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© Penelope Lemov and Parenting Grown Children, 2025. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given.

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

    The Pain of Parting: A Child Is Moving Far Away

    I was whining to a friend: Alpha Daughter leaves for a year abroad in three weeks. After spending several months being excited about all the opportunities a year in another country means–for her career, for her family–I am faced with the moment of truth. She is packing her bags and I have an oh-so-heavy feeling inside, a "when will I see you again" kind of heaviness. Paterfamilias does not seem to connect with my pain, I tell my friend. He says, "you'll go visit whenever you feel like–hop a plane and you're there whenever you want to be." I say it's not the same as being able to pick up the phone and chat or, hearing there's a sudden need for your services, getting there the next day. Distance is a fearsome factor. And it also means that on any visit, I am bound to overstay my welcome or, if not my welcome, my comfort level.

    My friend has been through this drama. Her daughter lived abroad for several years. I figured she would understand the feelings and fears. And she did–with this pragmatic twist:

    "I feel your pain about
    a distant daughter," she wrote in an email. "but I have to side with [Paterfamilias] on this one.  Getting to
    Germany is not a big deal and if you go every three or four months, it will
    suffice.  When my daughter was in Israel with the first grandchild, I went every
    three months and the flight was 12-13 hours. I would stay for five days,
    get adjusted to the time change, then board the plane again. It was awful. And sort of unnatural: no contact and then too much. But Germany is
    easier.  Between email and visits, you should be fine. I shouldn't
    be so smug. I now have my grandchildren less than 30 minutes away and I see
    them every week."

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

    Money Matters: The long arm of parents who help their kids.

    "We are spending so much money on our kids," a friend tells me. "They need to be rescued every once in a while."

    The kids in question are hers from her first marriage and his from his first marriage. One of her sons went through a painful and devastating divorce, including court battles over child custody and support. He lost his job. My friend, her husband, her other son, the father of her son and an uncle all pitched in to help the divorced son. It took several years before he was back on his feet. And now his eldest son–one of my friend's three grandchildren–was ready for college. He had to choose not the best school he got into but the least expensive one. My friend and her husband dipped into their retirement savings to pay tuition–her son couldn't afford it and neither the ex-wife nor her parents (the other grandparents) were willing to help out.

    My friend could live with the choice of the lesser school. That's life. It made her angry that the other grandparents weren't willing to help. That's life, too, but more emotional, verging as it does on fairness.

    Now, she's got another financial anxiety: Her stepson–a man in his late 40s–has always been self supporting and single. And has always been shy around women. So, when he started dating a woman his age and then announced he was getting married, everyone was thrilled. But the new wife came with old and huge debts from her life with a former boyfriend. The new husband is helping his wife pay off those I.O.U.s–the credit card debt keeps compounding like crazy–and now everyone's helping out. It's another drain on my friend's dwindling retirement resources.  

    "It never ends," she says. "It seems like one of our kids is always having a money crisis." A few years ago–just before he retired–my friend's husband paid off the mortgage on their house. "So we are lucky," she says. "What would we do–how could we help our kids–if we had a $2,000 a month mortgage payment to meet?" It also raises the question of how long you help out your grown kids. When does the rescue line end? And maybe even more to the point: How do you define crisis?

    Does it help to know she–and by extension we–are not alone? The Brits are experiencing similar pressures. Here's a news story I just came across. In Great Britain, "millions of grandparents are cutting back their spending because they
    feel under pressure to fund their grandchildren." Research also found that
    the majority of grandparents regularly spent cash from their retirement savings on
    clothing, toys and other treats for their grandchildren. Others helped pay for essentials, such as shoes and
    school uniforms, to help their own children balance their finances.

    Here was a key finding that hit home: "Although some children did ask their parents for financial help, much of
    the pressure to provide for grandchildren comes from the grandparents
    themselves." 

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

    Re-filing the Nest: An economist looks at the phenomenon

    While families struggle with the financial and emotional impact of having grown children move back home–and take up residence in their old bedroom–there are some interesting macroeconomic effects.

    Here's how a Mark Thoma, a well-respected economist, blogged about the implications of re-nesting. First he looks at a phenomenon he calls "Family as insurance:"


    The
    parental home as unemployment insurance

    "It is well known that in Spain and especially Italy, people in their
    twenties and even thirties stay with their parents until they find a
    job, and they often wait for the "perfect" job. This looks like an
    unemployment insurance with infinite duration with substantial moral
    hazard, which has lead to sky high youth unemployment rates in Europe.

    Greg Kaplan is
    documenting that something similar is happening in the United States.
    …many of those who do not attend college
    return home during unemployment spells, much like college students
    return home over the Summer. This analysis is very nicely done with an
    estimated structural model that features a repeated game between
    children and altruistic parents. In particular, this allows us to
    understand why the savings rate of young people is so low. As they have
    the option of returning to their parents, they see no need to build up
    any precautionary savings. This means also that programs like
    unemployment insurance have little impact for them."

    Then Thoma comes up with his kicker: "Just
    thinking of all things parents do to provide the insurance, yet minimize
    the moral hazard problem. The last place I would have wanted to live at
    that age
    was with my parents, and I'm pretty sure the feeling was mutual."

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

    Health Coverage: Even if they’re married, you can help.

    Maybe it's because it was such a sore point for paterfamilias and me: When our children graduated from college and set forth to various parts of the country to figure out what to do with their lives, neither of them figured they needed health insurance. Never thought about it. We, of course, did, and we had to scour plans in the states where they had wandered to find catastrophic coverage for them–to make sure that if something terrible happened, a doctor and hospital wherever they were would take them in and that we wouldn't be stripped of our assets when the bills came due.

    I blogged about this a while ago. The big news then was that a few states were allowing parents to keep their grown kids on their health insurance policies until those kids were 25 or 26 years old. Now, it's easier. The health reform law that finally inched and sighed and crept through Congress and onto President Obama's desk this year has important provisions for parents of young adult children. Not only can we keep our adult children on our health insurance plan until those children are 26, we can keep them there even if the kids get married. However, if your child's employer decides to offer coverage, all bets are off–your child can no longer stay on your policy.

    The other news? Some states are expanding that age-of-coverage to 30. Given the current employment picture–hard to find a job; growing trend toward contract work, which doesn't offer health coverage–that could be invaluable.

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

    Boomerangers Move Back In: The New Yorker cover says it all

    A picture is worth a 1,000-word posting. Amidst the joy and celebration of graduation time, the May 24 New Yorker cover has a message for all whose grown children are heading home after getting their higher-ed degrees. There he stands, the returning son, hanging his PhD diploma on the wall of his childhood bedroom wall–right near the rock n' roll poster and sports trophy. Note in lower left corner, the suitcase and in lower right, the box of college paraphernalia. While the magazine usually comes up with an archly clever title for its cover art, this one leans more to the simple and direct: "Boomerang Graduation."

    Well, for those going through it, the cover art makes it clear: You are not alone. So does the Shouts & Murmurs column, "Your New College Graduate: A Parents' Guide"  Here's an excerpt:

    "How do I teach my college graduate independence?

    Good
    question! Experts have differing opinions on the subject. Some suggest a
    “firm” approach: assigning housework, banning marijuana, requesting
    politeness, etc. Others suggest a “liberal” approach: cooking and
    cleaning for them, praising their “poems,” etc. Unfortunately, neither
    approach works."

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

    The Big Hurt: When our grown children won’t talk to us

    It's the great What If and the core fear of parents of adult children: What If our grown children cut us off–wouldn't answer our phone calls, emails or letters? Just wanted to have nothing to do with us?

    This traumatic issue is not something I've dealt with in this blog–it's too deep for someone without therapeutic training. But there was a piece in the New YorkTimes recently that explored the issue briefly and relied on the wisdom of Joshua Coleman, a psychologist who has been through the trauma himself. The estrangement, Coleman says, appears to be happening more often, even among families where there has been no obvious cruelty or cause such as drug abuse or addiction. "This is not a story of parents who have made egregious mistakes," he says. "It's about parents who were good parents, who made mistakes that were certainly within normal limits."

    If you're suffering through this trauma, check out some of the Web sites of professionals like Coleman–there are also a number of online chat rooms devoted to the subject–and take heart: Time and patience, persistent effort and small contacts, can pay off. That is how, Coleman reports, he was able to slowly repair his relationship with his daughter.

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

    Missing the Kids: Grown children move away but are not forgotten

    For those of us of a certain age–especially those of us whose children have grown up enough to leave the nest–there are some pithy, witty and heart wrenching observations of our condition in a new book,The Three Weissmans of Westport.

    The book is not about empty nesters–though one of the characters, Annie, is one. It does, however, have a lot to say about that empty feeling, and the author, Cathleen Schine, manages to offer insights with words that fly along the page–even while they point a dagger at the heart. Take this one, describing Annie's sadness–she's a 50-ish single-mom–that her grown sons could not come home for the Christmas holiday, which she was spending with her mother and sister.

    "For the first time that she could remember, Annie felt alone, truly and desperately alone. Even when her husband had disappeared and she had been left to fend for herself with two little boys, there had been the two little boys. Now they were gone, too. They loved her and called her and sent her e-mails and would still snuggle up to her to be petted when they were in the mood, but they were men, and though they would always be at the center of her life, she was no longer at the center of theirs."

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

    Home Visit: A special welcome for the grandchildren

    Uber son's family of five live in a city some 400 miles north of us. So it makes more sense for Paterfamilias and I to visit them, then it does for my son and daughter-in-law to drag three small children back to the family manse. Which is why it has been almost two years since they've been to our house for a weekend. 

    Rarity has its charms–and inspirations. My store of toys and amusements for children were in sore need of an update–the two "big" Grands have outgrown the Matchbox cars and play dough. Instead of just laying in a store of stuff for them to do–just-in-case rainy day amusements–I decided to try a variation on something I had read about and posted a while ago: Creating a special bag of stuff for each child–anything from a funny toothbrush to a word-game book to a box of crayons.

    It turned out to be a more interesting way to shop for stuff–thinking about each child and what he or she  would like. I ended up packing each bag with a few small items–from colored drinking cups with built in straws (one for each of them) to assorted small puzzles, a small board game, stencil kits and other art supplies. Bottom line: It didn't cost a lot of money but they seemed thrilled with having their own bag of tricks to rifle through. Especially the 2-year-old: She felt quite grown up being treated as an equal–especially since she got a page of stickers all to herself. 

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

    Home Visit: A son and his family come home for a weekend

    I wake up this morning to the sounds of my house. All the beds in it were full last night: Uber son and his family have come home for a weekend visit.

    It is an hour before I usually get up, but I hear my toddler Grand. She woke up in a cheery mood and is now pattering around the house–her mom in tow–having a babbling conversation with herself. It's such a happy sound–like a soft, lilting song. Then I hear the "big kids." They are up and around and leave a more definitive step on the stairs.

    Now they are all in the kitchen. I can hear cereal plopping into bowls, milk being poured and the chatter, chatter, chatter of children in the morning–a little tiff over something or other but otherwise breakfast is being wolfed down while I pull myself out of bed.

    My house has come alive. It is stretching and expanding to shelter and care for them. Me, too.

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

    The Power of “No:” Over-indulgence has its limits.

    Our grown children may have great expectations about the goods and services we can–and often do–provide. That's' why, a friend says, she felt liberated when she said "no" to one of her children.

    It may sound trivial–and clearly this is a parent and grandparent who enjoys indulging her children–but she has her limits. She had arranged for grown daughter and her three children to join her and grandpop for a long winter weekend at a resort in Florida. The grown child pays her family's air fare to Florida but my friend and grandpop foot the resort bill–room, meals, entertainment. They can afford it, and it gives them pleasure. One vacation day, my friend, daughter and granddaughter went shopping. As they passed a pricey children's boutique–the kind only grandmas shop at–my friends daughter told her daughter to go in there and pick out something,that grandma will buy it for her. And that's when my friend said No. "It was a tiny little thing, but I felt liberated. I was finally able to say, 'I'll do this, but not that.' " When she said no, my friend adds, "Chicken little did not fall from the sky."

    The question for many of us is along the same line: How many times do we pull out the credit card or send the check because our kids make us feel it's expected? Even when we can afford it, are there times when we should say "no," when enough is enough?  

    The Just Say No extends to matters beyond money. When we're expected to babysit–even tho we have other plans; when they want to come by for a visit–even though it's inconvenient. Many of us drop everything–cancel plans with friends, rearrange our schedules. Sometimes we should–our kids genuinely need us and the loving service only we can provide. But sometimes there's a feeling that they are taking advantage of us, that we still have an active life we're leading and can't drop everything just to make things more convenient for them. As my friend says, "It's a very interesting process to begin to do this."