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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.

    Daily Lives: What do they really want from you?

    Jen’s mother-in-law is visiting. She’s come from her home in Michigan to help with the Washington, D.C. baby–five months old and gurgling. Jen’s just come back to work–she has the office next to mine–and she needed the help: Her husband is away at a conference and she has some obligations this week that would make it hard for her to get home in time to pick up the baby by day-care “curfew.”
    She and her mother-in-law are getting along very well, Jen says. Except for one small thing: Should the baby stay home with grandma or go to day care? Her mother-in-law stayed home with the baby on Monday. On Tuesday, she suggested the baby go to day care. “You don’t want to get her out of her routine,” Jen’s mother-in-law said. 
    Here’s the conversation I had with Jen:
    Jen: I’d much rather my baby stay home with her grandmother. I don’t care about breaking the routine.



    Me: Maybe that’s your mother-in-law’s way of saying, “‘It’s too much for me.”


    Jen: I can understand that. And I’d be happy to take the baby to day care. I just want her to be honest with me.


    Me: That can be hard. She loves the baby. She wants to be helpful. But it can be hard staying home all day with the baby.


    Jen: Well, I asked her if she preferred I take the baby to day care. She hurt her ankle the other day and I told her I could understand that it might be hard on her leg to move around with the baby. I asked her to be honest with me. And she just said, “You shouldn’t break a baby’s routine.”


    I know what Jen is talking about. I also think I know what her mother-in-law is saying. You want to be helpful; you’ve come to your daughter or daughter-in-law’s house to help out. But it’s confining and lonely and, depending on the Grand’s age–tedious [newborns sleep the hours away] or exhausting [you’re on guard every moment]. I’ve used similar subterfuges to avoid saying, “It’s too confining and lonely. This isn’t my house. I have nothing to do here–you don’t want me taking over your kitchen or putting my imprint on your house. I need a break.”
    Jen’s point: It’s OK to say I don’t want to be home with the baby all day today. Just don’t pretend it’s otherwise, because that way the best interests of the baby may not be being served.


    That may be what she says. But is honesty the best policy? What would you do?


    I

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

    The Only Child Speaks Up: “Take your hands off the controls.”

    A recent story in a Canadian newspaper touched a lot of buttons for parents of adult children, and particularly of “only children.”  The story is the  adult child’s complaint about the tight controls parents exert, even as the child approaches marriage. The writer, an only child who is marrying an only child, says she noticed the stepping-over-boundaries during the wedding-plans phase but that the over-involvement is moving into the choice of where to live.
    Part of the answer to the writer’s plea likened the only child to a little and much-beloved emperor. But the bottom line was this: Whether it’s outwardly apparent or not, part of the parents’ dream is that “you
    will become an independent adult with all the tools to make life
    choices yourself. Unfortunately, parents are rarely willful enough to
    cut the cord themselves–you have to do it.” And it will hurt.
    If you see yourself in this, you might want to check your intrusion factor and pedal back.

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

    Re-Nesting: They can go home again

    We’ve got yet another study on grown children and money. This time it’s not about how we parents are helping them pay their bills or buy a house  (we can be so wonderfully generous, can’t we?), but about the pressures that force them home again and how we ought to deal with the boomerang kids.

    A recent story in the Washington Post looked at the three-year trend for moving back home: nearly half the about-to-be college grads plan to do so after they graduate. The survey, courtesy of MonsterTrak, also found an uptick in this year’s rate-of-return: where 22 percent of last year’s survey respondents said they planned to live at home for six months or so, a year later, 43 percent of them are still there. Chief among the reasons for staying put:debt–college loan and credit card.

    Moving back home for an extended time isn’t necessarily healthy for either the parents or the grown children. They lose their independence and we get to see our grown child’s habits up close and personal.

    The Post story listed some issues that should be discussed “before the bags are unpacked.” These start with rent [will it be levied], length of stay and personal financial information.  The experts quoted in the story say we parents have a right to that information in order to keep tabs on our adult child’s progress toward independence [and a move out of the house].  “If they don’t want to be accountable to you,”  the advice reads, “then they need to get up and out of your house.”

    Tough love. And a form of love that doesn’t sit too well with some of us. Having to have a contract with our children? Ick. Charging them rent? You’d have to be in desperate financial straits–unless you were putting it in a savings account for them so they’d have a nest egg ready when they’re ready to move onward and out.

    Any other thoughts on where you’d come down on dealing with a re-feathered nest?

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

    A New Baby: Offering help in one form and another

    There's a lot of excitement in our small family. We have a new baby–that is, Uber Son and his wife have brought forth their third. Babies are something we know something about. And we also know–experience cannot be denied–how hard it can be to juggle taking care of a newborn while also meeting the needs of two young children, a spouse, a home and mealtimes. We know how helpful it is to have another pair of hands–especially hands that can drive a car and take a child to piano lessons, get another to soccer practice, race to the supermarket for supplies, cook meals that can be frozen for use on another day–and bring the nursing mother a glass of water while that new baby is taking nourishment (oh the thirst when you're nursing).

    Paterfamilias and I just spent several days as extra pairs of hands. This is, of course, a basic service that comes with being parents of grown children.  But when we leave–we live a seven-hour drive to the south–both Paterfamilias and I key in on the same thing: How will they manage? I am distraught that I can't offer to spend another week or two to help. (It's something called a job.) What, after all, am I here for if not to help when help is needed. I look at my schedule and try to figure out when I can come back.

    Paterfamilias has another solution. He sends them a check, earmarked for paying for babysitters. Get them often, he writes in his note.

    It's practical. It's helpful. And it's also appreciated. And it's what we parents of grown children can do when we can't do the job ourselves.

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

    Money Matters: Setting limits when you make a loan

    When you lend your grown kids money–and it's a loan, not a gift–you may be risking a whole new set of pressures on your relationship. "What seems straightforward can become a straitjacket if families aren't
    careful," a recent news story reports. It asks the key questions:  How do you keep family harmony when money is given to one
    child and not others? What happens if a son or daughter can't — or
    won't — repay the loan?

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

    On the Road: Taking grown children on your vacation

    Vacationing with adult children is a whole new world–from getting to know them (and their habits) all over again to issues over who's paying for what and who's making the decisions. I'll be blogging about that all summer long, but meanwhile there's this story by a dad who's a professional traveler–he was escorting a large tour on a worldwide trip and brought his adult daughter along. He doesn't describe any pain in traveling with his now-grown daughter–just the wonder at her wonder at seeing the world's greatest sights.

    He starts off witih his most trenchant point:"One reality most families eventually deal with is
    that when your kids grow up, graduate from college and begin a life of
    their own, it is easy to grow apart, particularly if they live a
    distance away. They have their own friends,
    interests and want their independence. It is a rare opportunity to have
    them set aside a few weeks to just be with you."

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

    Who’s an Adult: Defining a point in time

    A college professor takes a crack at pinpointing when an adolescent becomes an adult. It's not as easy as he thinks.

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

    News Alert: How others (our grown children) see us

    This just in from MSNBC. It's not only a look at what we do that our grown children don't like, it asks for anecdotes–outrageous is what it requests.  The headline says it all: Grandparents Behaving Badly. Check it out.

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

    House and Hearth: The grown kids buy their first home

    When paterfamilias and I bought our house–the one we're still living in–our children were five and six years old. My mother flew up from her condo in Florida to help with the dirty work of moving in. She and I hand-transferred to the new house a fragile antique wall clock and a gold-framed mirror that used to be hers but were now mine. Paterfamilias and I were taking up the carpeting the former owner had nailed down all over the house. We had the wood floors stained and burnished before we moved in. What I remember most about those first few days in the new house is my mother carrying things back and forth between kitchen and dining room, rags wrapped around her bare feet. "This is a good way to keep the floors buffed," she told me as she shuffled around. "You should do this all the time."

    I'm reminded of this because Alpha Daughter just bought her first house. She closed on it on a Friday, and we flew up on Saturday to look it over. She and her husband were planning to strip out the old carpet and redo the floors before moving in. While we were poking around the front yard and inspecting its bushes, a neighbor came by–all big hellos and welcomes and wanting to know who was moving in. Then another neighbor appeared on the street. The first neighbor waved her over. "Lois," she said, "here's the new family that's moving in, and it comes with a Bubbe."

    That would be me. Bubbe is Yiddish for a granny. And there certainly was a very active five-year-old clambering up and down and around the front steps. But use of the term was a bit of a shock for me–I'd always thought of a Bubbe as a person who's sidelined to the back seat of the car–a person who's no longer part of the main events of family life. Part of what happens as our children get older, something my friend Marian, the psychiatrist, calls "flattening the heirarchy." Others use the term Bubbe in a more benign way–as the neighbor did, to connote that the parents of the new owners were around.

    This Bubbe, unfortunately, doesn't come with the house. Paterfamilias and I live a ten-hour drive away. I may never tie rags around my bare feet as my mother did. But like her, I hope to be there on moving day to help out with whatever needs doing. It's what we parents of grown children do, whether we think of ourselves as a Bubbe or not.

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

    Re-Nesting: It’s not just the 20-somethings who are moving back home

    Here's a shocker of a report: Grown children are moving back in with their parents. Not just the 20 somethings who are starting to make their way in the world, but the 40s and even 50s who have been out in the world and on their own. The slumping economy and credit crunch have a lot to do with it. You might say, everything to do with it.

    The trend has become notable in the past six months. The grown children who move back in are either single, single-again, laid off from a job, unable to make ends meet with the job they have or hoping a brief time at home at no- or low-cost will help them put together the wherewithal to buy a house or move up in the world. You can read a recent AP story here.

    One point the story makes is this: Such moves can be a drain on parental retirement resources, and financial advisers are saying that they have to show their clients–the parents–where to draw the financial line.

    It's a point an AARP story makes even when it's younger grown children who move back home. There's a need to plan for it–emotionally as well as fiscally.