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

Grandparenting: How to talk to a 12-year-old

09/05/2011

When my granddaughter was 8, she and her parents lived in Berlin for a year. It wasn't easy having meaningful or even fun conversations with her when we were limited to a time certain and to a not-in-the-same-room factor. One couldn't just wait for an entry point to make its way known. I did discover some techniques but those were conversation openers for young children.

A friend, whose eldest grandchild is 12, says it is no longer easy to sit down with her and have a chatty conversation in which the grandmother asks her beloved granddaughter questions about the granddaughter's life. "She's a good kid," says this grandma,"but she's very pre-teen. She no longer likes the direct inquiry"–what are you reading? how's your best friend? are you going out for soccer this year?–an approach that worked well in earlier years.

Now, if she wants to know anything, this grandmother holds off until she picks her grandchild up from her weekly piano lesson. "There's something about talking to each other through the rear view mirror that makes it easier to ask questions," she tells me. For instance, when she heard from the piano teacher–who happens to be my friend's friend–that the grandchild greatly preferred to play works in minor keys, grandmother asked grandchild (via the rear view mirror) why music that was on the depressing side had more appeal. Her granddaughter was amenable to this intrusion into her inner soul and, through the rear view mirror of the car, answered quickly. "I like the music because it sounds scary."

The grandfather has found the same rear-view mirror, alone in the car situation his best chance to find out what his granddaughter is thinking, doing, reading, studying at school. Now the grandparents fight over who will pick their granddaughter up at piano lessons. They both covet the chance to talk to her in a way they can't when they're face to face.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Helicopter Parents: Forgetting where the line is between them and us

08/30/2011

A lawyer friend is a high-powered, type-A attorney who's a very effective attack dog for his clients. The problem is, he sometimes applies that take-no-prisoners approach to his children's lives. Case in point: When his grown daughter had a big report due to the president of her company, he told her she should stop accepting invitations to various outings–she should be isolating herself in her office to get the big job done properly. It's exactly the way he would handle the pressure of an important brief or memo to a client.

Interfering in our children's lives: It's what we do–we can't help it. Sometimes it's egregious; sometimes it's just annoying or a little anecdote our grown children tell their friends about their mom or dad.

Why do we do it? Is it simply helicopter-parenting taken to the next level of our children's maturity? Are we simply being protective of our children? Do we want to ease the way with the benefit of lessons we learned the hard way? Whatever it is, we're on dangerous ground here. We lead our own lives–and just our own. Sometimes we get so invested in our children and their burgeoning careers that we may cross a line and forget who's in charge here. Whose life is it anyway?

On a blog that Theresa Froehlich writes, she notes the real danger of overdoing the pressure on the control button. "Every time I react with the compulsion to rescue my child, I am sending her the message that I don’t think she is capable."
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Parenting grown children: Keep helpful housekeeping hints to yourself.

08/25/2011

One of my "notes to self" [see list to the left] is about housekeeping–a euphemism for putting our imprint on our grown child's home or for acting on "advice" by assuming it's wanted and warranted. This goes for dads as well as moms: No fixing things, no rearranging messy closets; no relining kitchen shelves–unless asked.

As Deborah Tannen points out in her book, "You're Wearing THAT?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation," some of our housekeeping suggestions stem from concerns for their health and safety." Tannen describes a daughter's discomfort–a feeling that her mother was criticizing her husband–when the mother would come to visit and remind her daughter and son-in-law that "he should cut down the dying elm tree in the yard lest it fall and hurt somebody (it did eventually fall though no one was hurt), and replace the rotting step lest someone trip (it never was and no one ever did). Anyone would find these constant reminders annoying."But Tannen doesn't take the nagging parents to task. She addresses the grown children in saying, "Imagine the worry [the mother] endured each time she saw these threats to her loved ones' safety–and her frustration that they didn't undertake the simple repairs to eliminate the danger."

Point well taken. But, as Tannen points out, not all our observations, helpful hints and concerned commentary are so obviously linked to an urgent safety or health issue. Tannen describes a daughter who "cringed when her mother peered at the stove in her kitchen, lifting the protective pan under the grill to check to see whether the crumbs had been cleaned from beneath the pain–which, of course, they hadn't."

I may be overly sensitive on this point–I had such a mother; the grill pan was the least of it–but Tannen has given me a slightly different perspective on my reaction [grrrrr!) to my mother's good housekeeping exchanges. Rearranging my kitchen cabinets, re-doing my closets is not necessarily the criticism I took it to be. It's a problem of indirect communication. It can make an innocent remark or action come across as criticism. And indirectness. Tannen warns that the areas for setting off our grown child with an "innocent" comment are "the Big Three of appearance: hair, clothes, weight."

Made me feel fortunate that my mother stuck to the housekeeping.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Emerging Adults: If there is such a thing as affluenza, should we worry about it?

08/19/2011

They are a two-car family living in an affluent neighborhood. With her son, a junior at college, home for the summer, a friend was sharing her car with him. Though he had been unable to get a regular job, he had cobbled together a coaching business with a friend: the two–both college-level athletes–were tutoring neighborhood kids in the fine art of hitting a baseball and kicking a soccer ball.

The timing part of sharing the car was going smoothly enough. What got my friend ticked off was getting into the car in the morning and finding the fuel gauge on empty. Not once. Several times. She insisted her son chip in for gas–not necessarily refill the tank to its upper limits but put some gas in when the tank neared empty.

He didn't want to. He didn't have the money to do it, he said–even though he'd just gotten paid $20 for a coaching gig. She retaliated by setting limits on his use of the car unless he shares in the gas bill.

But the gas is not the real issue. She is worried that her son, surrounded by affluent friends, is picking up a sense of entitlement–something psychologist Gary Buffone, in his book "Choking on the Silver Spoon," describes as "expecting rewards without effort." And Buffone takes that sense seriously. He considers it one of five traits that indicate a serious case of affluenza or, in his words, "Silver Spoon Syndrome." He defines the latter as a set of symptoms "resulting from an inappropriate relationship with money or wealth."

Some of the other traits–a lack of motivation and drive, a low tolerance for frustration, failure to handle money responsibly and overvaluing material things–are hard to distinguish from adolescent ennui. The question for my friend is whether her son still has one foot planted in adolescent rebellion–he's spent two years away at college and has yet to exhibit the academic drive his parents would like to see–or whether he is growing up to be a young man with full blown a case of affluenza.

A reality check on use of the car fits in with one of Buffone's approaches to curing Silver Spoon Syndrome: give your child increasing responsibility. "The only way to break the back of entitlement is to lean on it–hard!" Buffone writes. "Parents must put relentless pressure on kids to make them earn what they get in life."

Given the current price of gas, my friend is applying no small pressure.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Emerging Adults: The four stages of job-search anguish for our college grads.

08/15/2011

A friend, whose 23-year-old son has been looking for a job for six months now, has been through several stages of search anguish. He's a graduate of a top college where he got good grades. Last year, a long search brought forth a one-year, low-paying internship with a nonprofit group. That ended in August. He is likely filled with anxieties about his future–none of which he is sharing with his parents. The dad has urged his son to go to graduate school–while the dad is still employed and can pay for it. It would get him out of a miserable job market and garner further qualifications for a good-paying job. But the son doesn't know what kind of graduate school he's interested in. The mom wants to see him employed. And she is going through her own stages of acceptance of the difficulties her son's generation is facing in finding a job.

Stage One: mild annoyance with her son: "How long does he think we're going to support him? When I was his age, I couldn't lean on my parents. I had to get a job or starve."

Stage Two: anger at her son: "He's lazy. He isn't taken this seriously."

Stage Three: fear of her son being resigned to joblessness: "I think he's thrown in the towel. He doesn't seem to be trying. He won't discuss it with us. He won't even tell me if he followed a job lead I gave him–and I don't think he has."

Stage Four: the unthinkable: On a family vacation with her son, her husband's three brothers and their children, my friend sat and listened while an uncle asked her son what was happening on the job front. First surprise: he answered! Second surprise: he'd gotten a job offer. It was for a job with an NGO [non government organization] in an African country. The country, however, was a desperately poor one riven by political instability. He has not decided whether to take the job or not. My friend finds the thought of him going to such a dangerous place frightening. So the stage she is now in is this: "I wish I had $100,000 I could pay someone to hire my son."

Now that is something that, when she was her son's age, she never could or would have thought about. But isn't that what some of us come down to–if only we could find someone willing to give our grown child a chance, we'd pay them a bonus to do it.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Vacation Togetherness: The grownkids, their kids and you at the beach for a week. Uh Oh.

08/11/2011

Jill and Lenny had made it a very pleasant habit to take their grown children on vacation with them. First they had a condo at the beach. Once they sold that, they rented at interesting, far-away places–one or two condos so everyone could come together and relax as one big, happy family.

They're not so keen on that scenario anymore. They still love the idea of a family vacation but finds it's increasingly difficult to take both families at the same time. Her son's children are 10 years older than her daughter's–with more sophisticated tastes. Her son has lived abroad with his family, sends his children to an international school where they are keeping up their multi-language skills. He has more money to spend than his sister and is willing to spend it on introducing his children to the varieties of food and experiences the world holds. No time like vacation to introduce and experiment.

The daughter's children–twins–are in preschool. Her outlook is more home-grown and her pocketbook more limited.Going out to a restaurant to try unusual food is a trial–the kids are too young to enjoy it; it's a pain make them sit still for so long–it's much easier (and cheaper) to eat hamburgers or pizza at the condo.

"Resentments arise," the parents of these grown children say. "Our son and son-in-law aren't kindred spirits. They have a civil relationship but they don't have too much to say to each other. Our daughter and daughter-in-law don't have that much in common. Everyone loves each other–the big kids love the twins but they have their limits on how long they want to play with them. I get tense when we're away together. Sibling rivalry rears it head–even at this age."

Jill and Lenny are now thinking that they don't want to have everyone together for so long a time. Both her son and daughter live in the same city as they do. Sunday dinners at the parent's house is an unspoken ritual. Three hours of togetherness is one thing. Ten days is another.

Welcome to the club. As one friend famously put it about visits from all her grandchildren at once: "I don't do gang bangs anymore." She staggers her daughter's visits to her resort condo. Another friend calls it "serial vacationing." Amounts to the same thing. It's a fine idea to have everyone together–all the grands in a big house at the beach–but the reality is something else. Either the kids and their spouses have little in common or the parenting styles are very different or there's just too much chaos in having so many people under one roof or we just get caught up in the tensions that could erupt into arguments–between grown siblings, grandkids or you and your children. That does not spell vacation. Even if the grown kids say they love it.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Parenting Perspective: Taking the credit–or blame–for our grown children

08/02/2011

When we were young parents with small children, paterfamilias and I suffered from a strange paradox. We would pay good money to hire a babysitter so we could go out to dinner without our children. But then we would spend the better part of that dinner hour talking about our children–their amazing strengths, the anathema of the occasional weakness. We had busy careers and took a pro-active interest in the issues of the day. And yet, much of the time was given over to jabbering away about our children.

Now that those children are grown and are no longer in our house–or even nearby–we don't have the same raw material to fuel endless discussions about them. And yet, our children are often the subject of our dinner time discussions. We've got bragging rights: We admire the heights they've reached, the road they are taking, the delight of their children, with only an occasional bow to a slight imperfection. (As I wrote in a birthday limerick to Uber son a few years ago:

There’s one thing we’d like to suggest/And we say this slightly in jest:

When you pick up the phone/And hear “dial tone”

Call Mom, Call Dad. They’re the best!)

We may be proud of our kids and talk among ourselves about them a lot, but I keep away from taking credit for who and what they've become–or even how often they call home. My mantra: If you take credit for the good stuff, you've got to take the blame for the bad stuff. And who wants to go down that latter road?

I was reminded of the parenting paradox while on vacation with Uber son and family this summer. Good grandparents that we are [a few self-pats on the back here], we offered to take care of our Grands while Uber son and daughter-in-law went out for a romantic dinner together. They called it a 'date' and seemed delighted to go. They came back glowing–only to admit that much of the dinner discussion revovled around, yes, their children.

I was also reminded of this paradox and my mantra when reading Deborah Tannen's excellent, "You're Wearing That? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation." Tannen focuses on the eggshell like quality of parent-grownchild communications but her commentary also takes into account the burden "bragging rights" puts on us as parents of grown children as well as the pressure it puts on our children. "if the measure of a mother's success," she writes, "is the perfection observable in her children, then the children bear a burden equal to her own: Whenever they are less than perfect, they are letting their mothers down."

So it would seem natural and quite appropriate for parents to go out to dinner and, with the kids at a distance, brag to each other about them. It's quite another to burden them with our high opinion of them. Somewhere out there is a middle road where we can let them know we're proud of them without making them feel they have to live up to the high bar we've set for them.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Milestones: A son is engaged, Mom gets to bond over the ring.

07/28/2011

He's her third and youngest and, at 44, the last to get married. Or he will be the last. Right now, he's engaged, and though he leads a very casual life style on the West Coast–there is not a button-down shirt nor suit in his wardrobe–his mother thought he might want to give his bride an engagement ring. A symbol to seal the deal. The bride to be–a physician with a demanding practice–was definitely not as casual in style.

When she proposed the idea of his buying his fiancee a ring, her son liked it. He just didn't like the idea of shopping. Nonetheless, on a visit to his mom and dad in New York City, he and his mom went off to shop together. Destination: Tiffany's. I'll let the mom tell the story from here:

"When we got there, we told the saleswoman he wanted something understated but elegant–not a knock-your-socks off kind of ring. The first ring she brought out she said was just to see the style, but it came with a $62,000 price tag. We gasped and worked down from there. I was very careful to withhold any judgment about what to choose. I restrained myself from imposing my taste. After about an hour, my son said he had had enough looking, that he couldn't do this anymore. So we moved quickly. He chose a very lovely ring for a very reasonable price.

"Shopping together for the ring turned out to be a very emotional experience. For a son to agree to share with his mother a major life experience–getting engaged and giving his fiancee a ring; to trust me–that was important to me. When we left Tiffany's, we walked the streets of New York and both felt elated."
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Emerging Adults: Their frustration at not having a good job vs. our understanding it.

07/22/2011

I am having lunch with a friend when I ask about her son, one year out of college: Did he get the job he was applying for?

As far as she knew, the answer was no. Or possibly, not yet. Her son, she says, is incommunicado on the subject of job hunting. She's tried to get around a direct assault by asking round-about questions, such as, what search engines are you using for your job search? He saw that one for what it was and cut her off.

"When," my friend wants to know "is it going to be okay to ask these questions? How long are we going to have to support him?"

It's not as though the lack of employment and the need to live at home is easy on her son–on any grown child. It's a trip back to adolescence. In a recent posting by Carl Pickhardt, Ph.D, he talked about a young man who, almost a year after graduating from college, was stuck in an entry level job with no future opportunity in sight. The young man–someone's grown child–was feeling anxious, disappointed, and angry. Pickhardt's suggestions to his patient may offer some insights for those of us with unemployed grown children struggling through the detritus of the Great Recession:

Pickhardt starts off with this observation: "When the reality we expect fits the reality we encounter, our emotional response is usually less upsetting than when the reality we expect does not fit the reality we encounter."

His patient has created three kinds of positive expectations about the reality he would face after college graduation. He has PREDICTIONS about what will happen after graduating. (He will find a job.) He has AMBITIONS about what he wants to have happen after graduating. (He wants an interesting job that will advance him into a satisfying career.) He has CONDITIONS about what should happen after graduating. (He should be paid a comfortable income at whatever job he finds.)

None of the three kinds of expectations came to pass. Pickhardt lays out the result:

"Because the prediction of easy employment is violated by reality, and after seven months of looking and he has yet to land a job, he feels surprised and anxious. Because the ambition for finding work he really wanted to do is violated by at last taking a routine assembly line job, he feels disappointed and let down. Because the condition of making a comfortable living right away is violated by making entry level wages, he feels betrayed and angry.

"Now this young man has two sets of problems, not one. He has the problem of choosing how to proceed with his life, and he has the emotional burden of bearing unrealistic expectations. For the sake of his emotional well being, he needed to give up his unrealistic expectations and create a realistic set instead. This is what he came up with.

"Just out of college I need to expect it will be hard to find a job, any job, right away. So I really need to look hard. Right away, I probably won't get a job like the one I really want. So I need to take what I can get and go from there. And financially, whatever job I get, I should have to struggle to get by on however little I am able to make."

Pickhardt's bottom line: "Accept what you have and you free up some energy that was spent protesting against it. …Choice of expectations in life psychologically matters because these mental sets can have such powerful emotional consequences. Thus recent college graduates who choose to hold unrealistic positive expectations about their immediate prospects in life usually do so to their unhappy cost."
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Crossing Boundaries: Tiptoeing thru a grownchild’s house

07/19/2011

This is a story Pat, who babysits her four grandchildren two days a week, tells me: She is careful–very careful–about housekeeping on the days she spends in her son's and daughter-in-law's house. If she sees dirty dishes in the sink, she'll clear them. If she sees a floor that's particularly dirty–and with four kids aged 5 through 12, floors are bound to get messy–she might clean it up. But not so that it's obvious. And she would never undertake a large, clean-up project, That is how she operates.

And yet, one day, her daughter-in-law came home from work, looked around her kitchen and asked her–in a tone that had an accusatory edge to it–whether she had rearranged her kitchen cupboards. Things had been moved around and re-stacked. But she had not had a hand in it, Pat informed her daughter-in-law. She knew nothing about it.

Turned out, her son had done it. He liked things arranged in an orderly way and upped and reordered the kitchen cupboard.

Phew. Not guilty. And yet: the first one to be blamed. No matter how carefully we tread, it is not easy to be a guest in a grown child's home.