Parenting Grown Children: What Dr. Spock Forgot to Tell Us

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.

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.

Money Matters: When is it time for "the chat?"

During the last few years of my mother's life, a visit to her (she lived in another city, an airplane ride away) generally meant a peek at a little list she kept.  She wanted me to know what her assets were and where--a CD at this bank, a safe deposit key at another one.  I came to think of it as "The Chat."
It gave me the creeps.

Yet, I've started wondering whether paterfamilias and I ought to be having "the chat" with our offspring. We're believers in share-it-now, help-them-when-they-need-it. But we're also husbanding what we'll need for an independent and comfortable retirement.  We're not [presumably] close to closing in on the end of our life lines, but you never know what's coming down the pike.

So we're asking ourselves, when is the best time to give our grown children a rundown on the assets we'll be leaving behind for them? It's a touchy issue but we don't want them to have to scramble around to assemble our assets. Maybe the sooner we do it--when we're in the pink of health and robust in appetite for life--is the better time. Not so creepy. Just the facts.

I've just developed a lot more empathy for my mother and The Chat.

A Big Event: Who has the bragging rights?

Our friends the Ds are having a baby. Let me rephrase that: Their daughter is having a baby. Her second. Their fifth. Their daughter's husband called at midnight with the good news: healthy 8-lb boy. By 12:02, Mrs. D was at her computer sending out an email announcement to family and friends.So far, so good--except that her daughter hadn't called her brother. It was late, the brother had three small children under five years of age and sleep is a precious commodity. The call could wait till morning. The sister-in-law, however, was up at 6, logged onto her computer and got the news by email from her mother.-in-law. Her nose was quite out of joint. She and her husband wanted the joy of the personal announcement from the daughter and brother-in-law. They  were quite resentful about the email.

I think about that now because we are having a baby. That is, uber son  and his wife are having their third. She is almost a week late and we are in daily communication about when an inducement might take place. Soon, if that baby doesn't make it's way into the world by week's end. So I bring up the question about who will tell uber-son's sister. Does he mind if we do?
He is dumbfounded by the question. "We're a close family," he says. "Who cares who calls first?"

Presumably, it's the mass email that's less than a charm. A call is still personal. Email's OK for friends and far-flung family but not for the nuclear ties that bind. At least this is the note I've made to myself.