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

Real Life: What to do when they lose their job

Just when you've reached a point in your own career where you're at peace--blind ambition turns into bound ambition--you've got your grown children's careers to worry about. Are they advancing, are they thriving at their work? Hey, even more basic than that, are they working? My friend G's son--he's married and the father of twin toddlers--just got laid off from his job-, along with 75 other people in the company. How comfortable a place is that to be in the economy we're living through now? It's hard on the son and on my friend. Not only do we, as parents of grown children, worry about our children's psyche in a loss like this but also about how they're going to pay the rent. But we also know--or fear--in the deepest recesses of our hearts that when the unemployment checks run out and the 3-year-olds need new shoes, we're going to tap the resources we have set aside for our retirement or fork over the cash we might otherwise put into that account. Or we'll squeeze our needs to meet theirs.
The question we face is this: Are we going to help them out, whether we can really afford it or not? And if we do, do we get to approve of the way they spend that money? From G's point of view, her son "lives large." He's got expensive tastes. If she has to help him out, does she put strings on the aide--or can she just quietly pay the rent and fill the fridge with basics. If she  sends a check, will she eat her heart out if her son uses it for a dinner out at an expensive restaurant?
Or should she just say no to helping out? Could you?

Keeping Up Appearances: When the grown kid looks lousy.

Unwashed hair. Unkempt clothes. A beer belly and then some. When our grown children don't look their best--not even close to it--it's upsetting. Embarrassing. Annoying. Is it a blow to the pride?--you want to show them off but here they are looking down at the heels. Is it plain old materialism?--they should be showcasing the best and most expensive.

I got an insight into what it could be from a friend who just went through a bout of the unkempts.
She had rented a seaside house for the summer and invited her son and his latest girlfriend to come visit--make it their vacation. But it was a strangely uncomfortable visit--they kept to themselves and were quite distant. And all of this was made worse by the son's appearance. He was badly in need of a haircut and the clothes he wore were frayed--buttons missing, tee shirts ripped. For my friend, it became the focus of everything that was going wrong.  "He looked like a loser," she says, and she is close to tears when she says it.

And there's where I think she put her finger on the issue: It's deeply disturbing when our kids look lousy. The fear is, they may not be doing well. They may be failing in life. We don't want this for them. We want life to go well for them.

In my friend's case, her son had been eased out of a business he had started with friends. He had been out of work for several months and had just come from some unpromising job interviews. His appearance spoke volumes about how he felt about himself. And that's why it was so depressing.  We are, as the old adage goes, only as happy as our unhappiest child.

Insights from Experts and Others: A Perspective on Helping Out

So a friend asked, When does the shlepping stop? [See below]

It's a broader question, of course: When do we stop doing all those little things for our kids that they ought to--could?--take care of themselves? It's partly an instinct to make life easier for them--as they struggle to find a footing in the adult world. In her book, "Your Kids Are Grown," Francine Toder, psychologist at California State University when she wrote the book a dozen years ago, doesn't answer the question so much as give it some perspective. "Each stage of life and decade between twenty and fifty," she writes, "is significant and provides unique challenges and events. The way a parent demonstrates support to a twenty-five-year-old daughter will be markedly different from the caring shown to a forty-five-year-old son."

Real Life: Looking for a Balanced Relationship

I started to make a list of tools to use to find the road to a healthy relationship with my grown children--Notes to Self. The first iteration ran to things like, keep your mouth shut, walk on eggshells, wait to be asked for advice. And then it struck me, those were rules for keeping the peace and not much more. They reminded me of a Dorothy Parker poem, The Lady’s Reward.

Parker starts off with some genteel advice to a woman who, presumably, hopes to land her man:

Lady, lady, never start
Conversation toward your heart;
Keep your pretty words serene;
Never murmur what you mean.

Dorothy goes along in that vein for several verses  until she unleashes her killer ending:

“And if that makes you happy, kid,
You'll be the first it ever did.”

(see full text here [http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/4970/)

Dorothy tapped into the vulnerability of one of the partners in a relationship, and it seems to me that a similar vulnerability lies at the core of the maturing relationship between us, the seasoned (and aging) parents, and our adult children who are in their prime and making their independent way in the world. So how do we have a lively intercourse with our children without intruding on their space?

I started rethinking what to put in Notes to Self [see left hand column], a list that will grow with time, experience and new insights. I'm not there yet, but here, with a bit of borrowing from Dorothy Parker, is where I hope I'm not.

Moms, Pops--always give
Your advice on how to live.
Be sure to ask if who they’re dating
Is the one that they’ll be mating.
Let them know how much the parent knows
About the cut of hair and clothes.
And you should surely question why
They want that bigger piece of pie.
Always, always be intent
On whether they can pay their rent.
Be sure to pierce through bluster-bluff
To suggest that they're not good enough.
If their behavior doesn’t fit the bill
Threaten to cut them out of your will.
And any giftie that you bring
Should always come with a little string.
It will always be a service
To bring up that which makes them nervous.
And if this brings closeness to your kid,
You’ll be the first it ever did.