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

Empty Nesting: How do we know when we're over the loss?

We all have our markers for recognizing that our children have grown up and left the nest--taken that giant step into independence. I don't mean when they leave for college, although that's usually the first most common step along the way. I mean a way of noting that great big void in our lives. In families where the high school kids were active on athletic teams, it may be the freeing up of Saturday mornings--or the emptiness of a day without a soccer or basketball or baseball game to attend. Or the stillness of the house when you turn the key in the lock and there's no music bouncing off the walls and singing through every inch of the house.

I just read a moving take on The Moment in a Michelle Slatalla column in the New York Times. It came when she went up to her daughter's room to clean it up--this, after her daughter returned to college after winter break of her sophomore year. "I felt a wave of nostalgia wash over me," she writes. "Everybody makes a fuss when you send a child off to college for the first time. You're expected to feel pangs when you separate from a freshman." But, she goes on to write, "waving goodbye at the end of sophomore winter break turns out to be much harder." It is, she explains, the realization that as time goes by her daughter would start to "come home for shorter periods and call home less often, and that the center of gravity of her life has shifted away."

Money Matters: Hard Hit and Hating It

Many of us who have grown children have been hit hard financially by the economic crisis. Money we thought we'd have to live comfortably on and still help out our adult children is gone. Is that changing our relationship with our adult children? Some of us may be worried about becoming dependent on them, or that they'll be dependent on us and we won't have the wherewithal to help.Or we jsut feel so bad about what's happening that we take it out on the grown kids, as one financial adviser noted recently.

Friends who used their second homes as vacation retreats for their children are having to sell those homes. May not sound like the worst crisis in the world, but it means the loss of a family gathering place and a familiar setting--one that may date back to their children's childhood--for their grandchildren to spend idle weeks of summer.

Friends who had planned to help their children buy a home are finding they don't have the cash to help out with the down payment. Or to pay off college loads. Again, it may not sound like a terrible crisis, but the loss of power--of still being the Big Daddy or Momma--are palpable. So many of us want to make life easier for our children, and this fiscal crisis is playing havoc with that plan. Maybe this is healthy--maybe some of us coddled our children. But a lot of us didn't. We just took great enjoyment from using the money we'd earned and saved over a lifetime to make our children's lives easier. And for many of us, that ability is gone.

How are you coping with fiscal losses? Is it affecting your relationship with your grown children? Or your own feelings about yourself vis a vis those children?

Money Matters: Having less for the Little Ones (who are now big)

I don't mean to be repetitious. It's just that the reality is all around us and everyone is feeling it: $3 trillion has seeped out and disappeared fromour 401ks and other savings or retirement accounts. For many of us, that loss wipes out money we had hoped would cover a downpayment for our kids' first house, their college or graduate school tuition, or tide-over money while they made their way through grad school or their first (low-paying) job. And, of course, our kids are scrambling to stay on their feet, knowing the safety net they had assumed was there is, well, not.

Not a good feeling. Here's a little statistical meat to back that up: 

Stat one: Nearly a decade ago, the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy estimated that the U.S. was on the verge of the largest inter-generational wealth transfer in history—$41 trillion, with about half if that dough being passed on while the benefactors were still alive.

Stat two: A recent Boston College study estimates that as many as 30 percent of older households are less secure in retirement as a result of the decline in housing values.

The disappearance of a sizable chunk of our generation’s money and security has left many of us resetting priorities--particularly when it comes to spending. Vacations are the first thing that seems to get downgraded. One friend reports: We've canceled the three-week trip to India; we're renting a beach house and inviting the grown kids to join us. We hope they'll suggest chipping in. We'll take them up on it if they do. 

What sort of trade-offs or steps are you taking to adjust to recent losses and keep what's left of your nest egg in tact? Have you changed your retirement plans? Travel plans? Spending patterns? Has it affected your ability to help your kids?

Not happy thoughts. But sharing ideas can help.

Money Matters: Helping the kids till it hurts

For many of us, gone are the days when we could open our wallets with ease and help our grown children when they were in need--paying off a college loan, helping with the down payment on a house or even defraying everyday living expenses. Now our 401ks are half of what they were, the value of our homes has shrunk. Our personal sense of wealth is melting away. And yet the kids still have needs--needs we want to fill. Not just to ease their way but because right now it may be tougher for them at the beginning of their careers than it is for us at the tail end of ours.

It appears to be the same rough go for the Brits. A recent study by Scottish Widows (must find the origins of that name!) found that adult children were sapping their parents and grandparents of large amounts of money, forcing them to cut back on daily spending and to take on more debt.

The research showed that one in six of those parents who have given money to their children have increased their own levels of debt, while one in ten have had to put a stop to any kind of savings of their own in order to fund their children. Moreover, nearly a quarter of adult children or grandchildren are using or have used parental handouts to fund their day-to-day living expenses or spending money. Over a third needed the money to pay off debt, and 30 per cent needed the cash for a house purchase.

Here's one other point from the research: Of the 6,000 adults surveyed, almost half of those that have already given money to their children expect to dig deeper and give them more in future.

Empty Nesting: We're in the majority now

We are not just our parents all over again. We rule. The majority of families in the U.S. today do not have young children at home, according to a the most recent population survey by the U.S. Census Bureau. Compare that with our parents' generation: In the early 1960s, almost 60 percent of families had children younger than 18 living at home; that percentage has now dropped to 46 percent. Go back even further in time: In 1880, 75 percent of couples in the U.S. had children at home.

The implications for us--we parents of grown children--are enormous. In a recent column, Abigail Trafford looked at the impact of those population stats on marriage. "After the traditional tasks of child-rearing are completed," she writes, "the main agenda for gray marriage is mutual satisfaction. Couples who have been together for decades have usually learned how to resolve conflicts. But that is not enough. What predicts happiness for older couples is the presence of positive elements: joy, playfulness, humor, adventure, caring, empathy and common interests."

  I would add to that our relationship with our children who are no longer young or being reared. We still have a relationship with them that can affect, as it did when they lived at home, our marriage [when our kids went off to college, i was struck by how many fewer arguments paterfamilias and I had] and our sense of well-being. There's an old aphorism: "You're only as happy as your unhappiest child." And that still holds true, even when they've moved out and on with their lives. Given the longevity stats that are in our favor, we will probably get to "enjoy" those grown children longer than our parents got to "enjoy" us.

Money Matters: Generic guidelines for those fiscal apron strings

The 401k is melting; retirement seems further away than ever. And then there are the needs of our not-quite-independent adult children. They've got their college debts, the difficulty in finding a job in this economy. They may be threatening to move back home--it's an affordability measure. And, of course, all those hurts hurt us. We want to help. We want to ease the way. Here's advice from a neutral party. It's aimed at parents of young adult children:

5. Don't coddle them. It's typical for each generation to want to make life easier for their offspring. Gifts of money, time, and assistance should be reserved for times of need or special achievement; otherwise, young adults fail to develop self-reliance skills that will help them navigate life's choppy waters. Then, when parental support dries up, they become frustrated failures. Give help when it's critical but don't overdo it.