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

The Job Hunt: When they get one, there are no bragging rights.

06/13/2012

A friend doesn't like to talk about her son's good luck in landing a career job–even before he donned cap and gown and got his college diploma. None of her friends college grads have had the same good fortune–those who are working are in non-career, just=-barely-earn-your-keep jobs.

The same pressure is on kids. A friend reports that on the eve of her college graduation her daughter had two job offers. She wasn't sure which to take but couldn't discuss the options with her peers. "She can't talk to friends because they aren't getting jobs," the mother reports. "It's very stressful all around. She didn't even tell her roommate."

These days, bragging rights are not something to brag about.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Re-Nesting: The bright and the dark side of college grads moving back home

06/08/2012

A friend's son has moved back home. Not that he wanted to. Or she wanted him to. But after four years away at college and a year of teaching abroad, he's back in this country and jobless. So he's come home, where his mother is less than excited to have him there. The reason: Though he's actively job searching (she thinks), he sleeps till 11:00 a.m. and somehow can't find the time to do chores she's asked him to do–chores she sees as his contribution to the household that's taken him in and is feeding him. The dad tells her to go easier on the son, that the son sees himself as an independent adult. "But he's not independent," the mom says. "We're feeding him and he's living at home."

Another friend's son–the eldest of three–is back home as well, and the dad is increasingly unpleased.The son had been in North Carolina helping a friend in a rent-a-beach-chair business but at last summer’s end, he came home jobless. He had been a marketing major in college but couldn't find a job in his field. He finally took a job as a door-to-door window salesman. "It's a frustrating job. I get that," the dad says. "But he gripes about it all the time. Some days when I get home, I don’t want to hear about it. I've had my own bad day." The dad says he’s about to have a chat with his eldest son about money. More precisely, he's going to tell him that the support is about to stop–the free meals at home; use of the father’s old car for which the father pays insurance; the free ride of a cell phone, which is included in dad’s cell phone plan. “I've got to kick him out of the nest," the dad says. "He has to stand on own feet and make his own mistakes.”

The front lines may be reporting frustration and misery over grown children living at home–the little annoyances add up. But researchers see a bigger picture and a brighter side.

In an op-ed piece in a recent New York Times, Karen Fingerman and Frank Furstenberg (their work is affiliated with the adult family project), detail their research on re-nesting which shows that the return home of college graduates "is not necessarily the nightmare scenario it’s made out to be. Our research shows that the closer bonds between young adults and their parents should be celebrated, and do not necessarily compromise the independence of the next generation."

That bit of sunshine is followed by these observations: "Grown children benefit greatly from parental help. Young adults who received financial, practical and emotional support from their parents reported clearer life goals and more satisfaction than young adults who received less parental support. This support ranged from room and board to making a car available, to parents’ listening to their son or daughter talk about the day."

The researchers also take note of how the re-nesting phenomenon has evolved over the last generation. In 1986, about half of parents reported that they had spoken with a grown child in the past week; in 2008, 87 percent said they had.In 1988, less than half of parents gave advice to a grown child in the past month, and fewer than one in three had provided any hands-on help. Today, nearly 90 percent of parents give advice and 70 percent provide some type of practical assistance every month.

"Maybe we just need to get over this discomfort," Fingerman and Furstenberg write. "In fact, we could be celebrating the strong bonds between today’s young people and their parents, rather than lamenting the foibles of the next generation."

All of which sounds great in the abstract but loses some of its luster on the front lines. Or maybe it loses its luster when the college grads are a year or two out of school and still struggling to gain purchase in the upwardly mobile work-a-day world. Everyone–parents, kids–wishes the grown children could get a decent job and move on with life. When they finally do, maybe then the front-line parents can look back and see all the positives the researchers see in those years of enforced togetherness.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Visiting Privileges: Oh to be in Tuscany with a daughter and her bambina

06/05/2012

A friend (and neighbor) has been spending the semester–she's an art teacher–in Italy. Her daughter, who lives far from her (not only from Italy but on the opposite coast in the U.S.), flew to Italy with her husband and year-old-daughter to spend six weeks of family togetherness. The fact that it was in Tuscany added to the aura of the visit.

There have been ups and downs but mostly it has been a wonderful time, my friend's emails tell me. A recent one ties together two themes about such visits and about our relationships with our grown children and their children. The first is that it's a rare treat to be able to spend uninterrupted time with our grown children. The second is a corollary of the first: our kids and their families are only on loan to us–they have their own lives once they leave the nest.

Her email starts out by referring to my last email on our bird feeding battles with squirrels and the joy of bird watching from the breakfast window.

"Yes, bird feeders and watching the little guys flutter about and eat are wonderful.We had a pair of house wrens settle into a wren house we hung up, two years running, and they had babies, fed them, each day giving them bigger and bigger bugs to eat, took away the little white packages of poop with each feeding, it was amazing to watch. Then one day we saw the babies lean out through the opening and…….. fly away! real life. sigh."

That graf foreshadows the heart of her email about the visit with her daughter and 21-month-old granddaughter.

"We are very wisely not under the same roof as [our daughter and family]. We found them a place a twenty minute walk away, which is perfect. We spend lots of time with them, but each have our own places. Quite wonderful. What a great treat it has been to watch [our granddaughter] changing in front of our eyes. She's gone from crawling to walking, from mooing and baaaing and neighing and tweettweeting to knowing tons of words including lalo and anch (yellow and orange) and lalil (olive oil, an essential utterance in Tuscany), very miraculous. What minds us humans were made up with. They've been here a month and will be with us till we leave. BUT what a shock it will be not to see [our granddaughter] every day."

The shock, the sadness and real life, sigh.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Parenting College Kids: Does our Internet-connectedness delay their growing up?

05/30/2012

For some of us, our kids are adults as soon as they leave our house to live elsewhere. We expect them to be able to manage money and relationships with their peers–to say nothing of us. If they're commuting to college and using our home as a base, we may consider them to be almost grown up. And if they move back home after a stint away at college, we have great expectations that they are adults now–they can vote; they can legally order a drink–even if they may be temporarily dependent on us financially.

Is it as simple as that? The issues of when a child becomes an adult is at the heart of a debate in psychological circles and behind the emergence of the concept of "emerging adulthood" to describe the half dozen or so post-adolescent years. There's a lively discussion about it at this New York Times site.

The discussion includes the role we play in setting our children on the path to adulthood. The professional addressing it is Barbara Hofer, a professor of psychology at Middlebury College and co-author, with Abigail Sullivan Moore, of "The iConnected Parent: Staying Close to Your Kids in College (and Beyond) While Letting Them Grow Up."

Turns out, some of us are doing our darnedest to keep our young adult children 'kids'–that is, youngsters who are dependent on us for more than financial support. "As a college professor who studies adolescents and emerging adults," Hofer writes, "I am particularly concerned that college students are not getting the opportunities they need to grow into autonomous, healthily connected adults when parents are still hyper-involved in their lives."

The Hofer-Moore research suggests that college kids are not being encouraged to make their own choices and decisions–to, in fact, make mistakes and figure out how to recover from them. Instead, Hofer writes that she sees parents hovering and helicoptering. "Parents who are using technology (calls, Skype,texting, e-mail, Facebook, etc.) to micromanage lives from afar may be thwarting the timely passage to adulthood." How bad is it? Hofer says one in five students in her study report parents are editing and proofing their papers. Her advice: "College parents can help with the transition by serving as a sounding board rather than being directive, by steering their college-age kids to campus resources for help, by considering long-range goals rather than short-term ones and by giving their “kids” space to grow up."

Back in the day–when my children were college students–Paterfamilias and I couldn't have edited or proofed, even if we wanted to. I hate to date myself, but my children left for college armed with typewriters–tho they did end up with computers by the time they graduated. The Internet wasn't around, to say nothing of WiFi. Not even FedEx. So there's no way we could have been so hands-on or hovering.

The new technologies keep us in touch with our grown children in many wonderful ways–don't get me started on Skype as a wondrous way to visit a grown child or grandchild who lives far away–but we can also take too much advantage of it. Just because we have an iPad doesn't mean we have to use it to keep up-to-the-minute (literally) tabs on our emerging adults. Let them try and fail and pick themselves up and try again. That doesn't mean we have to turn into techno-phobes. They can still text us all about it.

It may be that the fault, to update a Shakespearean line, is not in our iPads but in ourselves, that we are too tied to the idea of our children as dependents.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Great Expectations: The payback–or lack of it–when we help our kids out

05/28/2012

When their daughter and son-in-law bought a house, the parents helped out–with advice and counseling (both solicited) on the building plans and by babysitting their grandson, especially on moving day. They also helped paint rooms and gave the young couple furnishings from their own house that they no longer needed.

Their problem, as they expressed it in a letter to Carolyn Hax, is one of feeling left out. The daughter planned a house warming party and didn't invite the parents. When the mom complained, the daughter told her she was "over the top" to be upset.The mom, who signed her letter, "sad and disappointed" expressed her pain this way: "It seems to us that we were good enough to do all the legwork but not good enough to be invited to the celebration."

Ah yes, The left out feeling. No one likes it. Being slighted is one of the least feel-good feelings in the world. And to be excluded by our own children! But as Hax pointed out, "when adult children live near their parents, they're faced with a small but sensitive puzzle: how to lead social lives that are both independent and inclusive."

Hax's advice to the mom, who said this was not the first time she felt like she was the "hired help rather than part of the family," was to look at the situation in a more positive light.Instead of saying "We're the hired help," the mom could tell herself, Hax writes, "We're already a huge part of their lives. I'm glad they'll have this time with friends."

In other words, we are often hurt when we get over-invested in our children's lives–and especially so when we expect them to repay our many "investments" with a coin from another country. We may love our children and they may love us, but we aren't –and shouldn't try to be — their social life.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Visiting Grown Children: The hidden gift in a grandchild’s soccer game

05/24/2012

No camera or cellphone at hand but the picture sits bright in my mind: There on a grassy field sit Paterfamilias and his 9-year-old Grand, their knees drawn up, their baseball-capped heads close together.

They have come to the little neighborhood park near Alpha Daughter's house so PF could show his Grand some of the basics about kicking a soccer ball. During our weekend visit to celebrate Alpha Daughter's birthday, we also had the pleasure of watching our Grand play soccer. She is new to the game and, not to put too fine a point on it, it showed. PF, who's been playing and watching soccer all his life–a star on his college team, no less–saw her problem as a lack of technique. I, who know about soccer only by watching Uber Son and then his children play the game, saw things differently: She was clueless about the game–seemed to have no idea where to kick the ball once she stuck out her foot and got it on the ball.

So this moment in the park was found gold: a women's league game was underway–high school and college graduates who loved to play were running up and down the field trying to kick or head the ball between the goal posts. As Alpha Daughter, my grandpup and I set off for a walk, PF and Grand sat down to study the game. Head to head they sat, watching soccer. By the time we got back from our two-mile walk, PF had his favorite player picked out–#40–and was letting his little pupil know what #40 was doing that was outstanding, which passes were effective–and which were not and why.

We think our Grand came away from soccer in the park with at least a minimal understanding of what the game is about and what players–even players her size–are supposed to do when they are on the pitch. But more important than that was the bond between gramps and Grand–sharing knowledge, figuring things out together, sitting cap to cap and talking to each other.

Celebrating our daughter's birthday with her was wonderful–it meant a lot to us to be there for those few days. But the real gift of the weekend was the soccer moment at the park.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Grandparenting: Baseball, soccer or lacrosse–are we ready to coach again?

05/22/2012

When our kids were young and living in our homes, we either did or did not coach their sports teams; it was either a good or a bad experience–for them and for us. Now there our kids are, all grown up and thinking about coaching their own kids. Or possibly asking us to help out–or maybe even suggesting we volunteer to be the coach.

This latter may be wishful thinking on the part of some of granddads–or grandmums–who fancied themselves athletes and great coaches in their younger days. But the idea of coaching a Grand's team is not just a return to our once-athletic selves. It's also a chance to spend quality time with a Grand and bond over an experience that lends itself to endless discussion and sharing of information.

Should such an opportunity present itself, here's a 10-reasons list to review before rising to the challenge. The official title is "10 reasons dad may not want to coach a youth baseball team." But it applies to all sports and to moms and dads, grandparents and grand uncles as well.

In addition to the usual points about the difficulties of coaching your own child or grandchild–not showing favoritism; being a model of good sportsmanship–the list ends with this reason to keep your seat on the sidelines or in the stands: "One of the great joys of being a parent of a sporting child is watching that child play and grow within the game. As a coach, you might struggle with staying objective and keeping your emotions in check. Watching from the stands will give fathers the chance to enjoy their child’s play and not worry about the pressures of coaching."

For grandparents, there's the additional opportunity as observer to add our two-cents of advice to our grown kids about what we see happening on the field where their kids–our Grands–are playing. That, too, can be an endless source of discussion, conversation and bonding–a sharing of our love of the game and the wisdom we may have accrued about the subtleties of the sport.

We also serve who stand, cheer and keep an eye on the dynamics of the field of play.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Money Matters: A saving plan for the grand kids

05/18/2012

We've been squirreling money away for our Grands. We started out by putting money into 529s, but the 2008 recession and the follow-on downturn in financial markets have discouraged us from plowing more money into that vehicle. I've opened savings accounts for each of them. The interest rate on those accounts is, like the rest of the investment firmament, discouraging. Those accounts are not even keeping up with inflation–but at least the money isn't melting away into the downs of the stock market.

The idea behind my and Paterfamilias' savings for our four Grands is simple: We want to make sure there's some money there for their education. Their parents will bear the bulk of that burden; maybe the Grands will have to take out loans to finance some of it. But we hope our little bit will take the edge off the cost. Our parents did that for our kids–every birthday they sent a small check to put in an account for the kids. The wonder of compounded interest made those accounts a help when the college bills started rolling in. It's a role model we plan to emulate. But how to do it in today's difficult financial time?

PBS's new Web site, Next Avenue, which aims to cover financial (and other) issues of concern to those of us moving further along the age continuum, currently has a video with the heady title, "Saving for Your Grandkids." You can link to it here. It won't give you answers to or even ideas for the investment questions we're all wrestling with, but Ric Edelman offers very generalized caveats and options for those of us who want to put money away for our grandkids.

My take-aways from the video:

You can set up ways to save for their education or to save for their retirement. Few of us think about the latter. (How to do it, he doesn't say.)

Whatever plan you create for the grandkids you have, be sure you can replicate it for grandkids that might come along in the future. Fair is fair, even if someone's a latecomer.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Money Matters: Our college grad’s expenses are our expenses–our worry too

05/14/2012

Will the surveys never stop? Here's another one–this time from Ameriprise Financial–on how generous we baby boomers are toward our grown-up children–and how worried we are about their future financial security and ours.

A December 2011 survey of baby boomers with $100,000 or more in investable assets reports that nine out of ten–93 percent–say they have provided some kind of support to their adult children. Paying for –or lending money for–college tuition comes in at 71 percent; help in buying a car, 53 percent. Parents are also helping with the upkeep of life's many expenses, like helping to pay for car and health insurance, rent and utilities.

Where does the money come from? 45 percent take it out of their spending money; 35 percent hit their regular savings accounts (about 8 percent tapped into retirement accounts) and nearly 15 percent take out loans to help their kids.

At the same time, more than one-third–35 percent–are worried that their children haven’t learned to manage money responsibly. More than that–nearly half–say their children don’t understand what it takes financially to prepare for retirement–even as they report that they are spending what they should save on their adult children.

As to those adult children at the receiving end, the survey found that more than half of them point their fingers back at their parents: they say they rarely or never talked to them about how they budget the family’s money.

Should we be surprised that kids coming out of college today are drowning in student debt? Or what the New York Times recently headlined as A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Parenting and grandparenting: A reminder to lead our own lives–and not through theirs

05/11/2012

Over at the educated grandparent, a recent post admonished those of us retiring from our careers and jobs to remember to keep up with–or develop–interests beyond immediate family. It's not healthy for our grown children or us to live our retiree years through our children or grandkids.

The post headed with this attention-grabber

You can read the whole post here. For me, the important take-away was this:

"Many people define themselves by their careers. What then? Some grandparents become completely involved with their grandchildren, who become the focus of their lives. …We cannot depend on our children to fill our lives. That is our job."