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

Holidays with Grown Children: More on that outsider feeling

Christmas dinner at his daughter's house: Dick was surrounded by his wife, grandchildren, son-in-law, stepsons and their families. What could be warmer and nicer for the holidays? For those of us at a certain age, plenty.

Dick says that as everyone moved from the living room to the dining room for dinner, he sat down on the sofa and brooded. Am I still needed? he asked himself. As a business man (retired but doing volunteer work with a small business advisory group), Dick had been there to advise his son, son-in-law, daughter, and stepsons on their career moves--on getting started, on moving up the corporate or other ladders. Now that they were well on their way, they had reached a point where they knew more about where they were than he did. Never good at small talk, he felt left out of the general chit chat going back and forth between and among his grown children. "I didn't see where I fit in. I wouldn't say I felt irrelevant. I would say I felt almost irrelevant."

To put in perspective the feelings that flooded him that Christmas night, Dick says it has been harder to take than some of the physical diminishments he has experienced as he has gotten older--no longer having the same endurance or strength he had as a 60-year-old man who rode his bike for 50 miles or more on a Sunday outing. Illness and age have taken a toll (20 miles is the new comfort level).  But he says he feels that diminishment of strength less keenly than the loss of his role as the wise head of a many-branched family. As far as he is concerned, the grownchildren have outgrown their need for his advice. "I brought them up to be independent," he says. And now they are.

Who knew success would feel so empty?

Empty Nesting: Life and longing after the Thanksgiving weekend

It is Monday, the day after the Thanksgiving weekend and colleagues at work are chatting about the holiday--who went where, how long the left-overs lasted and, for those of us of a certain age, what it was like to have the grown kids together again under one roof. 

Betty's oldest son traveled home from his first job in another city; the middle son came home from college and the youngest was already in residence--he's still in high school. Here's her take: "It was so great to have everyone under one roof, everyone sleeping in their beds--the normal pattern of life. It's as though all of life we waited to come back to this. I felt like I finally got the right kilter back. I so lamented the break up on Sunday when two of my sons left. They'll probably be back in December for the holidays, but life shouldn't be waiting for these moments."

Kitty had her two children home for the holidays--her daughter home from college; her son back for the weekend from a job on the other coast. Her take: "It was wonderful having them both home--being our little family of four together again. The days are really limited in which we are going to be just the four of us. My son has a girlfriend. I really like her. She's lovely. I bet they'll get married one day. It's what you want for your children. But, from then on it will never be the four of us again."

I also had my family--Uber son, Alpha daughter, their spouses and children--under one roof. Not my roof this time. Uber son's. My take: It was touching to be together, to see my children and their spouses and my Grands reconnect--it has been over a year since we've had everyone together, not only under one roof but in one country.  It was also bittersweet. Late on Wednesday night, when Alpha daughter and family arrived, it was heartwarming to see my children reconnect, to see the good feelings flow and hear questions asked and answered about each other's lives. And so bittersweet for Paterfamilias and myself. We were bystanders--watching the action but not really of it. After all, we'd kept up with each family--made it our business to get to Berlin to visit Alpha daughter and kept up on Skype. And we'd traveled to visit Uber son and his family pretty regularly. So we sat and watched the third leg of that family triangle connect--son, daughter, daughter-in-law, son-in-law. Happy to see it, but no longer at the center of it.

It's what Kitty and Betty are sensing lies ahead: Once the family is no longer the snug little four or five of you, the kilter changes forever.

Hold that Thought: Why we temper the opinions and advice we give our grown children.

You may think you're tiptoeing around--"Walking on Eggshells," as Jane Isay, the author of a book by that name, puts it--but that may not be how we come across. My friend Pat, who describes herself as a person who says what she thinks upfront, says that after a day of babysitting--and reporting on events to her daughter--her daughter told her she shouldn't be so frank about what she's thinking. "What she doesn't know," Pat says, "is how I'm holding my tongue, not saying what I might otherwise say. I have to be very careful what I say around my grown children."

Don't we all. The great fear, I suggest to Pat, is that if we aren't careful with what we say, our grown children--children who now have adult lives and are heads of families of their own--will get so ticked off they won't speak to us again, or there will be a coldness to our relationship and that will break our hearts. She nods in agreement but she also asks, how much of a mute can you be?

In the introduction to her book, Isay recalls swapping notes with a friend about touchy incidents that they had both had with their grown children--how vulnerable they felt and how hard it was to communicate with them. Isay lays the problem to our being pioneering parents. "We're the first generation to have raised our children so permissively." Now, after cultivating the "creative" and encouraging them to express themselves, we're  stuck with the adult version of it. "Often their decisions [as adults] are not what we would have chosen--for ourselves or for them. We're at a loss to communicate our reservations, worries, and concerns, not because we can't put those feelings into words, but because the response we get often isn't pretty....the independence we worked to hard to instill in our children now feels to us like disinterest, and strong-minded youngsters sometimes grow into thoughtless adults."

Cold comfort, but all-in-the-same-boat comfort nonetheless.

 

Losing Control: We're the offstage players now

One of the trickiest parts of parenting adult children is recognizing that we are no longer the center of the family universe, that our grown children are now the sun and stars. We are revolving around them.

In her 2008 book Patriotic Grace, Peggy Noonan wrote about politics and our need to face common challenges together. But she might as well have been talking about parenting adult children when she wrote: "There is even a feeling, a faint sense sometimes that we have been relegated to the role of walk-on in someone else's drama, that as citizens we are crucial and yet somehow...extraneous."

Visiting Privileges: Talking to your grown children when the grandkids are around

A reader writes: "How do you have an adult conversation with your adult children when they are so focused on their children?" When the family is all together--out for a pizza dinner or sitting around in late afternoon--it is hard, he says, to get the conversation away from his grown children's constant monitoring of and chatting with the four- and six-year olds and onto affairs of the world or state. Or just anything that would constitute a grown-up conversation.

Is he being unrealistic? Is this the norm for how the generation of our grown children behaves. When I open the question to friends, most nod knowingly. Yes, their grown children are child-centric; yes, it's difficult to talk about anything that is not relevant to their offspring or of interest to said small children. What do they do about it? Grin and bear it. And wait for the pre-schoolers and kindergartners to grow into school-age children who can be induced to take an interest in the world outside the nursery  (if nursery is still an appropriate word).

"Children should be seen and not heard," is a point one friend made. He was harking back to what he thinks was his back-in-the-day day. But were our parents ready to ignore our presence to the extent that our grown children are not similarly willing? Is that progress? What would a Tiger Mother say? Her children would probably be giving us a large and loud dose of Mozart's Rondo a la Turk on the piano and there would be no room for conversation.

The reader's frustration may also hark back to the reality for our generation: We are no longer central to the family--our grown children are. We play by their rules. And we may not like them.

 

Communications: How it feels when we feel left out of our grown childrens' lives.

"Only connect." That's the famously underlying theme of E. M. Forster's Howards End. It also applies to our relationship with our grown children. We want to stay in touch--not just on a superficial level. We want to know what's happening in their lives, where we can help, where we can offer advice. And there are also those vicarious thrills. After all, our lives are slowing down while their's are picking up speed. And the place where those places interconnect can be uncomfortable. Forster is far from the only writer to look at the frailty of those connections.

Poet Cortney Davis captures the essence of a difficult parent-child moment when he writes of a parent and grown child sitting in an airport cafe:

How's work? I'll ask my son, trying to catch up.
He'll concentrate on his plate. I'll pick up the bill.

The Loneliness of the Empty Nest: A novelist describes that empty feeling

I turn to Olive Kitteredge again. Elizabeth Strout's novel told in a series of stories zeroes right in on the heart of what hurts parents of grown children most. Oh sure there are joys--watching our children mature, start careers, marry, raise children, lead interesting lives. But there is also a loneliness that can bear down on you at unexpected moments--especially those of us whose children don't live close by. Strout's story, "Starving," is ostensibly about a young girl suffering from anorexia, but the main character is Harmon, a man of a certain age who owns the local hardware store. There was about him, a character in Strout's story tells us, a certain sadness. As this woman friend observes, "His four sons had grown and scattered. They visited, appearing in town as great grown men, and she remembered when, in years past, you never saw Harmon alone. Always one or more of these small, then teenage, boys were with him, running around the hardware store on Saturdays, yelling across the parking lot, throwing a ball, calling out to their father to hurry."

On a walk by himself, Harmon recalls how one of his sons "had been a pack rat with a sentimental streak. Harmon walked along...the air like a cold washcloth on his face. Each of the sons had been his favorite child."

Harmon also notes that he had thought his wife "might have had a bad empty-nest time of it, that he'd have to watch out for her." But he finds "she seems calmer, full of a new energy."

That's what I love about this book. It captures in such fine phrasing what it is that we're experiencing. When our children grow up and leave home, it is a mixed blessing. There is renewed energy, yes! All of a sudden, we're Number One. But we also lose our admission ticket--to the soccer games, swim meets, piano recitals, opening school night. The house is no longer full of noise or excitement. Sundays at the soccer game may be an annoyance when we're in the midst of it, but now that our children are grown, we miss the interaction with them and being part of the community to which we belonged with them. Watching a grandchild's soccer game is not the same thing. We're just spectators.

Starving isn't just about anorexia. It's also about the loss when our children move away and the feeling we have in the aftermath.

When Your Grown Child Needs You: The loneliness of the long-term visitor

Have you read Olive Kitteredge? Do. It's all about us and our interior lives, emotions and fears--of growing older, of our children moving away, of our spouses dying or worse, losing their minds.

For those of us whose grown children live in another city far from us, there's one particular story in Elizabeth Strout's series of linked short stories (they all revolve around Olive, a big woman with a big persona) that hit home. Olive, who has a dysfunctional relationship with her only child--her son has moved away and avoids contact with her--is suddenly invited by her son to come visit him and his new wife and her children from former relationshsips. The story touches on the tumult of emotions we go through when we visit our children, especially on our own without our life's partner--the joy of being needed and embraced by them and their family; the awkwardness of fitting in, of being a fifth wheel, of being part of things but not; touched by the affection within the little family; dismayed when a discipline of a child is [from our point of view] mishandled; the disorientation when you witness a nasty spat between spouses. And the surprise--the shock really--of the overwhelming desire to go home, even after just a few days in residence. Or, as Olive tells herself, "After three days, I stink like fish."

Strout also captures the almost inexplicable need and desire to touch base with our home base--a spouse, a close friend. To do so is almost an affirmation that we haven't melted into the woodwork. I think it gets back to that notion that we are no longer center stage. We know it. Intellectually, we accept it. When we go visit en force--paterfamilias and the momma bear--we're an exciting event; the center of things. And that's why we tend to wrap up the fish in a day or so. Leave while you're still ahead and still the Star Turn. But when we stay for longer--usually because we're needed for emergency babysitting-type purposes--the reality of how much on the periphery we really are hits home. And this despite all the kind words and attempts at inclusion our children make. Of course, Olive didn't get that from her son. But I leave what happened to her to the story (within the larger story), "Security." Read it and feel sad--for Olive and for all the losses that come along with getting older and being the parent of an adult child whose focus is, rightfully, on his or her growing family.