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

Money Matters: Helping kids with big purchases

04/12/2010

When it comes to money, we're all over the place–tight-fisted to spendthrift; controlling to reckless; obsessed to careless. When it comes to our kids, it's even worse. It gets emotional, often reflecting where we've come from in our own lives.

Here's what I mean: A friend of a friend is a very successful and high-profile lawyer–a millionaire many time over with a big house and many expensive cars to his name. And he did it by himself: Started with almost nothing and slogged his way through to his current position of power and affluence. That, at least, is the routine he has always given his sons when he tells them he will not help them out financially–no loans to buy a car, a house or pay unexpected expenses. When they were heading to college, he insisted they work their way through. His message: They should work just as hard he did. He doesn't owe them anything.

This is not to suggest he isn't a loving father. But he draws a tight fiscal line and has yet to cross it. I've written before about those of us who prefer to use our hard-won money to help our kids out–to see them enjoy in the here and now the relief our money can bring. But we also have friends who say, we put our kids through college and that's it; we don't intend to help them with anything else–not that they can't afford it; it's a principle. It's an issue I've visited before on this blog.

It may get down to something as basic as our life experiences. If our parents were generous, we may have that model and want to be generous as well. Or, if our parents were fiscally restrained, we may decide we don't want to follow that path. Or perhaps they were generous to one of our siblings and that brother or sister squandered the money and our inheritance as well. We might want to be more cautious in the help we offer our children or the strings we attach to that help.

If you have the money to do help your grown children, where do you draw the line? Or are you all or nothing? Some things–help with paying off college loans, perhaps–but not others? And how do you come to your philosophy of giving?
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Re-Nesting: Togetherness across the generations

04/09/2010

One big happy (or unhappy) family is taking on new meaning. Older moms and dads are moving in with their adult children, or the grown kids are moving in with them and those adult children have children of their own. One house: two or three generations. It's called multi-generational housing. And economists tie it to both the down-turned economy and health needs.

It's growth is for real. According to a January 2010 survey of its real estate agents, Coldwell Banker reports that in the past year, there has been a notable rise in the number of home buyers looking to purchase homes to
accommodate more than one generation of their family. Nearly 70 percent of the sales agents see economic
conditions accelerating that trend in the coming year.

Here's how the survey breaks down the reasons behind the multi-generational housing purchases: 39 percent give financial reasons as the number one driver; 29 percent point to health issues; 6 percent cite a strong family
bond.

The emotional issues that tie into such togetherness can be, as comedian Sarah Silverman might say, "beyond beyond." On a more practical level, though, the Coldwell Banker survey has a tip for those preparing to be multi-generational homesteaders:

"Extended families purchasing a
home together should consider signing a written contract outlining
everything from finances to chores and childcare. Each family should
assess their situation individually and find a plan that works best for
them."
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Parenting Advice from Experts: Seven tips on getting along with your grown child

04/03/2010

Sometimes our relationship with a grown child sours. Maybe it's just going through a bad patch right now; maybe it's part of a general downward spiral. There are always reasons for a deterioration. Some of them may stem from–or be exacerbated by–things you say or do that you may not realize are toxic. Here's a checklist of seven such hot buttons–complied by Dr. Joshua Coleman. He calls them "recommendations to
decrease conflict and increase closeness with your adult child."

· Don't criticize their choice in romantic partners. You have
raised your adult child to be independent, so don't assume that you know
better about who they should be with.

· Don't criticize their parenting. Yes, you may have years of
experience, but most people like to learn on their own and resent
intrusions from the outside, especially from parents.

· Don't criticize their sexuality. This should go without
saying, but we don't choose our sexuality, our sexuality chooses us.
Criticizing something about your child that is part of his or her
make-up is a guaranteed recipe for alienation.

· Don't guilt trip about their lack of involvement with you.
Guilt increases distance and resentment.

· If you're going to say no to a request for money or some other
form of support, do it with affection and not as a complaint or
criticism.

· Take responsibility for mistakes you've made in the past.

· If your adult child has cut off contact, don't respond with
retaliation. Work to understand why your child feels the way that he or
she does. Assume that there are separate realities in every family and
that your adult child has a legitimate perspective, even if it isn't
obvious to you. Get a lot of support for the inevitable feelings of
hurt, anger, guilt, or shame evoked by the alienation from your adult
child.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Money Matters: Letting Your Kids Know What Their Legacy Will Be

03/26/2010

Heartache and heartburn lie ahead for grown kids whose parent's don't let them know how they plan to disburse their assets. That's what the estate-planning experts say and they may not be exaggerating. Of course, right or wrong, you won't be there to see it. But still.

The misunderstandings that can arise range from hurt feelings over who the executor of the will is to why one sibling was chosen to inherit the house and another got the jewelry–when the kids would have preferred it the other way around.

Yes, it's time to have a conversation with your grown children about your estate plan. Not necessarily how much you'll be leaving them but why you're doing what. One set of parents with a financially successful son and a do-good-works but much poorer daughter, sat their son down to explain why the daughter would inherit more of their money than he would. Having the information come directly from mom and dad and the reason behind it meant a lot to the son, who said he might have felt that somehow he had disappointed his parents–rather than that they felt so good about his success that they didn't feel he needed further backing. He also felt that if had disagreed with their reasoning he would have had a chance to argue against it. And he was able to tell them what items of theirs had sentimental value for him.

Such a nice story. And you're probably saying, as I am, I'm going to do it, I'm going to have a conversation with my kids about my estate–however big or small that estate may be. Besides, sentimental value can't be overestimated. And yet we don't do it. I haven't done it yet. Is it the confrontation with mortality? The discomfort of talking about money? Of appearing to play favorites? Of re-stoking sibling rivalries?

Time to come to terms with those emotions. If you need a little rational support, this New York Times story may be just the ticket.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Re-Nesting: When the grown kids move back home

03/22/2010

The economy is taking its toll on those empty bedrooms in your house. More young and not-so-young adult children are finding the only way to survive the downturn–the loss of job or the piling up of bills–is to cut their losses by moving back home. The number of people between the ages of 25 to 34 that are living with their parents increased 17.8 percent between 2000 and 2007, according to the U.S. Census Bureau–and that was before the recession firmed its grip. Wonder what the 2010 numbers will look like?

Here's another view of those numbers: Almost 16 million
families had at least one child over 18 living at home in 2003, up 7 percent
since 1995 and up 14 percent since 1985, according to the Census Bureau's
American Housing Survey.

They're "boomerang" or "back-to-the-bedroom" kids. They leave.
They come back. Sometimes more than once, often after college, between
jobs, before marriage, after a divorce or when housing costs are so
exorbitant that moving in to their old bedrooms is more appealing than
sharing a small, rundown apartment with three roommates.

Zhu Xiao Di, a research analyst at Harvard University's Joint Center
for Housing Studies, has studied boomerang kids for years.In a recent paper, ["The Effects of Housing Push Factors and
Rent Expectations on Household Formation of Young Adult,"] he finds a
direct correlation between rent prices and an adult child's decision
to live with the parents. Couple that with big increases in college tuition and fees, and young adults find themselves
saddled with debt before they start collecting their first paychecks.No wonder they head home.

The good (or bad) news, depending on how much you like have your grown children living at home, is that such arrangements aren't usually permanent. The number of kids moving back in with their folks usually escalates
during cycles of crisis, such as wars and economic depressions.

Sound like what we're going through now?
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Empty Nesting: Clearing out your child’s old bedroom.

03/17/2010

It took us almost 10 years to clear out our children's bedrooms. They were launched into the world and starting families of their own before we came to terms with the idea that they no longer needed their old bedrooms. And that if we took over those rooms, they wouldn't feel disowned.

I was reminded of those feelings when I read a recent piece in the New York Times by Michelle Slatalla. She is moving east and had to clean out the bedrooms of her college-age daughters who were away at school. It made her remember how awful she felt when her mother bundled up all the talisman's of her youth and dismantled her room. She was concerned that her children would feel the same way.

Maybe it was the grace of ten years, but I didn't worry about what my children would think. They would still come home for visits but they wouldn't be sleeping in their old beds surrounded by memorabilia from their grade school days. But Paterfamilias was unnerved by the dismantling–in fact, he resisted it for several years. He worried that his children would feel less welcome when they came home for a visit. On an even more gut level, he seemed to feel it was proof that our family had changed, that our children had grown up and moved away to other cities in other parts of the country. And he didn't like to admit it.

Empty nesting is a tricky thing. I've read stories–usually in decorating magazines–about parents who, garbed in a celebratory mood–re-do their now-extra bedrooms within days of their child moving out. I don't necessarily envy them. I wonder at the quick dispatch of the past. Of course, it may be that they desperately needed the extra space. Our son and daughter had the two biggest bedrooms in the house–on the top floor with high cathedral ceilings, skylights and huge picture windows. We took the room off the kitchen–it had more closets and a bigger bathroom. For us to move upstairs to their rooms meant ripping out the built-in desks and bookcases and replacing them with closets and an addition to the bathroom. There was nothing impermanent about the takeover of their space. We carefully boxed up anything they had left behind–that stuff is still in its boxes in the basement; they have never opened the boxes or asked after the old notebooks, textbooks or drawings in them.

They still come home to visit. They sleep in the guest room or on the pull-out couch in the downstairs rec room. I like to think that not retiring to their old rooms–or sleeping in their old bunk beds–makes them feel more grown up and independent, that it helps change the dynamics of the visit. There's no reason to slip back into teen-year patterns. It's a whole new adult world inside the house. The only little kids in it are theirs.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
Communications: How it feels when we feel left out of our grown childrens’ lives.

03/14/2010
"Only connect." That's the famously underlying theme of E. M. Forster's Howards End. It also applies to our relationship with our grown children. We want to stay in touch–not just on a superficial level. We want to know what's happening in their lives, where we can help, where we can offer advice. And there are also those vicarious thrills. After all, our lives are slowing down while their's are picking up speed. And the place where those places interconnect can be uncomfortable. Forster is far from the only writer to look at the frailty of those connections.

Poet Cortney Davis captures the essence of a difficult parent-child moment when she writes of a parent and grown child sitting in an airport cafe:
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Money Matters: Are you squandering their inheritance?

03/11/2010

So you took that lavish vacation–around the world in 90 days. Or you've remarried and are indulging your new spouse with a luxury condo or cash or other valuables. A recent piece in Money magazine looked at the issue from the grown child's point of view: What to do if your elderly dad showers a new girlfriend with diamonds or good-old mom maintains an expensive membership to a country club she can't afford and never goes to. Last fall I blogged about a divorced friend whose children wanted her to save some money for them because their father, recently remarried and a man of some wealth, was "spending it all" on the new wife.

We can be a source of aggravation, especially to the grown child who's worried about buying his first home or paying his college debts. He may be wondering whether he can count on a legacy from us. She may even think she can stop our free-spending ways by asking us to "grow up."

What Tyler Cowen, a professor economics at George Mason University and the author of the Money article, suggests is that these grown children take note of a classic paper called "The Strategic Bequest Motive." What they'll learn there: Time is money. That is, we parents of adult children want something in return for a bequest. Specifically, Cowen writes, "studies show that children who frequently call and visit their elderly parents tend to inherit larger amounts than those who don't." Taking that a step further, Cowen recommends that the best way to stop us from frittering away their legacy is for them to shower us with love and attention. "Whether consciously or not, they [Reader: That's us.] will treat their money more carefully because they'll want to leave it to you."

I have a different take on the bequest outcome. Perhaps the care and attention translates into a larger legacy because the love and affection already infuses the relationship–even if the patriarch or matriarch is enjoying a childish spending spree.

The authors of the original paper must have had their misgivings about false pledges of love and devotion. A quick check with the paper shows the authors give space up front and on the first page to a quote from King Lear:

Tell me, my daughter

(since now we will divest us both of rule,

Interest of territory, cares of state),

Which of you shall we say doth love us most,

That we our largest bounty may extend

Where nature doth with merit challenge.

Frankly, we should all have a conversation with our grown children
about legacies–what they can and cannot or should not expect. We can only hope the strategic bequest–or the need for it–never comes up. RIP King Lear–and Will Shakespeare as well.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.

Your Child’s Ex: Don’t get too attached

03/08/2010

Lesson learned the hard way: Get attached to your child's boyfriend or girlfriend at your peril. They break up and you're left feeling the loss. Until they are an official part of the family, keep your emotional distance.

Many of us have been through it. A recent Carolyn Hax column was from a woman who not only grieved for the loss of the daughter's boyfriend, but for his dog as well. "My whole family welcomed him as one of our own," she writes. Then the daughter broke up the romance. Now, the writer says, "I have lost a big chunk of my heart. I was very close to the dog; he spent weekends with me when my daughter and her boyfriend did things together." She is disappointed in her daughter's decision–the couple seemed so right for each other–and she would like to see the dog, and the boyfriend as well.

Life is full of disappointments, and it hurts to get caught up in the grief of a breakup. It's so easy to say, keep your distance but what to do when the young couple spend time with you, move in together and make you part of their lives–then their relationship implodes. You're supposedly "safe" if you get attached to a son- or daughter-in-law, but marriages implode as well. And if a couple lives together, how different is that from a marriage, in terms of the bonds you may form?

Well, sad as it is and good advice that the warnings are, the important lesson many of us have learned is to keep the sadness to ourselves and not do anything–like visit the dog or the boyfriend–that would alienate your child. Grown children do not take kindly to a parent undermining a big and very personal decision. Even an innocent remark in passing–"Johnny was such a nice guy" "Cindy was such a good cook" "Tiger was the sweetest cat"–can be construed as a critique of their judgment. Even a year or two later.
PARENTING GROWN CHILDREN: The children may be grown but we still have our issues.
Money Matters: Helping the kid buy a car

03/03/2010
When Bud's stepson wanted to buy a car, Bud thought back to his own youth–a time when he was irresponsible and somewhat reckless. The son, in his 20s, needed a car to commute to a job. But he had no credit rating and couldn't get a car loan on his own.

Bud was willing to help–even though he saw a few signs of the irresponsible and reckless in the young man. So here's the deal he and the young man's mom came up with: They would help him–but not by co-signing a loan. They feared that if the son missed a payment it would reflect poorly on their credit record. Instead, they would take out a loan for the car in their own name and the son would make monthly payments directly to them–but with this string attached: If a payment was missed, the parents [owners of the car] would put it up for sale. "I wanted to make sure he shapes up," says Bud. "I don't want him squandering his money on beer and other things. I want to make sure he takes responsibility for the car."

How did it work out? Stay tuned. They just bought the car.

For more information on the perils and pitfalls of co-signing for a a car loan, here's an article on teaching adult children financial responsibilities that deals with the co-signing issue. Bottom line: If you co-signed
on the loan, you must make the payments if your child doesn't or suffer
the consequences. The bank lent the money on the strength of your
signature and ability to pay.

The article offers some tips on other ways to deal with the car issue:
- Lend him a second family car.
- Buy him a clunker. It can be a gift or he can pay you back.
- If you feel
  you must buy him a new car, keep it in your name.
  At least that way, if your kid quits making payments, you have the vehicle. By
  co-signing, you get all the responsibilities and none of the benefits.
Sounds like Bud is on the right track.