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

Holiday Togetherness: The Thanksgiving Day handoff from us to them

11/18/2011

My book club's monthly meet-up is winding down. We've finished parsing all the meaning we can out of Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra. We're picking at dessert when the discussion devolves into the personal. Are your kids coming to your house for Thanksgiving dinner?

We are all women of a certain age–an age when our kids are in their 30s and 40s and have kids of their own. What struck me as various book-clubbers coughed up their plans was how few of us are still making The Dinner. Not that we're not up to it. Nancy's son has really gotten into cooking. He's coming to her house with his family–she has the Big House–but he's manning the oven and burners for the family, which includes his two siblings, their kids, his kids and his parents. Nancy says she'll stack the dishwasher.

Elaine says her son, who lives in city that's a 4-hour drive away, usually comes home with his family but this year he's got a neck injury. So she and her husband will travel to his house. When she asks what she can make, what she can bring, he says he doesn't need anything. The meal will be a less ambitious one than Elaine usually cooks. Her son says he can handle the dinner preparations; after all, there will only be seven of them. Even the offer of baking a pie or a cake is turned down. It is going to be a leaner meal, not a Big Traditional Thanksgiving Dinner.

Ann says she gave up the ghost several years ago. Her daughter-in-law loves to cook, has tried her hand at several cooking schools. She doesn't like her mother-in-law or anyone else to step into the kitchen while she's at work. Since the results are excellent, Ann happily acquiesces. She'd agree even if the food were so-so. She never liked cooking. She pitches in with the clean up–as do her two other children and their children–but it's not her home so it's much easier on her.

My tale is more complicated. I love making Thanksgiving dinner. I love having the turkey leftovers to fiddle with. I love picking meat off the carcass the day after. But three years ago, Uber son and his wife had a third child, and it got complicated for five of them to get on an airplane and come to our house, when two of us could fly to them. And, since Alpha daughter was within a 3-hour drive of her brother but flying distance of us, it made even more sense: air fare for eight vs airfare for two. A no-brainer. Everyone prefers the arrangement, except for Paterfamilias. He wants everyone to come to his home for the holidays. He likes the idea of it: His home and everyone he loves in it. He made his case for Thanksgiving at Our House when we were visiting Uber son a few weeks ago. He was swayed only when our son, who travels a lot for his job, said with an enormous sigh, "I would pay not to have to get on a plane."

Case closed. Thanksgiving dinner at Uber son's house it is. I'm allowed to bake and bring and arrive a few days ahead to help with the shopping and cooking. But I don't get to take home the carcass. It will have been turned into soup and sipped up before we head for home.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Grandparenting: Children’s books in praise of what we can do for our Grands

11/14/2011

The Holidays may still seem far away, but that isn't the frantic take you get from the Halls of Commerce. Not only is Black Friday starting earlier, the holiday decorations are already up in many malls and along city streets. But I digress: If you're looking for a gift for one of your little Grands–for Holidays or anytime–the New York Times has a delightful page of reviews of books about us and how we are the emotional mainstay or treasured person in our Grands' lives. What a nice way to impress on them our importance in their lives–without having to overtly say so. Or having our grown children have to ask them to respect us.

My favorite on the NYTimes list: Crouching Tiger. Maybe because my Grands have taken such an interest in my attempts to learn tai chi (they find it uproarious to watch me "Stroke the Wild Horses Mane" and "Ward off Monkeys.") Maybe because my grandparents came from "the old country" and i was fascinated by their multi-lingual abilities. In any case, this is a story that deals with an immigrant child’s conflicting emotions toward a grandparent from the old country. The grandson wants to learn kung fu, but his grandfather insists on teaching him the tamer tai chi. "Eventually," the review notes, "he learns to appreciate his Chinese heritage in a convincing, unsentimental way, and to value the wisdom of his forebears."

Can't beat the wisdom thing.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Emerging Adults: Will they ever grow up? Patience is required. Sainthood, too.

11/10/2011

I hear the complaints from friends with college-age kids and recent college grads in the house. They don't have the drive their father or mother had at their age, they aren't taking life seriously, they're lazy, willful, don't help around the house. Why it's just like having a teenager living in the house again. Only physically larger. And more worldly.

My children chose to go through this phase of "growing up" in apartments and group-of-friends houses far from the family manse. But as this wearisome economy rolls on and more and more of our children live at home–out of necessity–more of us are making our unhappy way through this stage. And it is a stage. So assures psychologist Carl Pickhardt in a newsletter he writes about the challenges of parenting young adults.

He call this stage trial independence (18 to 23-year olds). It's a time when, he writes, "the curve of parental impatience tends to rise." Parents are "really ready for their older son or daughter to get their life together, set an occupational or educational goal, show clear progress in that direction, and act responsibly grown up." When that doesn't happen–when there is what he calls "floundering and failing to make responsible headway," we may fear that our child will never grown into being a functioning adult.

Pickhardt suggests we relax and tell ourselves to be patient. The parental job, he suggests, is to hold their emerging adult "to responsible account, affirm positive signs of growth being made, express respect for what the young person is learning from hard experience, and be patient as their son or daughter struggles to find an independent way."

So much easier said than done. If only we could tack those thoughts to our brains when we come upon our grown child sleeping through Monday morning and forgetting to check out that job lead.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Parenting Grown Children: Smother love overdoes the kindness and helpfulness bit.

11/04/2011

Every summer, friends' grown child comes to their house at the beach for a two-week vacation–rent free, of course. Every winter, my friends take this daughter, their son-in-law and two children on a long-weekend ski trip. My friends pay for the condo and the lift tickets. The daughter lives near my friends and is frequently a guest for Sunday dinner and always for Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter.

Since my children live far away from me and Paterfamilias and we don't have a summer house by the beach or anywhere else, I usually think, "Lucky friends to be able to treat their daughter so well; to be able to spend so much time together in a pleasurable setting; to get to know their grandchildren so well; to be so much a part of their child's life.

And yet there's another side to the story, as a Carolyn Hax column made clear. "Any advice," a son wrote, "on how to deal with a mother who is smothering me with love?" The son is married; he and his wife have good jobs and two children. "Yet, Mom insists upon family vacations, family dinners, family everything. And she always makes reservations and nonrefundable deposits first, then invites us second, with that little (or big) bit of guilt thrown in." What the son wanted to know is, how to tell his mother to "let me live my own life and meet you on my own terms."

Of course, there's a big difference between inviting and insisting; on making plans together and issuing a fiat; on making your resources available to them at their convenience and playing the guilt card.

So what was Hax's advice? "Accept the number of invitations that feels right to you, decline the overkill, and gently, kindly, firmly become an immovable object who will not get into long renegotiation of each 'no' you issue."

From our side of the aisle, if we notice a son or daughter setting these kinds of limits–"We can't go on a vacation with you every year"–it may be time to gut check whether we're practicing smother love.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Wedding Notes: When the bride and groom make decisions you don’t like.

11/01/2011

They're getting married. The grown son has finally found Ms Right. They've also found what they consider to be the perfect place for the wedding. It isn't your hometown or hers. It's a destination. Someplace far away and beautiful–but expensive. Too expensive for, say, most relatives and friends. If you're not asked to foot the wedding bill, do you have any say in the matter?

That was a source of lively discussion in a recent Carolyn Hax column in which the son and his bride-to-be planned to wed on the Isle of Capri. Sounds romantic. But airfare to Italy and several nights accommodation can run up a bill. The father wrote Hax to say he can afford to take his wife and stepson but no one else can afford to or wants to spend the money to go, including the elderly grandparents, uncles and aunts. He's tempted to decline the invitation but is, he writes, "afraid of the damage to our relationship with him. I did offer to host a reception for all those who cannot afford to go, but he declined, saying it would cheapen the ‘real wedding.’ How should I handle this?”

It's complicated. On the one hand, the grown child isn't thinking of his greater family or the down-home virtues of having his family and hers meet and mingle and put down roots together. He's thinking of a wedding that will have panoramic views and sophisticated venues–or one that has a particular meaning for him and his bride.That's the best case scenario.

Most Hax readers saw the grown son as incredibly selfish and advised the father to stay home. Hax, who suggested the father go and make the best of it, had this point to make vis a vis the selfishness of the son's decision: "There's no way to re-raise your adult child by saying no for the sake of saying no. Sometimes you have to make a calculation that taking a big stand isn't worth the cost."

It is their wedding–and they're paying for it. If they make a decision we don't approve of–and sometimes that may be the choice of spouse–we still want to continue to be part of their post-wedding lives. Sometimes we just have to suck up what we see as a bad decision and live with it. Especially since it's unlikely we can change it.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Leaving a Legacy: A place defines a family’s values for generations to come.

10/27/2011

I've been thinking a lot lately about my legacy to my grown children. By that I don't mean how much money Paterfamilias and I will leave them–who knows what will be left to leave should PF or I hit a serious-illness streak. I'm thinking more about what I'll leave that lets my grown children and their children know who I was and what was important to me, that little (or big) something that underscores my values, whatever wisdom I have to impart, a sense of the life I've lived.

Being a writer, I've always thought of the written word as my road to legacy. But a recent New York Times story ("In a Maine House, No Room to Waste"), held out a whole other notion. A couple in their 60s–each having grown children from previous marriages–love spending weekends on Mt. Desert Island in Maine, a place where kingfish and heron patrol the mudflats and marshes and development is sparse. When they cross the bridge onto the island and can smell the ocean, the couple said, they "roll down the windows and holler, “Yay!” They eventually went from transient visitors to homeowners: buying and renovating a second home there, being very careful not to enlarge the home's footprint or leave any additional marks of man on the mudflats. It meant a very expensive commitment–to a home, a way of life and the marshy wilderness. They see the house as a way of leaving a legacy. They bought the house, the couple reported, "because we loved this island and we wanted to provide a way for us and our family and the other people we love to live together on this most gorgeous place on earth.”

A living legacy that says a lot about one family's values.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Rules for Parenting Grown Children: Overlook it. If you can’t overlook it, forgive it.

10/24/2011

I haven't added to my Notes to Self in well over three years. But I came across this suggestion from Susan Adcox at About.com.Grandparents: "Overlook it. If you can't overlook it, forgive it."

I take it to mean we shouldn't get hung up on our grown children's indiscretions, forgetfulness (in, say, calling us) or outright mistakes (in, say, raising our grandchildren). Life's too short–and our relationships with them too precious–to bear grudges against our grown children or insist on being RIght (see other Note to Self: It's better to be liked than right). This may not hold true for serious issues (addictions, failure to shoulder family responsibilities). There is a time and important place for Tough Love. For all the little stuff that crops up in the inter-generational life of a family however, it pays to give our grown kids a little slack. So I'm adding it to my list of Notes to Self–my little daily reminders of how to get along well with grown children and their families.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Hold that Thought: Why we temper the opinions and advice we give our grown children.

10/21/2011

You may think you're tiptoeing around–"Walking on Eggshells," as Jane Isay, the author of a book by that name, puts it–but that may not be how we come across. My friend Pat, who describes herself as a person who says what she thinks upfront, says that after a day of babysitting–and reporting on events to her daughter–her daughter told her she shouldn't be so frank about what she's thinking. "What she doesn't know," Pat says, "is how I'm holding my tongue, not saying what I might otherwise say. I have to be very careful what I say around my grown children."

Don't we all. The great fear, I suggest to Pat, is that if we aren't careful with what we say, our grown children–children who now have adult lives and are heads of families of their own–will get so ticked off they won't speak to us again, or there will be a coldness to our relationship and that will break our hearts. She nods in agreement but she also asks, how much of a mute can you be?

In the introduction to her book, Isay recalls swapping notes with a friend about touchy incidents that they had both had with their grown children–how vulnerable they felt and how hard it was to communicate with them. Isay lays the problem to our being pioneering parents. "We're the first generation to have raised our children so permissively." Now, after cultivating the "creative" and encouraging them to express themselves, we're stuck with the adult version of it. "Often their decisions [as adults] are not what we would have chosen–for ourselves or for them. We're at a loss to communicate our reservations, worries, and concerns, not because we can't put those feelings into words, but because the response we get often isn't pretty….the independence we worked to hard to instill in our children now feels to us like disinterest, and strong-minded youngsters sometimes grow into thoughtless adults."

Cold comfort, but all-in-the-same-boat comfort nonetheless.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Leaving a Legacy: Letting grownchildren in on the plan for your worldly goods.

10/17/2011

In the French movie, Summer Hours, three forty-something siblings grow apart over how to dispose of a beloved summer home and the valuable items inside it. When their mother died, she left no specific instructions–just the hope that the place would be kept going for the next generation. I'm not giving the ending away to say that the mother's wishes go unfulfilled and that the relationship among the siblings deteriorates.

King Lear also fumbled his estate planning. He let his children know who would get what–but not in quite the best way.

Movies and literature are filled with sad tales that surround the making or not making of plans for worldly goods. Estate planning runs amok or doesn't take place at all. While some of us have been orderly about the process–made out wills, told our children where accounts can be found. We may have skipped one important step: talking with our children about the disposal and dispersal of the lesser items.

Not that I've taken this advice myself, but I'm reminded of the need to make such arrangements–to ask my grown children who wants the piano and who would enjoy the Phyllis Plattner watercolor that hangs in the living room? Would anyone like my collection of wood, porcelain and tin cats? And what of the other things in our house–items paterfamilias and I might not prize but that may carry great sentimental value for one of them. I should gather our grown children together and do a walk-through. It needn't be gruesome. It doesn't mean we're about to leave this world. It's just a chance to put a plan in place that everybody is happy with–and avoid a post-mortem blow-up. Of course, we wouldn't be there to see the latter, but still….

In a Washington Post article, Adolf Gundersen wrote about his experience in doing just such planning with his 80-year-old parents and his siblings. The evening–his wife dubbed it a "pre-mortem"–of putting on paper what would happen when his parents were gone "combined the gravitas of a memorial service with the easy sharing of a holiday dinner. And the best part of it was that my parents were there to enjoy being the center of attention." The author and his four brothers decided what would happen to a cabin in the woods that they all loved but didn't want to manage.The get-together also touched on discussions about financial and health care planning that his parents admitted they were "weary of dealing with on their own."

Gundersen writes about some of the reasons why he, his brothers and parents waited so long to have this conversation. "Getting us kids actively and directly involved in so many facets of their lives would mean a huge role reversal….For a long time neither of them had seemed psychologically ready for such a gathering."

Depending on where we are in our life cycle, we don't necessarily have to invite our children into a full "pre-mortem" discussion. (One friend admits that her mother has a dispersal discussion with him and with each of his brothers whenever they visit. Her agenda: to find a home for her clown collection–something none of the children admire or desire.) But it wouldn't be a role-reversal for us to invite our grown children over to tell us which of our possessions they'd like to have once we no longer need them. Not that I need them to assure me that someone will keep my cat collection together.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Parenting Tensions: They may be grown ups but they can still be very irritating.

10/13/2011

Whether they are emerging adults in their 20s, settling down in their 30s or marching into middle age of their 40s and 50s, they are still our children, and that makes them a source of great joy and of dreadful anxiety. In a 2009 study of the relationships between adult children and their parents, Kira Birditt, the lead author of a University of Michigan study, notes that the parent-child is one of the longest lasting social ties human beings establish. "This tie is often highly positive and supportive," she notes, "but it also commonly includes feelings of irritation, tension and ambivalence."

In short, the study, which was published in Psychology and Aging, found that the majority of parents and adult children experience some tension and aggravation with one another. Those tensions and aggravations, however, are harder on us than they are on them, particularly when it comes to issues regarding our children's lifestyle or behavior (finances, housekeeping). According to Birditt, we may be more upset by those tensions because we have more invested in the relationship. We're more concerned than they are about seeing them launched into successful adulthood.

Other points from the report:
–Daughters were more of a source of tension than sons, not because sons are that much easier to get along with. Rather, daughters generally have closer relationships with parents that involve more contact and that may provide more opportunities for tensions.

–When it comes to unsolicited advice, moms are more the problem than dads. "It may be that children feel their mothers make more demands for closeness," Birditt said, "or that they are generally more intrusive than fathers."

–While the years when our grown children are in their 20s are filled with a lot of unresolved issues–what careers will they have, who will they chose as a life's partner–Birditt found it surprising that parental perceptions of tension increased with the adult children's age. "Middle-aged children," she said, "may be less invested in the parent-child tie than young adult children because they're more likely to have formed their own families and experience multiple role demands."

In related, unpublished research, Birditt analyzed the way some of us cope with the relationship tensions. While most of try to accept and understand our grown child's point of view, the more intense the tension level, the less likely we or our children are to use constructive strategies and the more likely we are to yell and argue or avoid the situation entirely.

But here's the kicker. Though many of us have learned to keep our mouth shut when we don't approve of something our adult children are doing–the way they dress or their choice of friends–Birditt suggests there are limits to such a strategy. "The old adage, 'If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all,' isn't good advice for parents and adult children," she said. "Avoidance doesn't work as a strategy for dealing with conflicts. It appears to make things worse."

Go figure. Clomping around on the eggshells may be the healthier way to behave.