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

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.

 

Emerging Adults: If there is such a thing as affluenza, should we worry about it?

They are a two-car family living in an affluent neighborhood. With her son, a junior at college, home for the summer, a friend was sharing her car with him. Though he had been unable to get a regular job, he had cobbled together a coaching business with a friend: the two--both college-level athletes--were tutoring neighborhood kids in the fine art of hitting a baseball and kicking a soccer ball.

The timing part of sharing the car was going smoothly enough. What got my friend ticked off was getting into the car in the morning and finding the fuel gauge on empty. Not once. Several times. She insisted her son chip in for gas--not necessarily refill the tank to its upper limits but put some gas in when the tank neared empty. 

He didn't want to. He didn't have the money to do it, he said--even though he'd just gotten paid $20 for a coaching gig. She retaliated by setting limits on his use of the car unless he shares in the gas bill.

But the gas is not the real issue. She is worried that her son, surrounded by affluent friends, is picking up a sense of entitlement--something psychologist Gary Buffone, in his book "Choking on the Silver Spoon," describes as "expecting rewards without effort." And Buffone takes that sense seriously. He considers it one of five traits that indicate a serious case of affluenza or, in his words, "Silver Spoon Syndrome." He defines the latter as a set of symptoms "resulting from an inappropriate relationship with money or wealth."

Some of the other traits--a lack of motivation and drive, a low tolerance for frustration, failure to handle money responsibly and overvaluing material things--are hard to distinguish from adolescent ennui. The question for my friend is whether her son still has one foot planted in adolescent rebellion--he's spent two years away at college and has yet to exhibit the academic drive his parents would like to see--or whether he is growing up to be a young man with full blown a case of affluenza.

A reality check on use of the car fits in with one of Buffone's approaches to curing Silver Spoon Syndrome: give your child increasing responsibility. "The only way to break the back of entitlement is to lean on it--hard!" Buffone writes. "Parents must put relentless pressure on kids to make them earn what they get in life." 

Given the current price of gas, my friend is applying no small pressure.

 

Re-Nesting: College grad moves in but not on

The complaint comes not from the mother of the son who has returned to the nest. It comes from the sister. The brother, a recent college grad, has a low-paying, late-night-shift job and can't afford to rent his own place. So he's moved back home with mom. His girlfriend is the problem. She doesn't officially live with the brother but she's there all the time--and she sits in his room all day, stoned, the sister says. She wants to know what her mother can do about this inappropriate and unhealthy situation--a situation that bothers the mother. The sister/daughter writes Carolyn Hax, a Washington Post advice columnist,that her mother "is at a loss as to how to confront my brother and this girl without stomping on his nascent adulthood and causing a huge fight."

Ah, yes. The "trampling" on the "nascent adult." Just what so many of us face when college students, young adults or emerging adults move home while they come to terms with where their life is going--and all the anxieties that accompany that: for them and us. It's a problem. We don't want to step on their toes, but when they start stepping on ours or we are confronted with unhealthy choices they are making, we may have to do some trampling--nuanced and with some with some emotional subtlety--but nonetheless something that addresses the point.

Here's Hax suggestion: Mom needs to treat son like an adult, not as an emerging one. She could say something straightforward and non-emotional, like, "I've said nothing about your girlfriend's staying here, hoping you would recognize for yourself that it is totally inappropriate for her to sit in your room, full-time, stoned...Please steer her out of your room, and ideally to some help, or else I will have to get involved."

Hax's point--and it's one I find worth remembering--is this: Don't get sucked into an argument. That would send the message that the mother sees her son as fragile, and that would undermine her respectful intent.

To say nothing of trample down hard on his nascent adulthood.

Emerging Adulthood: Finding something illegal in your grown child's possession.

A friend's college-sophomore son came home for Spring break. Rule of the house: do your own laundry. But morning of day he was to leave and return to school, his room was piled high with dirty laundry. The mom was holding her ground on the rule when the dad asked his son to help him out at a soccer game he was coaching. The mom, liking the idea of father and son coaching together, decided she'd "help out" by doing her son's laundry. When she was dumping the first load from washer to dryer, she discovered she'd washed his wallet--it had been in the pocket of a dirty pair of pants. I'll let her words take the story from here:

"So i took everything out of the wallet to let things dry. And I found a fake ID [a driver's license form another state, giving his age as 21]. I was very upset about it. It's illegal to have such a thing and when our son was home at Christmas break, he'd gotten drunk with a friend and caused a commotion in our backyard that caused a neighbor to call the police. I didn't want to confront him with the fake ID so when everything was dry, I put it all back in the wallet --except the fake ID. I kept it.

"When he came home, I told him about washing the wallet by mistake. Later, as he was getting ready to leave for the airport, he went through it. And he asked, Wwhere's my ID?' I said, 'Your ID [his real license] is in your wallet.' Well, he got really angry and we were shouting at each other. I said the fake ID was illegal and that given the drinking problems last Christmas, this was no way to win back his parents trust. He said he didn't use it to buy liquor. He used it to get into concerts. The shouting went on. It got so bad I refused to drive him to the airport.

"He hasn't spoken to me since. I wrote him an email explaining why I did what I did and how I felt about fake IDs. He sent back a reply that was just short of saying f--- you."

What an issue! You find something illegal in your 20-year-old's possession, something that could, in the long run, bring him harm. But you found it going through his wallet--even though you didn't mean to be going through his personal items.

My friend says her friend with a son her son's age says, "all the kids have fake IDs. Forget about it." She doesn't buy that would-you-jump-off-the-cliff argument.

I asked a friend who has a 24-year-old son what he would have done. "It depends on what was going on in the household. Were the parents letting their son have parties in the home where his friends were allowed to drink? If so, they don't have much to stand on about using the fake ID to buy liquor. I would have taken the ID but talked to my son directly about it--about my concerns about under-age drinking. I wouldn't have waited for him to discover it was gone."

Paterfamilias, a lawyer when he's not a sounding-board dad, saw the situation differently. He was not primarily troubled by the illegal document but by the mom's actions. By his lights, she should not have looked in the wallet--should not have taken stuff out to dry. And if she did and found the fake ID, she should have tucked it back into the wallet. If there was an issue about drinking and his buying liquor with a fake ID, she should address that separately--not connect it to the fake ID. Going through his wallet, however inadvertent, and then using what she found there to confront her son, "breaks a bond of trust."

Another friend, whose youngest is 33, makes light of the "illegal" act. She had a fake ID when she was growing up in Brooklyn. All her friends did. LIke me, this friend had an intrusive mother. So she reacted as I did: "I would have tucked it back in and never said a word about it."

For some of us, a fake ID is not a big crime. But what if the item she found was worse--illegal drugs, say, or evidence of an interset in child pornography? Does that change the way a parent would react? It's a slippery slope between inadvertently finding damaging evidence and behaving like an intrusive snoop.

 

Helicopter parents: How not to talk to an 18-year-old

A few weeks ago I posted a blog on how to talk to an 8-year-old. It got a lot of response, and I learned a whole litany of questions to use to get a conversation going, questions that were not conversation stoppers. (Case in point:  "How's school?")

It's a little more complicated with an 18-year-old, but here too there are conversation blockers. Stephen Emerson, president of Haverford College and the father of a college-age student, sees these 'stoppers' as "Have you thought about" and "Here's how to do it," and, the most egregious of all, "how about if I call..." He calls these the sins or signs of helicopter parents.

In a recent op-ed piece, he had some sage thoughts for parents who tend to hover over their children, even as those children age out of living in the parental home and of being under their parents' advise-guide-control regime. But he also raises a basic question about hovering: what if helicoptering is, he asks, "our generation's greatest cultural sin, in that it could have lifelong effects on children taught to believe that they are incapable of autonomy?" Helicoptering or hovering--our inability or refusal to allow them to make their own way--could cause our children to develop a sense of inadequacy.

As a parent, he does not see himself growing distant from his daughter as she acquires independence "but that we are realigning. Before, when we were on a clear grown-up/child path, I probably--yes--hovered above. Now I find myself at  her side....as our journeys continue, we parents will see our position relative to our children shift yet again. We will be behind them, and they will be leading us."

And that's an issue many of us struggle with--letting go and letting them take the lead.

 

 

 

 

Vacationing Together: The Daddy Indulgence Curve

Back in the day when my children were moving through their college and post-grad years, a colleague at work used to tease me about the many ways Paterfamilias and I made life easier for our grown children--things we did for them that her parents had never done for her. She loved to refer to Paterfamilias as "daddy indulgence."

More recently, I was thinking about her phrase when I was called by a reporter from SmartMoney about a story she was writing about money issues revolving around vacations with grown children. It struck me that as long as we've had children--that is, since they've been babies--we've taken them on vacation with us. It wasn't until they were college age and older that the idea of their paying for all or a piece of that vacation crossed anyone's mind. Certainly, in those post-college years when our children had yet to get career jobs--or were in graduate school--there was no question about who the deep pockets were and who would pay for vacation. If they would deign to join us--skiing over the Christmas holidays or hiking in Vermont in the summer--we would foot the bill. Any significant others on the scene would join us free of charge--that is, they'd bunk in with our kids--but would pay for their own incidentals, such as ski tickets and beer. That was the high point on the daddy indulgence curve. If we didn't indulge, they couldn't afford to join us. And we preferred to have them along.

But when does the Daddy Indulgence curve start to dip down? And how do you get there? Certainly, by the time grown children are in their prime earning years, they should be paying their own way--and we should be making sure that any joint vacation plans are within their means. But there are several years between post-grad and prime.  Do you start by splitting the rent on a condo, having them pay their own airfare to wherever it is you're going, letting them buy groceries? And what if one grown child is more in a position to take on a fair share of the vacation costs but the other isn't? The Daddy Indulgence Curve does not arc smoothly or make a perfect bell. It can live on the rise for one child and his or her family but dip for the other. And how does that make each grown child feel--both the ones who still need a subsidy and those who can pay their own way.

Any one else out there with some experience on the Daddy Indulgence Curve? Can you share how you've handled the ups and downs?

Refilling the Nest: The unpleasantness of having grown sons home for the summer.

The first surprise is the beer. Carol and I usually have walk-and-talk lunches so asking our waitress for "the coldest beer you have" is not in the order of things. "I need to celebrate," she says by way of explanation. "Thank God they're gone."

"They" are two sons--young adults. The 20-year-old flew off to college the night before. The morning of our lunch, the 23-year-old packed up and left for a training session for his first non-summer job--as an AmeriCorps volunteer at an inner city school in a city about an hour from home. Having them in residence for the summer was exhausting--mostly because of the nagging it took to get them to do anything she wanted them to do. "Anything" covered everything from finding a summer job [neither succeeded], helping with household chores and projects, studying for graduate school exams, filling out forms for the next semester at school--you probably know the list. She found her boys to be "lazy" and spoiled--"They expect us to do everything for them without any strings attached."

Let's put her frustrating summer in perspective. The boys--young men--were 20 -somethings: "Emerging adults," according to this New York Times article by Robin Marantz Henig. "The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course," she writes, "as young people remain un­tethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life."

Here are the stats the author uses to back up her point: "Sociologists traditionally define the “transition to adulthood” as marked by five milestones: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child. In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had, by the time they reached 30, passed all five milestones. Among 30-year-olds in 2000, according to data from the United States Census Bureau, fewer than half of the women and one-third of the men had done so. A Canadian study reported that a typical 30-year-old in 2001 had completed the same number of milestones as a 25-year-old in the early ’70s"

And that leads to this conclusion: "To some, what we’re seeing is a transient epiphenomenon, the byproduct of cultural and economic forces. To others, the longer road to adulthood signifies something deep, durable and maybe better-suited to our neurological hard-wiring. What we’re seeing, they insist, is the dawning of a new life stage — a stage that all of us need to adjust to."

And when that adjustment takes place in our home--up close and personal all summer long--it leads to a cold beer when the kids--finally--go back to school or move out to test the waters of independent life.

Emerging Adulthood: Are you more indulgent of your 20-something than other parents?

Our post-college graduates are not as grown up as we think we were at that age. That was one of the messages from this New York Times story "What Is It About 20-Somethings? The signs of change: They are marrying later than we did. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s was 21 for women and 23 for men. By 2009, it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men. 

The article also pointed out that, as we wait for the mature-enough-to-marry stage, we give them more help--practical and advisory--than we got when we were their age. A survey by Karen Fingerman asked parents of 20-something children whether they provided their grown sons or daughters practical assistance (money or help with everyday tasks) in the previous month. In 2008, two out of three parents said they had. Twenty years ago, only one in three parents had. We're also more generous with advice, companionship and an attentive ear: 86 percent of today's parents reported they had provided advice and the like in previous month; less than half did so in 1988.

Then there's data gathered by the Network on Transitions to Adulthood. It finds that American parents--rich, poor and in-between-- give 10 percent of their income to their 18- to 21-year old children.

This is not meant to be a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses moment--for measuring what you do against what others do. But it's interesting to have a date-driven perspective on how we're treating our 20-somethings, compared to the way our parents treated us--on average.

Boomerangers Move Back In: The New Yorker cover says it all

A picture is worth a 1,000-word posting. Amidst the joy and celebration of graduation time, the May 24 New Yorker cover has a message for all whose grown children are heading home after getting their higher-ed degrees. There he stands, the returning son, hanging his PhD diploma on the wall of his childhood bedroom wall--right near the rock n' roll poster and sports trophy. Note in lower left corner, the suitcase and in lower right, the box of college paraphernalia. While the magazine usually comes up with an archly clever title for its cover art, this one leans more to the simple and direct: "Boomerang Graduation."

Well, for those going through it, the cover art makes it clear: You are not alone. So does the Shouts & Murmurs column, "Your New College Graduate: A Parents' Guide"  Here's an excerpt:

"How do I teach my college graduate independence?

Good question! Experts have differing opinions on the subject. Some suggest a “firm” approach: assigning housework, banning marijuana, requesting politeness, etc. Others suggest a “liberal” approach: cooking and cleaning for them, praising their “poems,” etc. Unfortunately, neither approach works."

Money Matters: Putting money aside to help the grown kids and their kids

This recession is hard on everyone--more so on those it affects directly: those with the lost job or the diminished 401k. But that hasn't stopped many of us from using what we've got to help those we love. A  study out of Britain may reflect what's happening here as well.

Here are the basics of the report:

13 percent of British grandparents are filling up savings accounts with money for their grandchildren to inherit:. A fifth of this group are saving upwards of £400 every year, which will turn into a £10,000 nest egg when the children turn 18. Additionally, a tenth of these over-50s are putting money into savings accounts to help their adult children through the recession.

The study is in sharp contrast to a report released earlier that revealed that six in 10 over-50s are concerned that their pensions and savings will be insufficient to look after them in retirement.

Meanwhile, back here in the U.S.A., a friend tells me what she's doing to assure that her 33-year-old daughter--unmarried and still struggling with job losses in this economy--will have savings in the bank on her far-in-the-future retirement day. She's has set up a Roth IRA in her daughter's name and is funding it for her--for now. More on this interesting idea in a future post.