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

Empty Nesting: The challenge young adults face living on their own.

Once they've graduated from college and gone off to seek their fortune, it can be disheartening to see them return home to live with mom and dad again. Psychologist Carl Pickhardt who writes about issues revolving around adolescents and post-adolescents--emerging adults is the latest term--has come up with eleven common challenges or reasons young adults might come back to the nest and what they learn from sticking it out and facing up to the challenge of independence.

You can read a fuller description here, but here's a brief rundown of the 11, with Pickhardt's take on the learning moment:

1. Loneliness or homesickness from living apart from family. Pickhardt writes: "Coping with this challenge can teach the capacity to live at a distance from family while still staying in touch, and to develop an independent social network of one's own."

2. The chaos of living with too many choices. Pickhardt's take: "Freedom isn't free because all choice is linked to consequence for which one has to take responsibility, and order must be established."

3. Finding and keeping a job. What your child learns from this, Pickhardt says, is that "there is no job security and it can take a lot of work to find work."

4. Flunking out of college--or coming close to it. The lesson: "It is easier to get into college than to complete it, and self-discipline to do the work is required to graduate."

5. Living with roommates who may have different life experiences or may be incompatible. The life lesson: "Skills in managing a domestic partnership can provide valuable preparation for a significant relationship later on."

6. Falling in love and losing out. "Love is challenging and risky, is not guaranteed to last forever, and a broken heart can be mended."

7. Living in a drug-filled world. Lesson learned is all about "moderating alcohol and other drugs meant to induce good feelings so that use does not cause bad decisions, at worst creating a reliance that is hard to break."

8. Being strapped for funds but trying to keep up with more affluent friends. Lesson learned: It takes work "to repay what is owed and the importance of living within one's means."

9. Stress from adjusting to the increased responsibilities that come with independence. "Coping with this challenge can teach how to moderate demand, physically maintain oneself, and keep the pressure down."

10. Negative feelings can overwhelm positive ones, leading to emotional disturbance. What do kids learn from this? "How to recover from intense unhappiness and develop strategies for maintaining a sense of emotional wellness."

11. Fear of the future and the ability to cope with the demands of adult responsibility. "Coping with this challenge can teach pride in having what it takes to brave the unknown and chart and chance one's course through life."

Parenting: The fine line in showing our grown children we love them

Alpha daughter has a bum knee. I overhear her father's long-distance phone conversation with her about the problem. Her doctor is advising surgery to fix the moving part that's irritating the other moving parts. Then to my surprise I hear Paterfamilias say, "I can fly up there to help out if you need surgery." It is certainly a nice gesture since both our daughter and her husband work full time and a 9-year-old child needs to be walked to and picked up from school and otherwise cared for. But then he goes further. "I can go to see the doctor with you. I can take notes and ask questions. It's a help to have someone else with you. I had your mother with me when I went to see my doctor about my hip replacement."

This is another very nice gesture--or does it cross the line and infantilize our daughter? Truth be told, it is helpful to have another pair of ears in the room but she is a grown woman with a caring husband, and it may be a stretch to have one's father fly up to the city where you live to go to a doctor's appointment with you--especially for a non-life-threatening ailment.

I cringe a little when I hear him make his offer. I worry that she will take this gesture the wrong way--see it as an infringement of her maturity and independence. Fortunately, she doesn't. She may not need her dad to come up to be with her, but she takes his comments for what they are: a gesture of his love and concern for her.

Sometimes our gestures or comments may cross the line. If we're lucky, our children understand why and accept the words graciously. Other times we're not so fortunate. There's a fine line between showing them our concern and treating them like the little children that once lived in our home. And an even finer line between which option they choose.

Money Matters: Are we still working for our grown children's sake?

Here's what Ann tells me: She is tired--her job is exhausting what with traveling once a month, having to stay downtown for business dinners every few weeks plus dealing with the pressures of office politics and the crush of getting work done. She thinks she's ready to give it up, but there's one reason she's not: she likes the ready money--the ability to, without giving it a second thought, pay for her grandtwins' day care, take the whole family (three grown children, their spouses and children) away for a weekend to celebrate her husband's birthday.

Here's what I've been thinking: I would like more time to spend on this blog and turn it into a book. It's a dream I've been nurturing for years. I should give up my editing contracts and get to work on my dream project. But, like Ann, I like the ready money and the ability to indulge my children and their families with a new dishwasher, a warm coat or a ski trip without thinking about my retirement budget.

So Ann and I tell ourselves and each other that we would quit but that we continue to work to indulge or help our grown children. It's kind of crazy: it's not as though they are needy. All of them are--knock on wood--self-sufficient, weathering this economic crisis and doing work we're proud of. Neither Ann nor I could count ourselves in the "1 percent" but we are comfortable. Both she and I--and our spouses--have planned well and put aside a respectable nest egg for our retirement years. We could probably afford the day care tuition or the other indulgences even if we weren't working.  And yet we continue to tell ourselves we need to stay on the job.

We may be in denial. It may be more that we're just not ready to leave the Mothership of our jobs and the security--not necessarily financial--that it provides. Our grown children--and grandchildren--may be the handy excuse.

 

 

 

Grandparent Rivalry: Getting past the competitive edge

For years, Amy and Ed, whose three children and five grandchildren live within six miles of them, were the only grandparents in town. Their daughter-in-laws' and son-in-law's parents lived far away in other cities and even in other countries. So Amy and Ed were the ones who did soccer practice pick-ups and piano-lesson chauffeuring; they tutored one grandson in math and were available to pick up and deliver another to day care when the parents were ill. Sometimes Amy, who works full time, would complain to friends that her weekends were so taken up with visits to her children and grandchildren that she no longer saw her friends.

Now there has been a change in the family dynamic. One set of grandparents, who are in the foreign service and spent years living abroad. have been posted stateside for a spell. They live within 15 minutes of their daughter and grandchildren. 

Both sets of grandparents are now available to help out. If there's a need for a babysitter--a grown child is sick and can't go to work--there are others to call, not just Amy and Ed.  After years of being the only ones, she and Ed feel they now have to wait for a place in line.

 "When you don't live near your children and you go to visit them, that's a time you've created to see your kids and grandkids and that they've carved out for you," she says to me, whose children and grandchildren live far away. "But it's different when they live nearby. There's almost constant pressure to be the one who helps out." With the arrival of new sets of grandparents, the pressure has changed to an uncomfortable sense of rivalry.

That sense is compounded by another competitive feeling. "Her parents are seen as adventurous. They've lived abroad. They are always doing stuff--climbing mountains, entertaining heads of state. We look so ordinary in comparison."

These are not easy feelings to deal with. Part of it is the shift in the family dynamic: action-oriented grandparents who had rarely been available are now on the scene and ready to take an active role in meeting their daughter's needs--for however long they are stationed in this country. "I tell myself it isn't a competition--it's a matter of staying even," Amy says. But more than that, it's a touchy adjustment.

 

Emerging Adults: Time to drop the control button. They're running their own lives now.

Once we've survived having adolescents in the house, we've got it made: we like to think parenting will be easier from here on out. And it will be. Sort of. But there is a continuum of adolescent rebellion that moves and morphs as our almost-grown kids move into the emerging adult years.

As psychologist Carl Pickhardt explains it, the young child "looks up to parents and their wonderful powers and idealizes who they are. The adolescent looks down on parents and their unfair authority and criticizes who they are. The young adult looks at the hit-and-miss child raising job parents have done and humanizes them as well-intended but imperfect people."

That means our emerging adults see us warts and all, and figure we've done something right and some things wrong. But the really key issue for us, as parents of these emerged adults, is a follow-on point Pickhardt makes: The ultimate goal of adolescent rebellion is to establish adult equity with the parent. "Thus by the end of adolescence," he writes, "there is mutual agreement that the young adult is just as much entitled to run his life as parents are to run theirs."

Some of us run into trouble accommodating ourselves to the "mutual agreement" or their sense of entitlement. If I read Pickhardt right, we tamper with their fledgling independence at our peril.

Money Matters: When grown children bite the hand that feeds them

Ever since the grand-twins were born, Pam and Dan have been very involved grandparents and parents. The boys--their daughter's children--live just 15 minutes away. In the first year or two, Pam and Dan were there to change diapers, feed babies and babysit so the parents could have a "date night" together every Sunday evening. Now that the boys are six, Pam and Dan pick them up from school once or twice a week and continue to babysit as well as host the family for Sunday and holiday dinners. They even put a swimming pool in their backyard to make summer visits more refreshing for the young family. They've always helped out a little financially--just to make things a little easier for a family that wasn't living high but also wasn't earning high, either.

Everything was in balance until this past March when the son-in-law lost his job. Now Pam and Dan, who was a physician until he retired, are supporting the young family. And that has thrown a lot of other balances out of kilter. Dan says that for now he can pay the mortgage and other basic bills for his daughter and her family. The son-in-law is no laggard: He is hard at work looking for a job and at other entrepreneurial opportunities. Pam and Dan would rather help them now than leave them money later.  But there is a question of how long they can continue --and what they would do if the financial burden started to impinge on their life style. So money is not the immediate problem.

And yet is it. The daughter has asked Pam to step back from grandmothering, to not be a regular presence. Pam isn't sure what else her daughter said--the conversation was so scary and upsetting. Would this mean the end of the grandparent's relationship with their grandsons? With their relationship to their grown child?

Dan's advice was to step back and let is pass--that the daughter's "demand" would go away of its own accord. Pam's worst fear--that she and Dan would be cut out of their daughter's and grandchildren's lives--does not seem to be happening. Things are almost unchanged. The Sunday dinners have continued. But Pam has an undertow of worry. She wonders what she did to cause the outburst. She's an ebullient person--was she too exuberant around the boys? Was she overwhelming?

More likely it isn't anything Pam did or said. Her daughter's change in financial circumstances has probably pushed her to assert independence and control where she can.

It is so hard for us to distance ourselves from hurtful words our children send our way. While others can see the less personalized side of the story, we are so tied into our grownchildren and our grandchildren that any threat to the strength of that relationship feels like a dagger to our heart--even when that isn't necessarily what our children meant to do or convey.

 

Life with 20-Somethings: The fruitless job search may lead to a "lost generation."

An east coast friend with a 23-year-old son who graduated from college this past spring writes:

"Last spring after graduation, my son got a job offer with an accounting firm in Dallas. He had to study for his CPA, so he was home for the summer. One evening, a group of his friends came over. They were sitting out on the deck drinking cokes and beer, and I knew they were looking at my son with envy. He was moving to Dallas, he was going to live in his own apartment, he just bought a car--and he had a job in his profession. That used to the standard for kids coming out of college--especially good colleges like these kids had just graduated from. But most of them were living at home with no job prospects. A few had found something but not in their career."

This has been the new reality for college grads, and this is what the data recently released by the Census Bureau underlies. While the economy has been devastating for those living in or near poverty, it has also been wrenching for recent college graduates. Richard Freeman, an economist at Harvard University, has suggested that the generation coming out of college since the 2008-2009 recession "will be scarred, and they will be called the `lost generation'--in that their careers would not be the same way if we had avoided this economic disaster."

They have not only been unable to find jobs now, it's not likely to get better soon--even as the employment figures pick up. Recent college grads who are now getting by with waitering, bartending and odd jobs will have to compete with new graduates for entry-level career positions. As Andrew Sum, an economist and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, put it, "We have a monster jobs problem, and young people are the biggest losers."

Here's hoping the latest downward trend on unemployment--8.3% in January--keeps going. It might make it possible for another friend's son to come home from his job in volatile South Sudan--a job he took not because he always wanted to go to Juba but because it was the only job he could get.

 

Visiting Privileges: Traveling abroad with a grown child and his family

Last February, I went to Berlin to visit Alpha daughter and her family who were living there for a year. Berlin was cold, gray and dreary, but the visit was a dazzlingly bright time. There was a special warmth in spending a week with my daughter and her family and feeling their "thank you" for making the trip to see them when they were so far from home.

Last week, I went to Amsterdam to spend time with Uber son and his family, who were visiting that city for five days. This was more complicated than a simple visit to a daughter living abroad. Uber son was there on business and the host company had agreed to bring his wife and three children along. My son would be free two of the four days. I volunteered to hook up with them in Amsterdam, in part to be a pair of helping hands on the two days my son had to work, but also to see the city [never been there], be energized by a mid-winter get-away and spend time with Uber son and family [they live in a U.S. city far from mine]. And, as in Berlin, Amsterdam was gray and winter-dreary in late January but I never felt the cold.  

On this trip, I was--for my Grands and daughter-in-law--the familiar face in a city where the language is different [we may have high school French or Spanish tucked into the recesses of our brains, but not Dutch], the food unfamiliar [though the Dutch penchant for pannekoeken--pancakes--was easy to adopt] and many of the amusements on an adult level [the infamous red light district, Dutch history musems, a 17th century synagogue]. But, when my son went off to his meetings, my daughter-in-law, my three Grands and I explored the zoo, its aquarium and butterfly room. The whole family went off to the Van Gogh Museum where we got audio guides and the older kids [8 and 10] loved hearing about the painter's life story and learning how his art went from the dark of the Potato Eaters to the brilliant golden hues of the Sunflower paintings. We took the canal boat tour and for dinner one night, everyone was game to try rijsttafel--I appointed myself Assistant Chief Taster to make sure the different Indonesian dishes my Grands put on their plates of rice weren't too spicy for them. And I babysat the one evening my son and daughter-in-law went to a business dinner. 

I loved seeing Amsterdam. Even in the winter, it is a walkable and easy to visit city. I got to do some things on my own and many things with my son's family. But most of all, there is a special warmth in being there for your grown child and his family--and to share in the wonder of their family life. You feel it, and so do they.

Parenting Grown Children: A list of how to do it--or how not to do it.

I came across this to-do (and not-to-do ) list for parenting grown children. It was compiled by a mother (Candelaria Silva) with two grown children in their 30s who are still, Silva reports, "talking to me--unbidden." I was particulaly taken with a birthday card she sent each child on that child's 30th birthday. It was made up of a hand-written list of 30 things she loved and admired about that child. There is something so heart warming about the idea--not just the sending of the list but the sitting down and ruminating over all the positive stuff you love about your child. 

As to the rest of her to-do list, she's not oblivious to the negative. She just doesn't dwell on it. And she obviously parents her grown children with a light touch. Here are some other highlights from her account of what she calls "positive methods I've found to parent adult children."

* Forward articles with pertinent info from newspapers, magazines, and other people’s blogs.
* Send I love you cards and notes regularly.
* Listen – intently as an ally. Just say “uh-huh” every now and then to let them know you’re listening, while taking notes for follow-up info to send.
* Don't hover. (No helicopter parenting here.)
* Don’t try to solve their problems.
* Don’t lecture, ever.
* Don’t remind them of their past experiences and choices.
* Encourage.
* Make the offer to offer advice, a response, a suggestion lightly, almost as an aside.
* Don't hold your breath waiting for them to ask for your advice.
* Count to 20 when prompted to let go with a torrent of worries and cautions.
* A thoughtful letter with suggestions sent by postal mail (that you don't ever check to see if they've received) works.
* Did I mention prayer, meditation, crossing fingers?