to sharing a vacation retreat with grown children.

Talk about cleaning. Even in paradise, there are dishes to be washed, laundry to be done, beds to be made and floors to be swept.

Determine in advance how to split rental fees. Two couples in two master suites can easily halve the cost. But if one set of grown kids takes two smaller bedrooms for himself and his kids; the other shares a big one with his baby and you take a third but teeny tiny room, it becomes a math problem: How much should each family pay?

Establish how you’ll share food and liquor costs. If one family wants interesting, sophisticated food but you and your other grown child prefer spaghetti and meatballs, will you grouse at splitting the food bills evenly? Likewise, if one son drinks just one glass of wine a night but your daughters have 5 p.m. cocktails every evening followed by a bottle of wine with dinner, how do you divide up the liquor bill? Beyond those costs, you need to divvy up responsibilities of food shopping and preparation.

Discuss your vacation rhythms. Do some of you get up 7 a.m. and head to the beach or do all of you envision sleeping in and enjoy a late brunch before bringing out the beach towels or going sightseeing? Differences in this department are a recipe for holiday disaster, unless you agree beforehand that you'll be going your own way.

Consider how to share a rental car. If everyone had to fly to the location, you and your grown kids are never going to want to go everywhere together and at the same time. [see above] Think about sharing the car for one or two days of a week’s stay and then apportion the remainder of time. To eliminate problems, you might want to rent more than one car.