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

Grandparenting: Are we willing to share the wealth with our Grands?

01/15/2012

A few days ago, I wrote about a 2011 MetLife survey on boomer parent's spending habits vis a vis their grown children. (Long story short: Most of us want to help our adult children with college tuition; fewer want to help them buy a house.)

There's also a 2009 MetLife survey on how grandparents feel about spending money on their grandchildren. The 2011 survey already covered the college tuition question for grandchildren–most of us say, 'no way.' But this survey has more specific questions.

How do we feel about financial assistance or monetary gifts for grandchildren? Two out of three of us give our grandchildren money; The average amount in the five years leading up to 2009: $8,700.

Why did we do it? The reasons most cited were general financial support, education, and major life events.

Do we want to give them gifts while we're still here or leave them a lump-sum legacy once we're gone? Nearly 80 percent of us would rather distribute smaller gifts. Nothing beats seeing them enjoy an indulgence or appreciate real-world help.

Has the Great Recession and its aftermath made us more generous toward our Grandkin? One in four of us report we are providing more assistance than in the past, due to the current economy.

Do we give advice along with the money? Not so much. More than two-thirds of grandparents report that they are not providing any financial advice or guidance to their grandchildren. Among those who are talking to their grandchildren about financial issues, the most common advice is “start saving early in life,” and “don’t get into too much debt.”

Isn't that what our grandparents told us?
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Money Matters: What are we willing to pay for when our grown children are grown up?

01/12/2012

There's a new survey out on how generous–or not–we are with our adult children. Overall, the 2011 MetLife survey found that four out of five us are willing to help out in a variety of ways. But we have our limits.

Topping the list in priorities is college education. Nine out of 10 of us believe we, as parents, have some responsibility to pay for some of their higher education, with half of us seeing this as a strong or absolute responsibility. The survey even put some numbers on that assistance: More than half of us would contribute 10,000 a year or more to the tab for our child's higher education.

In terms of percentages, we're more generous than our parents. According to the survey, only 35 percent of baby boomer parents helped with the college bills. As to helping our grandchildren with their college bills, two-thirds of us don't think we have any responsibility in that regard–love those kiddies though we do. Only only 15% of us report that we have contributed toward the costs of a grandchild’s education.

We don't see helping our grown kids buy a house as nearly as compelling a responsibility as a college education. Half of us suggested that we had no responsibility at all to contribute to the down payment on a house. Among those 23 percent of us who felt we had at least a moderate responsibility to help, half of us said we would contribute under $10,000 for that purpose.

The survey also looked at how much responsibility we felt in helping out a grown child whose fortunes were flagging–who had lost jobs, were going through a divorce or meeting some other financial setback. More than four in 10 of us reported that, in such cases, we feel a strong or absolute responsibility to help out–if the setback was not of their own making.

Woe betide the grown child who spends recklessly and causes his or her own financial debacle. We are not as forgiving–at least our purses are not. Only 11 percent of us feel the need to bail out a child when the debt is due to overspending. We draw the line at those closets full of Jimmy Choo shoes, crazy weekends in Vegas or a drug habit. But even here, the MetLife survey puts a number on how much we'd be willing to spend to help out–if we were willing at all. And it's not $10,000. It's half of that.

What about leaving them a legacy? Half of us in the Baby Boomer generation feel little or no responsibility to leave something behind for our heirs. For those of us who do, MetLife has some numbers: Those of us who would leave something behind see the appropriate amount as somewhere between $20,000 and $50,000.

They survey also looked at what obligations our children feel toward us. Take a deep breath and read on: (all percents are for feeling a strong or absolute responsibility):

62% feel called upon to call us at least once a week to see how we're doing

58% would have us live with them if we weren't healthy enough to live on our own

50% would take us in if were financial destitute

46% would provide financial support in our later years if we were having financial reverses.

Not that we'd want that. 42% claim we wouldn't take the help.

Does this make you want to rethink those contributions to their financial health, education and housing?
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Grandparenting: We also serve who sit and wait–and watch an endless event.

01/09/2012

Ah the joys of grandparenting: small children who love us without question, who will come and cuddle up with us to hear us read a story and who, as they get a little older, will program our iPhone and show us how to download Netflix. They're still interested in hearing about what life was like for their parents when they were little tykes or for us when we were toddlers or teens.

Such wonders come with a price. Friends whose grown child and three grandchildren live nearby are often called on to babysit–something they don't mind doing. They've been to soccer games and volleyball tournaments, clarinet recitals and dance performances. But sometimes the daytime, weekend duties are a little harder to take. To wit, an email from these very same friends that arrived this morning:

"We ended up at [my son's] most of yesterday, covering for him as he had a week-end 2-day exam. We spent an endless afternoon at a so-called Pine Derby car racing competition for scouts, which my grandson participated in. There ought to be medals for the attendees!"
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Holidays with Grown Children: More on that outsider feeling

01/05/2012

Christmas dinner at his daughter's house: Dick was surrounded by his wife, grandchildren, son-in-law, stepsons and their families. What could be warmer and nicer for the holidays? For those of us at a certain age, plenty.

Dick says that as everyone moved from the living room to the dining room for dinner, he sat down on the sofa and brooded. Am I still needed? he asked himself. As a business man (retired but doing volunteer work with a small business advisory group), Dick had been there to advise his son, son-in-law, daughter, and stepsons on their career moves–on getting started, on moving up the corporate or other ladders. Now that they were well on their way, they had reached a point where they knew more about where they were than he did. Never good at small talk, he felt left out of the general chit chat going back and forth between and among his grown children. "I didn't see where I fit in. I wouldn't say I felt irrelevant. I would say I felt almost irrelevant."

To put in perspective the feelings that flooded him that Christmas night, Dick says it has been harder to take than some of the physical diminishments he has experienced as he has gotten older–no longer having the same endurance or strength he had as a 60-year-old man who rode his bike for 50 miles or more on a Sunday outing. Illness and age have taken a toll (20 miles is the new comfort level). But he says he feels that diminishment of strength less keenly than the loss of his role as the wise head of a many-branched family. As far as he is concerned, the grownchildren have outgrown their need for his advice. "I brought them up to be independent," he says. And now they are.

Who knew success would feel so empty?
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Holidays with Grown Children: That outsider feeling

01/02/2012

The December holidays are filled with warm, fuzzy feelings: parents and their grown children get together to pay homage to cherished family traditions. There may be minor blowups and some discord, but the family is together again and that counts for a lot.

Then there comes a time in the life of almost every family when those traditions shift their ground, when our grown children start building their own family traditions with their homes and families at the center. And that can bring on a quietly sad trauma for us, the parents of grown children.

Here's one example of what I'm talking about:

Sam moved to Oregon 40 years ago–alone. None of his east coast family moved with him–not his mother, father, sisters or cousins. Sam married a west coaster and had one child, a daughter, who is now grown. Last year, she married a Portland man–a man whose family is three generations deep in that city. And that's what is making the holidays so difficult for Sam. In year's past, Sam, his wife and daughter came east for the holidays. They spent time with his sister and nephews in New York City, visited the tree in Rockefeller Center, window shopped the department store's Christmas extravaganzas and cooked Christmas dinner together. This year, his daughter, in the flush of her first year of marriage, invited her new Portland family and her parents to her house for a holiday dinner. Goodbye trip to New York and visits to all the cousins and nephews.

Sam's daughter decorated her house with garlands and tinsel. Made a good dinner for her first time at entertaining a lot of people. Sam's son-in-law's family was there by the dozens, people he barely knew. And that was the sad trauma for Sam. "It was the worst feeling in the world," he says, "to be a guest in my daughter's house and feel like an outsider."

Time and acquaintance may soften the feeling, but as our grown children put down roots with other families, we no longer make the holiday decisions or impose the traditions–regardless of how warm and cozy they felt for oh so many years.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Emerging Adults: What are those 20-somethings thinking?

12/28/2011

Grown children in their 20s are a parenting challenge–not as challenging as adolescents. But still, they can be prickly and difficult. We think they're adults and they are, but they are stil going through stages of emotional growth and change. It may be hard for us to remember what was running around in our heads when we were their age.

I was reminded of this in a post on Nathan Bradford's blog. Bradford is a former book agent whose blog is about getting your book written and published (if you're in that category, check out his blog: it's excellent.] He's also a young man who just reached his 30s and in one of his posts, he wrote about his reaction to two movies–when he saw them in his early 20s and then when he saw them when he turned was 30. And that's where he layed it all out–the change in the workings of the maturing mind.

The movies in question were "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset." Here's his description of those movies: "In the first, "Before Sunrise," … two early-twenty-somethings [Jesse) and Celine] meet on the train from Budapest to Vienna. Jesse has one night before his plane leaves back for America and he convinces Celine to spend the night with him wandering around Vienna, where they talk about life, love, dreams, everything. "Before Sunset,"…picks up after [an] intervening nine years. Now in their thirties, Jesse and Celine walk around Paris before Jesse has to fly back to the US, and this time they're dealing with the weight of real adulthood and exude a palpable sense of nostalgia and regret."

In the first movie, Bradford writes that the two characters capture the magical feeling of the rush of falling in love and of being with someone who excites you. The second is about testing the strength of that brief connection.

And here are Bradford's insights into his own maturing:

"The first time I watched these movies… I was in my early twenties and still in the exciting early days of a relationship. Of the two movies I naturally identified most strongly with "Before Sunrise."…I was roughly the same age as the characters, the world seemed full of endless possibilities, and my future was so excitingly uncertain.

At the time, "Before Sunset" struck me as poignant but also incredibly, almost needlessly sad. The characters were stressed and intense and (SPOILER) stuck in loveless relationships and thinking about what might have been if things had just unfolded differently on the platform six months after they first met.

But now, at age 31, I re-watched the movies at a vastly different place in my life and it was like watching completely different movies.

Now "Before Sunrise" was an exercise in nostalgia, remembering how intense conversations felt at that age, the sense of adventure, and the brave early twenties naivety of thinking life will be completely easy because we are the special ones, at long last, that truly get how the world really works.

And now it's "Before Sunset" that I identify with the most, not least of which because it turns out, like Jesse, that this year I was having a novel come out at the same time that I was starting a new life with some of the same weighty thoughts of what might have been. …

That intense melancholy of "Before Sunset" that I once found almost maudlin is something I now see all around me in my peers. It's the quarter-life crisis of reaching a certain point in your life just by doing the right thing and hitting the right benchmarks of college, first job, dating, marriage, before inevitably being beset by forces outside of your control. There's a sense of wandering and uncertainty that sets in when you begin to face the weight of major decisions and choosing the right relationship (or not) or sensing you're in the wrong career.

Your early twenties are the time when you think you have everything figured out; at some point before the end of that decade you realize that you don't."

What Bradford has to say is, for me, an important guidepost for parenting grown children–in that it reminds me of what it is like to be that age, and how we, as parents, would do well to factor that into the way we deal with our grown and still-growing children.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Money Matters: The place where a few grandparent bucks have a big bang

12/22/2011

Those of us who came of age during the greatest economic expansion of the 20th century are now near to retiring or we're already there. We may no longer be earning top dollar but many of us have put away money, earned pensions, established 401k accounts, and are otherwise well-padded for retirement–padded enough that we look at the economy our grown children are dealing with and wonder how we can help with the fiscal challenges that lie ahead for them.

All of which is a long way of saying, some of us are in the position to and would like to give our grown children some pecuniary peace of mind by lifting a small burden here and there. For those of us with grandchildren, one easy-lifting spot is putting money aside for our grandchildren's college education. We don't have to take on the whole burden–who knows how grand a sum it will be a decade or two from now or whether they'll get a scholarship of some sort. But we can contribute.

It's easy enough to set aside money in our own account or set up a separate account with a grandchild's name on it. But a 529 adds a tax bennie to such savings. The money comes out of our taxable estate and, once in the 529, it multiplies [hopefully, it does not shrink] tax free. There is no tax due on it when it's withdrawn–so long as your grandchild withdraws it for education purposes. If your son or daughter has already set up a 529 savings plan, you can contribute. You can even get special coupons to do it on your own. Or you can set one up yourself for each grandchild you choose to help. Setting up a 529 yourself gives you more control over the money. If you find you need the cash after all–for, say, unexpected desire to take a trip around the world–or you change your mind (that grandchild turned out to be an ungrateful wretch) you can ask for the money back, though you'll pay a tax and 10 percent penalty on the withdrawal. But still, it's a way to help out unobtrusively–and give your grown kids some relief about the burdens that lie ahead.

Here's a link to an easy-to-follow briefing on 529s. It's called "15 Facts All Parents Should Know About 529 Plans." And another one that answers a lot of questions grandparents might have.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Name Calling: Are Mom and Dad honorific titles or something special?

12/13/2011

The name Mom or Dad is loaded. It's what our children called us when they were small and what they continue to call us–or some variation of that name. So it can create a little ball of hurt to hear a son call his mother-in-law Mom or hear a daughter call her father-in-law, Dad. For some of us, it's just the surprise of the moment–then we get over it. After all, we know who's who. But some of us take it more to heart, as a recent Dear Abby letter suggests.

To a Mom who wrote that she resented hearing her son call his mother-in-law mom in front of his very own mother, Abby writes: "Let it go. Your son was probably calling [his mother in law] "Mom" because he had been asked to do so. ("'Sonny,' we're family now. Please call me 'Mom.'") It would not, however, be confrontational to tell your son that hearing him do it was hard to swallow."

I can see letting it go. But bringing it up with the son or daughter? I'm not sure about that, and neither is Susan Adcox at About./com's Grandparents. She makes the very sensible suggestion of letting it go, period. "Friction with a daughter-in-law is one of the swiftest routes I know to becoming estranged from a son. Having a son with two moms is much better than having no son at all."

One of her readers added this point: "I believe my sons call their MIL’s by their first name, as my DIL’s call me. I do know though that it seems whichever Mom you are, you are only entitled to agree or there’s trouble."
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Vacationing Togetherness: Two rules for avoiding friction

12/09/2011

She's become a veteran at this: hosting her grown children and their families at the villa she rents in Tuscany. We won't go into how some people are really lucky about their vacation deals–she teaches Italian and needs to keep her skills fresh; he's a successful businessman [retired] and can afford to indulge this form of refreshment. Over the years of visits by grown children, other relatives, myriad friends and acquaintances, she has learned how to handle the extended [more than one night] visit.

Her first house rule for her children–two sons, each with a wife and two children–is simple: Keep 'em busy.

Before anybody arrives, she makes the daily plans. When they get there, she shares. Here's her rationale: "We never want a day when they can say, what are we going to do today? Or a day when they are just going to sit around the house and swim in the pool all day. I hand them a calendar when they arrive. It shows them what the plan is for each day. If they don't want to do it, they know in advance what's coming. We can negotiate and make another plan. Of course, they tend to stay with what I'm planning since I go with them and I'm the only one who speaks Italian. That makes it a lot easier for them to take trains to visit other cities, go out to lunch, understand the guided tour at the aquarium in Genoa."

Second house rule: visits are one family at a time: serial visits only, never together.

Her rationale: Too many opportunities for sibling rivalry, resentments over child-rearing practices and misunderstandings among family members. Besides, two sons, two daughters-in-law and four grandchildren would be too many people to get moving in one direction at a specified time.

How do her kids take to this? One comes every year for a week. The other has made the trek to Italy only twice in six years. Their choice.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Grandparenting: Getting away with grandkids in faraway places.

12/06/2011

When our Grands reach school age, their parents–our grown children–may be willing to let them take a trip with us. One friend took her 11-year-old granddaughter to Paris. She made a deal with her: She would make sure the granddaughter could get the comfort food of her choice at dinner every night [plain pasta with butter]. In exchange, the little traveler had to be game to go to the museum or event of choice each day. It worked–there was hardly any whining. Also helpful: a midday return to the hotel for a wee bit of rest.

Another friend, who babysits one afternoon a week, was allowed by her son and daughter-in-law to take those Grands [ages 10 and 13] to the Galapagos this summer. Those one-afternoon-a week visits gave her a certain familiarity (with eating habits, personality ticks) and comfort with her grands–and they with her. Here's her report on the trip:

"There's a family history here. When my son graduated from college, his dad said he would take him on a trip to anywhere in the world. My son chose Galapagos, and they still talk about their trip with great nostalgia. As for my trip, I am on a "if not now, when!" kick. My husband [the granddad] couldn't go–nor did I want him to.

My grandboys are real animal/nature enthusiasts, and they're getting to an age, especially the 13-year old, when they may not be so thrilled to travel with the old grandma much longer.

They are very good travelers, not spoiled and not demanding and I knew that it would work out. They were much easier to travel with than their grandpa: No moaning and groaning, no frantic searches for bathrooms, no demands for attention, they can walk long distances–you get the picture.

They did go to bed earlier than I would have wished, and it meant that I would often go to bed early. (Come on guys, it's only 8:30! By the time I brushed my teeth and came back to the room, they were sleeping.) I was able to read, but how much reading in bed can one do without falling asleep! Then I would wake up too early while they slept on. But that's a minor point.

It's a vigorous trip. It's not for the halt and lame, though there were people on our boat who were overweight and not fleet of foot who managed well enough. To see the animals and birds in their natural habitats, totally unaware and unafraid of humans, was glorious. The boys each had their own cameras, birthday gifts I gave them last year when I knew we'd be going, and that was a big plus. Their photos are better than mine.

We were on a boat that carried 100 people, extremely well organized so there was no waiting, comfortable enough (we were three to a room), great food. We were on the boat for four nights and had five days of island hopping. I think 5 or 6 days would have been better, though we certainly saw a lot.

Now we've got that trip to talk about and reminisce about when we get together. We always find something new to share with my son and husband about what we saw and did–and how things have changed since they went."