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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.

    The Buddy Game: The names our kids use to cheer on their kids

    "Go long, buddy, go long." That's my grown son talking to his son. They are throwing a football back and forth on the solid ground of the dead end street that fronts their house. Long, wide, down the middle–dad and his buddy are giving that football and themselves a workout.

    "Keep your eye on the ball, buddy." That's my son again. This time he's advising his son on hitting a baseball with a bat. It's an art and a science but "buddy" has to watch the ball closely.

    "Shoot, buddy, shoot." "Look for the pass, buddy." "Get back, buddy." This time we're at a soccer game and it's not my son shouting to his buddy. It's all the dads. They are offering free coaching advice to their sons who are on the soccer pitch and trying to score or defend against a goal or just be a factor in the game. The calls for buddy to do this and buddy to do that are a cacophonous backdrop. In a way, it's a positive–the buddies can't tell if it's their father is yelling to them or someone else's dad is yelling to a teammate. So they can just concentrate on the coach and the game–or not. There are some daisy-pickers out there.

    When did it come to all this buddy-calling? Hang around a soccer game and you're unlikely to hear a dad call to a Mike or Bill or Frank or even to use some home grown nickname, like "slugger."

    Is all this "buddy" talk an attempt by our grown children to buddy-up to their children. Be their pals. Should we shout "buddy" when we go to a game? Quick answer: No! We should not shout anything. Not even ''yay, buddy." We are not our grandchildren's pals. That's our grownchildren's job.

    One theory behind all this buddy calling comes from psychologist Michele Borba, who was quoted recently in the New York Times, on the topic.Her point: “The gist of Buddy Parenting is the parent’s goal is to be more of a pal than really the parent, the monitor, the overseer. It becomes toxic when you start placing popularity with your kid above establishing limits or saying no.”

    We've seen none of that toxicity in our son's household. Limits are firmly set. But we do see gender discrimination. At his daughter's soccer games, neither our son nor any of the other dads or moms give a shout out to buddies–though our son has been heard to call out some coaching encouragement to his daughter. "Good kick, Angel." "Nice hustle, Angel." But he is a loner. Girls aren't buddies to their moms and dads and apparently they aren't angels either. At least not yet.

     

     

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

    Grandparenting: Building a bond, one crossword at a time

    You never know where that special bond with a grandchild is going to come from. Paterfamilias has long had a special relationship with his grandson, who's now 11. When we go visit our son and his family or they come visit us, PF and grandson kick the soccer ball, throw basketballs through hoops, have a catch with a baseball. And then there are the touch football games at Thanksgiving: women, and more particularly grammies, are not specifically excluded but they aren't exactly welcome either.

    Crossword
    This year, when our families were vacationing together in Vermont, we were blessed with a rainy Monday morning. I say blessed because PF had come back from his morning coffee run with the New York Times. After he and grandson poured over baseball stats and soccer results, I opened the paper to the crossword puzzle and asked my grandson for help with a clue–the name of some baseball player who had won some obscure award years ago. Of course, he knew it right off the bat. Nothing baseball is obscure to an 11-year-old. So he sat down and wrote the answer in the appropriate boxes. While he scanned the other clues for another answer he would know, I suggested he hold back. "Let's work around the answer we've got," I said. And so it went, we worked away at the crossword puzzle–the Monday Times crossword being the easiest of the week. We used my laptop to look up the names of Greek mythology figures and the like–this was, after all, a learning experience. We noodled over the many ways we could interpret different word clues. Reader, he finished it. Tuesday, I warned him, would be tougher. And it was, but between the Internet and occasional input from other adults, we completed that one, too.

    We didn't have time for the Wednesday, the progressively more difficult puzzle–our son and family were heading home–but I promised I would save it. We were staying in Vermont another week but would be overnighting at his house on our way home. I would bring it with me and we could do it together then.

    And so it was that we sat at his kitchen table and worked at the Wednesday puzzle with our usual tools. It took a while but we finished all but one little square. We were very pleased with ourselves.  We may never crack a Saturday puzzle–it's only for the crossword Super Gods–but we now have our New York Times moments to look forward to. It's not soccer, but it is a special game we do together. Bring on Thursday puzzles. I now have a partner.

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

    Vacationing with Grown Children: Weighing whether to say yes to a trip together

    The invitation was a gift in itself. Pam and Dan's son invited them to join him and his family on a trip of a life time: He and his wife, their two children [ages 8 and 11] and the other grannie [who was also the full time nanny] were heading to South Africa for a late-summer safari. They were all keyed up to see big cats, elephants, zebras and gazelles in the wild.

    For Pam and Dan, here was a chance to spend quality time with a son who lives in another city, to get to know the two Grands in a way that distance and weekend visits preclude and to share in the young family's wonder should a lion or rhino or a herd of zebras be spotted lumbering across the savannah. A chance of a lifetime on a whole different level.

    When they weighed whether to say yes or no, Pam and Dan chose not to go. Little things figured in their equation. The 24-hours it would take to get there was less than appetizing. A safari had never been on either their short or long list of trips they wanted to take. Pam doesn't like hot weather and Africa in August was bound to be too hot for her. Dan had signed up for a doubles tennis tournament–his partner would be understanding but disappointed. And Dan would be disappointed, too.

    But there were bigger issues as well. The Nanny Granny was going along. She was intimate with the day-to-day discipline and management of the Grands. Would Pam and Dan end up feeling like outsiders at their own family's vacation? It's not a frivolous question.

    There's also this: When I joined Uber Son and his family for a short week in Amsterdam this winter, it was a thrilling trip–watching my Grands' wonder as we cruised the canals, visited the Van Gogh museum, tasted pannekoeken, saw the canal-lining houses where 17th century Dutch burghers lived and imported goods from all around the world that were hauled into and stored in their attics. But one of the keys to my personal enjoyment was that I stayed in a hotel half a mile away from my son's. I could take time out to rest or to sightsee on my own. That was part of the magic.

    A safari is a different animal–it's everyone doing everything together, unless you opt out and stay in camp rather than go on the guided jeep ride through the park. There is the additional strain in being in an unfamiliar–even dangerous–world where it's difficult to venture out on your own. [A friend who went on a safari with her grown son, says she had to warn him not to take late-night walks by himself. To the animals in the preserve, she warned him, he was "meat on the hoof."]

    And then there's the cost. Safaris don't come cheap. Nor does the airfare to South Africa. Although they feel a touch guilty about turning their son down, in the end Pam and Dan didn't see why they should pay a small fortune–upwards of $5,000 a piece–to see animals in the wild when animals in a zoo sate their animal-viewing appetite.

    They're going to Provence instead. On their own. Viva la France, says Pam. She'd be happy to take her Grands there any time.

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

    Parenting Adult Children: The challenges of adjusting to screen time

    I've been trying to get my mind around this for a while: How do we adjust to the time and ways in which our adult children–or even younger grandchildren–spend time on multiscreens and in the digital world. Some of us are old enough to remember being concerned about our children spending too much time watching television. Now we're having an even harder time coming to terms with all the hours our grown children and their children spend on iPads, smart phones, computers, game players and electronic platforms I don't even know about.  TV? They watch any show they want via YouTube or Hulu and on any device at hand–anywhere they are, anytime they want. Even if it's at your kitchen table while they are ostensibly visiting you.

    Setting limits for our grown children, especially young adults still living in our homes, is hard enough. Standing by while our grandchildren twitch their thumbs over mini keyboards and stay in touch with friends when they are with us, is frustrating–even though they're just doing what come naturally. It's not personal. But it's annoying.

    In a recent post on Pyschology Today, psychologist Carl Pickhardt, who writes about parenting adolescent children, picks up on the concerns he hears about the amount of time spent with and on an electronic screen–playing video games, social networking, texting, watching DVDs.

    Pickhardt's perspective for parents of adolescents applies to those of us with older children and younger grandchildren. He writes that it's hard for him to tell "if the increasing amount of leisure screen time adolescents put in each week is an emerging problem or simply a social and cultural adjustment to major technological change that is here to stay. Certainly the electronic screen is a vast platform or window or stage on which young people can act out a wide variety of roles – as audience, as spectator, as creator, as player, as communicator, as networker, as shopper, as trader, as researcher, as searcher, as performer, as student, as helper, as teacher, as entertainer, to name a few. The possibilities are mind boggling. The electronic screen is now a means to so many ends."

    The real concern, as he points out, is whether the electronic screen is used "more for escape from than engaging with real life experiences and responsibilities and developing real life skills," and whether "solitary screen time discourages social contact and growth, when online activity consumes more life time than offline activity."

    With our adult children–especially young adults still living at home or dependent on us–we can set rules about personal interaction: Screens off at the dinner table or when we're discussing something important. With our grandchildren, it's trickier. Rules of the road are set by the parents and we can come off as interfering know-nothings if we try to change the rules when they're around us.

    It's complicated. One more adjustment to a brave new world where our old rules of engagement don't apply. I'll be following up on this issue–looking for what the experts are saying about how to deal with social media etiquette and extended screen time. Stay tuned. Or at least, keep your smart phone and iPad charged up and on.

     

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

    Runaway Grandpa: Pop-pop comes home. Not all generations are welcoming.

    Two years ago, I posted a blog about a runaway grandpa. It was a tale of family woe: In his 75th year–and 50th year of marriage–a retired, New England professor ran off to California to live with a woman he'd been wooing for a year. Not only did his wife feel abandoned, so did the grown children, both of whom were married with children of their own, who wondered how their pop-pop had disappeared. Both grown children decided to shut their father out of their lives–they refused to open his emails or answer his phone calls.

    Now he's back. His wife has been more forgiving and welcoming than his children. But at least one grandchild has risen to the challenge of re-knitting the family back together again. The 9-year-old, who lives in Texas with his parents, was celebrating his birthday when Pop-Pop and Grannie came to visit–the first visit since pop-pop's return to the family. Although the daughter remained cool, the grandson set set out his druthers for celebrating his birthday–lunch at the tiny restaurant at the tiny airport near his home. And so they went. From their seat, they could see small planes land, gas up and fly out. "He knew," says the grannie of her grandson, "that his pop-pop loves airplanes and this was his way of making his grandfather feel welcome." It helped cut the ice since there were lots of old airplanes to watch and talk about–which, at the time, beat trying to talk around more pressing family issues.

    Things have gone less well with the son who lives in the same city as pop-pop and grannie. The son is still angry at his father. He has told his mother not to call his house. "He told me it was because he might pick it up and it might be his dad and he's not going to talk to him right now," the grannie reports. The reason notwithstanding, it has hurt her feelings "to have a son say 'Don't call me.' It cuts me off from my grandchildren."

    Feelings of betrayal and anger run deep. We may think–worry, fret, be annoyed–that we're no longer the central players in of our family's life. Our grown children are. And with a sentence–"don't call me"–they can push us to the farthest edges of the periphery. Our actions may not be central, but they still pack a punch. And not necessarily in a good way.

     

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

    Grandparenting: Helpful hints on how to talk to a teenager

    When they were babies and toddlers, conversation with Grands was babytalk. Easy to manage. As they hit their stride as youngsters, we began to have more challenging but interesting conversations with them– chats about ideas, family history, life, school, friends. They didn't sit on our laps anymore, but we could have heart-to-hearts.

    But oh those teen years. Their parents–our grown children–are having their own difficulties communicating. One friend whose Grands are in high school said she has a better relationship with them now than when they were younger: she is now the place they come to complain about the parents and, since this woman doesn't get along with her daughter in law, find a "us against them" camaraderie.

    Most of us, though, just want to keep the lines of normal communication open, without getting in between our grown children and their children. Some of us find the car a perfect place to chat–with eye contact only through the rear view mirror. Seems to free them up to chat more freely. Or for us to eavesdrop on conversations they have with their friends.

    But that doesn't address the real issue: How to have a meaninful conversation with our Grands and to reassure them that we are there for them. A site called babysitting.net recently posted ten tips on how to talk to your teen age child. Most of the tips are for the parents, but a few are helpful for those of us floundering around and trying to figure out how to talk to our verge-of-adulthood, hormone-driven Grands.

    Here are a few of the tips, which I've amended for grandparents:

    Ask open-ended questions. Stay away from asking questions like, “How was your day?”  The answer will most likely be a one word answer.  Instead, say something like, “Tell me about your day.”

    Talk about topics your Grand likes. Sports, if he or she is into athletics. (Brief yourself on whatever sport they're into.) Or movies. Or, if you're really brave, music.

    Listen more than you speak. You don't have to fill every idle moment with chitchat. Leave some silence to give them a chance to fill it with conversation.

    Don't try to fix them. Don't jump in and offer advice until it's asked for. The only thing you should do while your Grand is talking is nod and say the occasional "hmmm" or "I see" to indicate you are actively listening.

    Only offer an opinion if your Grand asks for it. Telling your Grands what you would do isn’t going to help. If your Grand asks for advice, start by asking what they've considered so far.  This will give you an idea of where their head is and you can act accordingly.  Lectures? Don't go there.

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

    Parenting Adult Children: The checklist for how pleased we are with our kids

    Thanks to Susan Adcox and her blog on grandparenting, I've come across a transcript of a 1996 This American Life show with the theme of "Adult Children."

    Part I is a conversation between Ira Glass, host of This American Life, and his mother, a family therapist who, at the time of the conversation, has been asked to lead a discussion of a women's group on the subject of adult children. She called her children to help her key in on advice they would give to the group about communicating with your children and about having a good relationship with your adult children.

    in the transcript of the conversation between Ira Glass and his mother, Shirley, there's this little gem:

    Ira Glass: ..if you had to characterize in a phrase people's relationships with their children, would you describe them as being very good, somewhat OK, generally kind of yucky? I mean, how would you describe it?

    Shirley Glass: I would say that there were a lot of people whose dreams haven't been realized, whose expectations haven't been met. And so there's a sense of disappointment, although there were some people there who were pleased with all aspects.

     As the conversation progressed, Ira's mother shared a checklist she had come up with for gauging how satisfied parents were with their adult children. Her findings:

    • Is married.
    • Lives near the parents
    • Has children (grandchildren for the grandparents)
    • Is successful
    • Is married to someone the parents approve of
    • Appreciates the parents.

    Susan wondered, as do I, if anyone has come up with a similar checklist our grown children might have in their heads to gauge their satisfaction with us. Would it include such items as

        *Listens well

        *Likes my spouse/significant other

        *Is independent

        *Has stopped pressing my hot buttons

        *Will babysit anytime, anywhere and play by my parenting rules

        Got any more generic gauges to add? Write on……

     

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

    Money Matters: A friendly dispute over who’s picking up the dinner check

    I asked a friend: When did you stop picking up the tab for your kids–for their flights home for the holidays [her sons and their families live on the other coast], for dinners out and for tickets to go to the movies. Her answer was definitive and simple: "When they started earning more than I do."

    I was thinking about that on a recent weekend visit to Uber son. Usually we fly up on a Friday and my daughter-in-law makes dinner for us all. On Saturday we offer–come close to insisting–that we take everyone out for dinner. If the family is too tired or one of the Grands too restless to sit in a restaurant, Paterfamilias will go out and pick up take-out food. A fair enough division of labor and a nice balance of the costs of feeding a family of seven–five of them, two of us.

    On this particular weekend, we flew up on Saturday. We were going to spend all day Sunday watching two of the three Grands play in soccer tournaments and then fly home on Monday. Saturday being Saturday, PF as usual insisted, cajoled, requested we go out for dinner. Everyone was in the mood for it and off we went to their favorite Thai restaurant. But when the check came, Uber son grabbed it. PF fought him for it. A friendly tussle but Uber son was adamant–and his arms longer. PF fell back to his second line of offense: Let's split it. But Uber son was having none of it–not even when PF made a dash for the cash register and tried to add his credit card to the one our son had proferred in payment.

    We know we're supposed to let them treat us from time to time, to be graceful about letting them know they are growns up now. But this seemed awkward. After all, we had insisted on going out for dinner and now here was our son stuck with a dinner check for seven.

    The saving "grace" came right after dinner when we drove over to ye olde ice cream shop and Uber son allowed as how the dessert treats were on PF. Reversal of fortune, and  tip of the balance–or re-balancing– between father and son.

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

    Grown Children and Grandchildren: Taming the gung-ho inside us–at soccer games and elsewhere

    I had lunch recently with a friend whose youngest son is house hunting–only he doesn't want to live too near his older brother. He worries that the older brother–the father of three athletic boys–will pressure his family (he's got one toddler son) to go all-out for soccer and other sports. He's worried, in other words, that gung-ho will be contagious and too much pressure on his small child.

    I know what he's talking about. Our grown children and our friends' grown children have expressed similar concerns, only it was about what we might say to their children as they start to play organized sports. One gramps I know is a gung-ho kind of sports guy, and soccer is his go-get-'em sport of choice. His son made it clear how he was to talk to his 5-year-old grandson about sports. When he comes to see a soccer game, there are well-defined boundaries about encouraging words and negative comments and some subtle points in between. There seems to be a concern that the gung-ho of the grandpa would turn off the grandchild–make him lose his love for games and sports, turn a positive into a negative, be a confidence-burner.

    I see it all around me. Parents of grown children are being told to follow a family line about how they talk to their grandchildren about events taking place outside the home. It's not necessarily part of the 'everybody's a winner' attitude. That is, everyone on the team gets a trophy, even if the team was in last place. Or an attempt to shield children from the realities of competition. It seems to be more of a 'bring 'em along slowly' attitude. Sometimes we grandparents forget how young our grandchildren are when we take to the sidelines to cheer them on.

    But more to the point: our grown children–our grandchildren's parents–are in charge. And like it or not, Young Father Knows Best–even when, in our heart of hearts, we don't think he does.

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

    Money Matters: The final arbiter in helping our kids out financially

    When our grown children need financial help and we have the wherewithal to make it happen, our decisions generally fall into one of two camps: Either "Yes! I'd rather help my child now than leave it to them later. " or "No! They're independent adults. They need to stand on their own two feet."

    But real life has a funny way of coming along and moving us somewhere in the middle. The "no way" parents may see a well-conceived business plan and be asked by their entrepreneur-to-be to invest in the venture. Or the "Yes" parent may be asked to fund a dream-come-true trip around the world and demur, reasoning, "This is something my grown child should finance himself."

    Readers of this blog may remember my friend Dick who refused to lend his daughter $1,000 to visit a friend whose mother had died but lent his son $10,000 to buy a boat. His calculus, he said, was not so much the use of the money but the fact that he had lent his daughter money on several occasions and she never repaid it. His son often borrowed money from his dad but he always repaid it. Clearly, the son's credit standing was higher than the daughter's.

    Then there are friends whose 40-year-old, divorced son is struggling to gain traction in a creative field [filmmaking] and whose neighbor's son [food photographer] is going through the same hard time. When I blogged about that situation, I pointed out that my friends wanted to–and continue to–support their son's "dream," even though their son tells them he doesn't want to take their money and is not above taking on low-paying temporary jobs to help make ends meet. But they look askance at the neighbor, who supports his son, even though the son refuses to take temporary gigs and the son's wife, now pregnant with the second child, doesn't work outside the home, either. My friends thought the neighbor was being an enabler and should give the son a dose of "tough love" since he seemed to be making no effort to support his growing family.

    When we decide whether or not to help support our kids or lend them money, there may be ostensible reasons for saying yes or no–an unworthy cause versus a desperate need. For many of us, though, our decision may hinge on whether we smell a sense "entitlement,"–that is, that our children expect us to open our wallet no matter the reason, request or need.

    There's at least one more way to think about whether to loan or not loan.

    Barbara Nusbaum, a New York-based clinical psychologist specializing in money psychology, says she sees nothing wrong in wanting to share the wealth with grown children—especially if a family can afford it and it’s done with “a spirit of loving generosity.” But she also notes that when it comes to parents and their grown children, money has many meanings to it. “You can give money in a generous way and it’s about support, love and generosity,” she says. “But it can also be about control or about creating dependence.”

    When parents are invested in giving their children money, Nusbaum continues, “they will expect something back and want to control the decisions of their adult children. They may give money for one purpose and the children may spend their money in a different way, and then the parent feels resentment.”

    So, when is it time to snip the financial strings?

    For Nusbaum, a good test for parents is to ask themselves whether the financial support is something that will lead to their child’s independence. By way of example, she says a child who hasn’t been able to get a job might ask for money to go to graduate school, hoping it will lead to better job opportunities. “That might be a worthwhile,if it will allow that young adult to become independent,” she says. But if the parent is supporting a child and there is no movement in terms of finding a job or career, it might be time to tell the child “I can’t do this for you anymore.”