PenPenWrites

Unwashed hair. Unkempt clothes. A beer belly and then some. When our grown children don’t look their best–not even close to it–it’s upsetting. Embarrassing. Annoying. Is it a blow to the pride?–you want to show them off but here they are looking down at the heels. Is it plain old materialism?–they should be showcasing the best and most expensive.

I got an insight into what it could be from a friend who just went through a bout of the unkempts.
She had rented a seaside house for the summer and invited her son and his latest girlfriend to come visit–make it their vacation. But it was a strangely uncomfortable visit–they kept to themselves and were quite distant. And all of this was made worse by the son’s appearance. He was badly in need of a haircut and the clothes he wore were frayed–buttons missing, tee shirts ripped. For my friend, it became the focus of everything that was going wrong.  "He looked like a loser," she says, and she is close to tears when she says it.

And there’s where I think she put her finger on the issue: It’s deeply disturbing when our kids look lousy. The fear is, they may not be doing well. They may be failing in life. We don’t want this for them. We want life to go well for them.

In my friend’s case, her son had been eased out of a business he had started with friends. He had been out of work for several months and had just come from some unpromising job interviews. His appearance spoke volumes about how he felt about himself. And that’s why it was so depressing.  We are, as the old adage goes, only as happy as our unhappiest child.

Do we give till it hurts? Between my friends, their friends, friends of theirs and people who’ve clicked onto this blog, there’s a recurrent theme: How much, how often, for what and until when do we help our kids out financially.

It’s all very personal, of course. But here’s a little statistical oversight from a recent survey of some 400 parents of adult children:
90 %  of us continue to support our children after they turn 18.
83 % of us support our children through higher education.
11 % of us help them to buy their first home.

It’s a change from our generation. When we were young adults, the survey found, only 39 % of us who went on to college or beyond got help from their parents.

Why the change? Our kids need more help, survey researchers say. They’re faced with high overall living costs, high levels of student debt and low starting salaries. Besides, we’re better able to finance that support than were parents in the 1970s and 1980s.  Well, that’s what they say.

Are our grown children our friends? Can they be our best friends? Not likely–there is an emotional component that bars the way. If a friend–best or otherwise–loses a job, gains too much weight, becomes ill, we’d worry about them and talk to them directly. "Are you OK?" we might ask. "Is there anything I can do to help?"

But such questions and concerns come freighted with other meanings when they’re addressed to a grown child. That’s a point Deborah Tannen makes in ter book, "You’re Wearing That? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation." While Tannen addresses herself to mother-daughter issues, much of what she has to say is true for any parent-child discourse–at least it is in our family.

Here’s the point Tannen makes about the fundamental tension built into the conversation between parent and adult child, particularly when it comes ot advice or suggestions and the fine line between those and criticism:

"From the daughter’s point of view, the person you most want to think you’re perfect is the one most likely to see your faults–and tell you about them. From the mother’s point of view, your job has always been to help and protect your daughter, give her guidance based on your greater experience, and ensure that all goes as well as it can for her. But any advice or suggestion you offer implies criticism, because someone who is doing nothing wrong does not need suggestions or advice."

My dentist has two sons: One lives nearby; the other half way across the country in Michigan. Every Christmas, the sons and their families come to her house for the holidays. This year, when she was discussing the holidays with her Michigan son, he brought up the question of travel. He didn’t know what to do. He had a 3 year old and newborn. He didn’t want to fly the crowded skies with two little ones. He was planning to drive–he usually did–but the newborn hated the infant car seat–he cried and cried whenever he was in it. The son didn’t know how his family would get through the eight hour trip.

This is the dialogue that ensued [according to my dentist]. SHE: Son, don’t come.  HE: But I don’t want to disappoint you. SHE: We’ll come to you the day after Christmas . HE: Oh Mom, that would be so wonderful.

Truth be told, my dentist told me [what could I say with all that dental gear in my mouth?], she didn’t really want to make a big Christmas dinner for the family at her house. It’s a lot of work. She hinted as much to her son who lives nearby. This son has five children. "We see them all the time," she said. "I suggested we just stop by their house on Christmas day. But he was so disappointed. The kids look forward to Christmas at grandma’s house."

This time she did not say "dont’ come."

It’s November and all thoughts turn to summer vacation. Should we be making plans for a multi-family love-in with all offspring and theirs?

The first year we tried that, we bundled into one 4-bedroom condo: alpha daughter, her hub and a one year old; uber son, his wife and a 5-month and 2 year old. Luxury place. Protected lawns for running; swimming pool and tennis courts across the way. The vacation was, well, here’s what it was: Neither alpha’s family nor uber’s came with the attitude that pater familias and I would be babysitters in residence. Nor did they expect all their meals to magically appear at the table. Everyone pitched in. There was no dumping. What there was, tho, was a lot of need. From the moment I hauled myself out of bed in the morning, someone small needed something that wasn’t being provided: a quiet cuddle, a romp outside, a belly rub, an apple sliced, a clean sock found, a milk run made.

What with different bedtime rituals for babies and toddlers [plus the complication of different time zones–alpha daughter lived a coast away] and the plain old exhaustion of having three children under 2 in the house, not once during our week of togetherness were all the adults in our little family able to sit down to a dinner at the same time–which was part of the point of vacationing together: the chance to visit with eachother as adults.

Almost every afternoon, pater familias would raise his head from his book and call out to an ever-more frazzled me: what time do you want to play tennis? Or, when are we going for a bike ride?

What universe was he living in?

Actually, he was in the real one. This was, afterall, supposed to be our vacation, even though a week of rest is what I needed once this one was over. Yet, as we all packed up to drive off to various cities and airports, both alpha and uber asked the same thing: Can we do this again next year?

Reader, we did. it does not get easier.

When it comes to where and when we help our children financially, pater familias and I have taken a Marxist tack: To each according to their needs. It’s never overt. An offer of a helping hand here, a fiscal boost there. We’ve never totaled up who’s gotten what or whether the "books" are even. But a recent A to a Q in the Ethicist [NYTimes, 11/11, 2nd question] got me thinking about whether we should.

The writer of the Q earned a comfortable living; his sister, off doing good works in Central America, did not. The parents helped her out financially. Shouldn’t there be a reckoning, he asked, so that the aid she had already received be subtracted from her share of the final bequest? "The allocation of money in a will," Randy Cohen warned,"can seem symbolic of the deeper feelings parents have for their children." Some families are able to "discuss these matters openly," but that isn’t necessarily you, me or even possibly The Ethicist himself. Most of us, he suggested, prefer to avoid the discord and discomfort such discussions spew. (His final word on the subject: we parents should live it up and spend it all before we go!]

Well, maybe not. But I’m girding myself up to at least let the kids know what our "allow and bequeath" philosophy is–to the extent we have one.

So a friend asked, When does the shlepping stop? [See below]

It’s a broader question, of course: When do we stop doing all those little things for our kids that they ought to–could?–take care of themselves? It’s partly an instinct to make life easier for them–as they struggle to find a footing in the adult world. In her book, "Your Kids Are Grown," Francine Toder, psychologist at California State University when she wrote the book a dozen years ago, doesn’t answer the question so much as give it some perspective. "Each stage of life and decade between twenty and fifty," she writes, "is significant and provides unique challenges and events. The way a parent demonstrates support to a twenty-five-year-old daughter will be markedly different from the caring shown to a forty-five-year-old son."

A Vermont friend’s daughter has been to college in New York, to a first job in Boston, to a stint in Africa in the Peace Corp, to a university in Michigan to get her master’s degree, to an internship in Ecuador. Now she’s back home, 30 years old, and job hunting–here and abroad. For each move, my friends pack up the car, attach a trailer and move all the daughter’s stuff to the next place or to storage in their basement.  The daughter’s career has been wonderful and exciting–for the daughter as well as my friends. They’ve gone to visit her in Africa and Ecuador, in Boston and Ann Arbor. But they are getting tired of carrying beds and a well-worn couch up flights of stairs and in and out of a trailer.

When, my friend asks, does the shlepping stop?