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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.

    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.”

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

    Grandparenting: A little help on getting the grands to bed

    There's a nanny site that loves to make lists–1o best ways to entertain a child waiting on line; 10 best things to do in the summer. There's now a six best tips on getting grandkids to bed. The focus is on the wee ones and most of the tips have to do with establishing a solid routine. But there are one or two that might help those of us who've chosen to help out a grown child by taking on a babysitting gig for a Grand or two. Despite elaborate instructions from the parents, we may struggle to get the little kids down and out for the night.

    The two "best tips" I found relevant are these:

    "Keep kids well rested during the day." While it's up to parents to set up a nap routine, we grandparents should factor in this reality: overtired children are much harder to put to bed at night. The nanny tip line implies that skipping nap time is not going to help get the kids to bed earlier or easier. "Depriving your child of needed daytime sleep will typically make nighttime sleep worse, not better."

    "Avoid stimulating activities before bed." When we're babysitting a Grand it's lots of fun to make them laugh hard and run around a lot. But it won't help if the roughhousing and wrestling take place too close to bedtime. The nanny tip line says: "When active playtime happens right before bed, children can get wound up and calming them down becomes problematic. For nighttime family fun, consider playing a quiet board game or reading a book."

    On that latter point, there's nothing like a little Winnie the Pooh as bedtime nears. Christopher Robin has a talent for unwinding.

     

     

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

    Parenting Adult Children: Letting them treat you to something

    A few years ago, the magazine I worked for was bought and sold. In the morning we were told who the buyers were; in the afternoon, we were all fired–except for five 20-somethings. The shock of it made our already close staff closer, even in the diaspora. Everyone's resettled now but we have many a mini-reunion. At a recent one–bagel and coffee on a Saturday morning–a former co-worker (and mother of a 28-year-old married daughter) told me she learned something from my blog. (Now that was a good feeling.) More specifically, she was referring to the Notes to Self item, Let them treat you to something.

    Last year, before she resettled in her new job–or even knew that there was a job out there for her–she  went up to Brooklyn to visit her daughter and son-in-law, staying with them in their small apartment as she usually did. When they went out for dinner in the evening, her daughter grabbed the check. It was the first time. The mother's first reaction was to say "No, I'll take care of it." But the second–and the one that dominated–was to 'Let them treat me to something.'

    "It made them feel good," she told me. It made her feel good, too. "I was out of a job so it was especially nice. It was a recognition of their independence. And it also made me realize they could afford it–and that was a very nice feeling, too."

    Since then, she and her husband have gone to Brooklyn several times to visit their daughter and they've let their daughter pick up the tab from time to time–for movies, ice cream cones or brunch. It puts everyone on a more adult standing–not to have mom and dad the ever-indulgent parents; letting the grown kids feel grown up. What a tonic. And a treat.

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

    Smother Love, Retiree Style: There’s still no excuse for over-helping our adult children

    In May, I linked to a post on the educated grandparent blog–a post that talked about the need for those of us who are retiring from our jobs and work-day careers to make sure we develop our own interests and not live our lives through our grown children and grandchildren. No sooner had I read through the post on the issue than I came across this "Ask Amy" column in a newspaper. In the second question in the column, a daughter complains about a mother who is driving her nuts with constant calling, text messaging and emails. "She is retired (in her 60s) and extremely bored," the letter writer notes. "She sits online all day and sends me about 10 emails a day with ideas for my career, endless news articles and forwards."

    Yes, just what the educated grandparent blog warned about. And with some hint at what happens when we don't get a grip on our life. The daughter writes that she is becoming "more detached from her [mother] because she is suffocating me with the bombardment of emails, texts and phone calls."

    Amy's last word to the daughter is this reminder: Her parent's life is her parent's responsibility.

    No one said it would be easy to step back from our children's lives–and especially not when we are no longer engaged in our careers, interacting with friends at work and feeling in control of a busy, active life. It's just that smother love is no answer to one of life's biggest adjustments, which is what retirement is. Our children don't want to be our cause. It may be easy to send emails and text messages–to show our progeny how well we can keep up with their interests and needs. We may think we're showing interest in them but they may take it as a busy-body like bombardment. Some 20 years ago, when we were annoyed at someone's mixing too personally into our business, we would shoot out a popular admonition: "Get a Life." Still holds true today.