PenPenWrites

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.
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

08/16/2012

"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

08/13/2012

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.

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

08/09/2012

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.