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

Money Matters: Are we still working for our grown children’s sake?

02/21/2012

Here's what Ann tells me: She is tired–her job is exhausting what with traveling once a month, having to stay downtown for business dinners every few weeks plus dealing with the pressures of office politics and the crush of getting work done. She thinks she's ready to give it up, but there's one reason she's not: she likes the ready money–the ability to, without giving it a second thought, pay for her grandtwins' day care, take the whole family (three grown children, their spouses and children) away for a weekend to celebrate her husband's birthday.

Here's what I've been thinking: I would like more time to spend on this blog and turn it into a book. It's a dream I've been nurturing for years. I should give up my editing contracts and get to work on my dream project. But, like Ann, I like the ready money and the ability to indulge my children and their families with a new dishwasher, a warm coat or a ski trip without thinking about my retirement budget.

So Ann and I tell ourselves and each other that we would quit but that we continue to work to indulge or help our grown children. It's kind of crazy: it's not as though they are needy. All of them are–knock on wood–self-sufficient, weathering this economic crisis and doing work we're proud of. Neither Ann nor I could count ourselves in the "1 percent" but we are comfortable. Both she and I–and our spouses–have planned well and put aside a respectable nest egg for our retirement years. We could probably afford the day care tuition or the other indulgences even if we weren't working. And yet we continue to tell ourselves we need to stay on the job.

We may be in denial. It may be more that we're just not ready to leave the Mothership of our jobs and the security–not necessarily financial–that it provides. Our grown children–and grandchildren–may be the handy excuse.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Grandparent Rivalry: Getting past the competitive edge

02/16/2012

For years, Amy and Ed, whose three children and five grandchildren live within six miles of them, were the only grandparents in town. Their daughter-in-laws' and son-in-law's parents lived far away in other cities and even in other countries. So Amy and Ed were the ones who did soccer practice pick-ups and piano-lesson chauffeuring; they tutored one grandson in math and were available to pick up and deliver another to day care when the parents were ill. Sometimes Amy, who works full time, would complain to friends that her weekends were so taken up with visits to her children and grandchildren that she no longer saw her friends.

Now there has been a change in the family dynamic. One set of grandparents, who are in the foreign service and spent years living abroad. have been posted stateside for a spell. They live within 15 minutes of their daughter and grandchildren.

Both sets of grandparents are now available to help out. If there's a need for a babysitter–a grown child is sick and can't go to work–there are others to call, not just Amy and Ed. After years of being the only ones, she and Ed feel they now have to wait for a place in line.

"When you don't live near your children and you go to visit them, that's a time you've created to see your kids and grandkids and that they've carved out for you," she says to me, whose children and grandchildren live far away. "But it's different when they live nearby. There's almost constant pressure to be the one who helps out." With the arrival of new sets of grandparents, the pressure has changed to an uncomfortable sense of rivalry.

That sense is compounded by another competitive feeling. "Her parents are seen as adventurous. They've lived abroad. They are always doing stuff–climbing mountains, entertaining heads of state. We look so ordinary in comparison."

These are not easy feelings to deal with. Part of it is the shift in the family dynamic: action-oriented grandparents who had rarely been available are now on the scene and ready to take an active role in meeting their daughter's needs–for however long they are stationed in this country. "I tell myself it isn't a competition–it's a matter of staying even," Amy says. But more than that, it's a touchy adjustment.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Emerging Adults: Time to drop the control button. They’re running their own lives now.

02/14/2012

Once we've survived having adolescents in the house, we've got it made: we like to think parenting will be easier from here on out. And it will be. Sort of. But there is a continuum of adolescent rebellion that moves and morphs as our almost-grown kids move into the emerging adult years.

As psychologist Carl Pickhardt explains it, the young child "looks up to parents and their wonderful powers and idealizes who they are. The adolescent looks down on parents and their unfair authority and criticizes who they are. The young adult looks at the hit-and-miss child raising job parents have done and humanizes them as well-intended but imperfect people."

That means our emerging adults see us warts and all, and figure we've done something right and some things wrong. But the really key issue for us, as parents of these emerged adults, is a follow-on point Pickhardt makes: The ultimate goal of adolescent rebellion is to establish adult equity with the parent. "Thus by the end of adolescence," he writes, "there is mutual agreement that the young adult is just as much entitled to run his life as parents are to run theirs."

Some of us run into trouble accommodating ourselves to the "mutual agreement" or their sense of entitlement. If I read Pickhardt right, we tamper with their fledgling independence at our peril.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Money Matters: When grown children bite the hand that feeds them

02/10/2012

Ever since the grand-twins were born, Pam and Dan have been very involved grandparents and parents. The boys–their daughter's children–live just 15 minutes away. In the first year or two, Pam and Dan were there to change diapers, feed babies and babysit so the parents could have a "date night" together every Sunday evening. Now that the boys are six, Pam and Dan pick them up from school once or twice a week and continue to babysit as well as host the family for Sunday and holiday dinners. They even put a swimming pool in their backyard to make summer visits more refreshing for the young family. They've always helped out a little financially–just to make things a little easier for a family that wasn't living high but also wasn't earning high, either.

Everything was in balance until this past March when the son-in-law lost his job. Now Pam and Dan, who was a physician until he retired, are supporting the young family. And that has thrown a lot of other balances out of kilter. Dan says that for now he can pay the mortgage and other basic bills for his daughter and her family. The son-in-law is no laggard: He is hard at work looking for a job and at other entrepreneurial opportunities. Pam and Dan would rather help them now than leave them money later. But there is a question of how long they can continue –and what they would do if the financial burden started to impinge on their life style. So money is not the immediate problem.

And yet is it. The daughter has asked Pam to step back from grandmothering, to not be a regular presence. Pam isn't sure what else her daughter said–the conversation was so scary and upsetting. Would this mean the end of the grandparent's relationship with their grandsons? With their relationship to their grown child?

Dan's advice was to step back and let is pass–that the daughter's "demand" would go away of its own accord. Pam's worst fear–that she and Dan would be cut out of their daughter's and grandchildren's lives–does not seem to be happening. Things are almost unchanged. The Sunday dinners have continued. But Pam has an undertow of worry. She wonders what she did to cause the outburst. She's an ebullient person–was she too exuberant around the boys? Was she overwhelming?

More likely it isn't anything Pam did or said. Her daughter's change in financial circumstances has probably pushed her to assert independence and control where she can.

It is so hard for us to distance ourselves from hurtful words our children send our way. While others can see the less personalized side of the story, we are so tied into our grownchildren and our grandchildren that any threat to the strength of that relationship feels like a dagger to our heart–even when that isn't necessarily what our children meant to do or convey.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Life with 20-Somethings: The fruitless job search may lead to a “lost generation.”

02/08/2012

An east coast friend with a 23-year-old son who graduated from college this past spring writes:

"Last spring after graduation, my son got a job offer with an accounting firm in Dallas. He had to study for his CPA, so he was home for the summer. One evening, a group of his friends came over. They were sitting out on the deck drinking cokes and beer, and I knew they were looking at my son with envy. He was moving to Dallas, he was going to live in his own apartment, he just bought a car–and he had a job in his profession. That used to the standard for kids coming out of college–especially good colleges like these kids had just graduated from. But most of them were living at home with no job prospects. A few had found something but not in their career."

This has been the new reality for college grads, and this is what the data recently released by the Census Bureau underlies. While the economy has been devastating for those living in or near poverty, it has also been wrenching for recent college graduates. Richard Freeman, an economist at Harvard University, has suggested that the generation coming out of college since the 2008-2009 recession "will be scarred, and they will be called the `lost generation'–in that their careers would not be the same way if we had avoided this economic disaster."

They have not only been unable to find jobs now, it's not likely to get better soon–even as the employment figures pick up. Recent college grads who are now getting by with waitering, bartending and odd jobs will have to compete with new graduates for entry-level career positions. As Andrew Sum, an economist and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, put it, "We have a monster jobs problem, and young people are the biggest losers."

Here's hoping the latest downward trend on unemployment–8.3% in January–keeps going. It might make it possible for another friend's son to come home from his job in volatile South Sudan–a job he took not because he always wanted to go to Juba but because it was the only job he could get.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Visiting Privileges: Traveling abroad with a grown child and his family

02/06/2012

Last February, I went to Berlin to visit Alpha daughter and her family who were living there for a year. Berlin was cold, gray and dreary, but the visit was a dazzlingly bright time. There was a special warmth in spending a week with my daughter and her family and feeling their "thank you" for making the trip to see them when they were so far from home.

Last week, I went to Amsterdam to spend time with Uber son and his family, who were visiting that city for five days. This was more complicated than a simple visit to a daughter living abroad. Uber son was there on business and the host company had agreed to bring his wife and three children along. My son would be free two of the four days. I volunteered to hook up with them in Amsterdam, in part to be a pair of helping hands on the two days my son had to work, but also to see the city [never been there], be energized by a mid-winter get-away and spend time with Uber son and family [they live in a U.S. city far from mine]. And, as in Berlin, Amsterdam was gray and winter-dreary in late January but I never felt the cold.

On this trip, I was–for my Grands and daughter-in-law–the familiar face in a city where the language is different [we may have high school French or Spanish tucked into the recesses of our brains, but not Dutch], the food unfamiliar [though the Dutch penchant for pannekoeken–pancakes–was easy to adopt] and many of the amusements on an adult level [the infamous red light district, Dutch history musems, a 17th century synagogue]. But, when my son went off to his meetings, my daughter-in-law, my three Grands and I explored the zoo, its aquarium and butterfly room. The whole family went off to the Van Gogh Museum where we got audio guides and the older kids [8 and 10] loved hearing about the painter's life story and learning how his art went from the dark of the Potato Eaters to the brilliant golden hues of the Sunflower paintings. We took the canal boat tour and for dinner one night, everyone was game to try rijsttafel–I appointed myself Assistant Chief Taster to make sure the different Indonesian dishes my Grands put on their plates of rice weren't too spicy for them. And I babysat the one evening my son and daughter-in-law went to a business dinner.

I loved seeing Amsterdam. Even in the winter, it is a walkable and easy to visit city. I got to do some things on my own and many things with my son's family. But most of all, there is a special warmth in being there for your grown child and his family–and to share in the wonder of their family life. You feel it, and so do they.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Parenting Grown Children: A list of how to do it–or how not to do it.

02/01/2012

I came across this to-do (and not-to-do ) list for parenting grown children. It was compiled by a mother (Candelaria Silva) with two grown children in their 30s who are still, Silva reports, "talking to me–unbidden." I was particulaly taken with a birthday card she sent each child on that child's 30th birthday. It was made up of a hand-written list of 30 things she loved and admired about that child. There is something so heart warming about the idea–not just the sending of the list but the sitting down and ruminating over all the positive stuff you love about your child.

As to the rest of her to-do list, she's not oblivious to the negative. She just doesn't dwell on it. And she obviously parents her grown children with a light touch. Here are some other highlights from her account of what she calls "positive methods I've found to parent adult children."

* Forward articles with pertinent info from newspapers, magazines, and other people’s blogs.
* Send I love you cards and notes regularly.
* Listen – intently as an ally. Just say “uh-huh” every now and then to let them know you’re listening, while taking notes for follow-up info to send.
* Don't hover. (No helicopter parenting here.)
* Don’t try to solve their problems.
* Don’t lecture, ever.
* Don’t remind them of their past experiences and choices.
* Encourage.
* Make the offer to offer advice, a response, a suggestion lightly, almost as an aside.
* Don't hold your breath waiting for them to ask for your advice.
* Count to 20 when prompted to let go with a torrent of worries and cautions.
* A thoughtful letter with suggestions sent by postal mail (that you don't ever check to see if they've received) works.
* Did I mention prayer, meditation, crossing fingers?
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Leaving a Legacy: Letting your grown kids know what you are willing their way.

01/25/2012

Estate planning is a funny thing: We don't give it much thought–until we do. When we're leading active, vigorous lives, who can be bothered–who wants to be bothered–by thoughts of mortality? As we get older and more isolated, we may start seeing those wills and estates as a 'pay back' device. And we do so at our peril.

I was reminded of this by hearing Hendrik Hartog talk about his book, "Someday All of This Will be Yours," on the Diane Rehm show. Hartog catalogues a century's worth of emotional perils and legal pitfalls that come with leaving an inheritance that is seen as unfair to one or all of your children. As he explained on air, his aim in presenting a history of cases between 1850 and 1950 was to look at what they show about parent-child relations and how, in a time before pensions and Social Security, people used the promise of inheritance to secure care for themselves in old age–a grown child was often called upon to stay home and care for an aged parent-.

But Hartog made an important point beyond legal and cultural history. Even though the cases he discusses come from a different time and era, some things never change. People he talks to today tell him similar stories of inheritance plans gone bad in terms of family harmony and unity.

All of this is just another way of saying, it doesn't have to be so, that we can clear the air so that our grown children not only know what's in our estate but what our guiding principles are in dividing up those worldly goods between them and others. Great movie scenes though they make, the reading of the will ought to have no unpleasant surprises–in fact, no surprises at all. The more our grown children know what we're thinking and where and how we saw fairness in drawing up our will, the fewer sources of disharmony we'll leave behind.

The will isn't pay back time. We do want to be remembered fondly, don't we?
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Money Matters: Is a loan a gift when we help grownkids buy a house?

01/22/2012

Whenever we talk with friends about grown kids and money, one connection is a constant. Almost all of us have helped or plan to help our children buy a house. We're the generation that was lucky enough to buy our homes before the infamous bubble and whose overall estates have benefited from the pre-2008 relentless climb in home values. The climb has been such that many of our children, successful though they may be at this point in their early careers, can't afford to buy a house. And we want them to have one: Not just as a shelter, but as a solid financial investment. (Yes, we still believe those days will come again.)

When we do extend that helping housing hand, it tends to fall into one of three forms: an arms-length deal in which money for a downpayment is loaned and repayment is expected; a loan that's not-so-arms length and will be repaid when the house is sold; a loan that's really a gift that comes with no strings attached. (There is a fourth form–or so I've heard: Some buy the house outright for their kids. They put up the downpayment and pay the mortgage fees. But that seems a whole 'nother category of house "loan.")

Here's the story in stats, from a 2010 survey by the National Association of Realtors (Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers): 27 percent of first-time buyers who made a down payment received a gift from a friend or relative, typically their parents; 9 percent received a loan from a relative or friend.

For those 27 percent who give housing help as a gift, the survey includes some non-economic factors to consider: either don't attach any strings or declare upfront what those strings are. They can be anything from eventual repayment of the "gift" (which makes it more of a loan) to calling home more often. Not sure how well that latter point works.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

The Re-Filled Nest: Improvements for our college grads in search of a job

01/18/2012

The economy has wreaked havoc on those of us with recent college grads. One friend, whose son was fortuante enough to get a job in his professional field (accounting), reports that he is the only one among his set of four best friends to do so. And that's not untypical of the job situation for the past year.

Many of those children–emerging adults, frustrated at not being able to convert their college degrees into good-paying jobs–are living home. That's creating a whole nother set of tensions. For those parents looking for a break in that bleak picture–we love our kids but we don't necessarily love having them live at home anymore–there's some hopeful news on the job front. Not necessarily the dip down to 8.5 per cent unemployment (though that's welcome), but the signs that show where the job growth is.

In a December jobs report, workers with bachelor’s degrees or other post-secondary educations were the ones who hit the sweet spot: about 1.1 million bachelor’s degree recipients found work. Meanwhile, the number of workers with high school diplomas or less who were employed fell by half a million. More surprisingly, the least-skilled workers also added jobs over the last year. The number of high school dropouts who had jobs rose by 126,000.

According to Catherine Rampell, who runs the online Economix site for the New York Times, the numbers support MIT economist David Autor‘s argument that the work force is hollowing out, producing very low-skill service jobs that generally cannot be done by machines or workers abroad (like food services) and higher-skilled jobs that require greater schooling (like medical jobs).