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

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.

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.

 

The Re-Filled Nest: Improvements for our college grads in search of a job

The economy has wreaked havoc on those of us with recent college grads. One friend, whose son was fortuante enough to get a job in his professional field (accounting), reports that he is the only one among his set of four best friends to do so. And that's not untypical of the job situation for the past year.

Many of those children--emerging adults, frustrated at not being able to convert their college degrees into good-paying jobs--are living home. That's creating a whole nother set of tensions. For those parents looking for a break in that bleak picture--we love our kids but we don't necessarily love having them live at home anymore--there's some hopeful news on the job front. Not necessarily the dip down to 8.5 per cent  unemployment (though that's welcome), but the signs that show where the job growth is.

In a December jobs report, workers with bachelor’s degrees or other post-secondary educations were the ones who hit the sweet spot: about 1.1 million bachelor’s degree recipients found work. Meanwhile, the number of workers with high school diplomas or less who were employed fell by half a million. More surprisingly, the least-skilled workers also added jobs over the last year. The number of high school dropouts who had jobs rose by 126,000.

According to Catherine Rampell, who runs the online Economix site for the New York Times, the numbers support MIT economist David Autor‘s argument that the work force is hollowing out, producing very low-skill service jobs that generally cannot be done by machines or workers abroad (like food services) and higher-skilled jobs that require greater schooling (like medical jobs).

Emerging Adults: What are those 20-somethings thinking?

Grown children in their 20s are a parenting challenge--not as challenging as adolescents. But still, they can be prickly and difficult. We think they're adults and they are, but they are stil going through stages of emotional growth and change. It may be hard for us to remember what was running around in our heads when we were their age.

I was reminded of this in a post on Nathan Bradford's blog. Bradford is a former book agent whose blog is about getting your book written and published (if you're in that category, check out his blog: it's excellent.] He's also a young man who just reached his 30s and in one of his posts, he wrote about his reaction to two movies--when he saw them in his early 20s and then when he saw them when he turned was 30. And that's where he layed it all out--the change in the workings of the maturing mind.

The movies in question were "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset." Here's his description of those movies: "In the first, "Before Sunrise," ... two early-twenty-somethings [Jesse) and Celine] meet on the train from Budapest to Vienna. Jesse has one night before his plane leaves back for America and he convinces Celine to spend the night with him wandering around Vienna, where they talk about life, love, dreams, everything. "Before Sunset,"...picks up after [an] intervening nine years. Now in their thirties, Jesse and Celine walk around Paris before Jesse has to fly back to the US, and this time they're dealing with the weight of real adulthood and exude a palpable sense of nostalgia and regret."

In the first movie, Bradford writes that the two characters capture the magical feeling of the rush of falling in love and of being with someone who excites you. The second is about testing the strength of that brief connection.

And here are Bradford's insights into his own maturing:

"The first time I watched these movies... I was in my early twenties and still in the exciting early days of a relationship. Of the two movies I naturally identified most strongly with "Before Sunrise."...I was roughly the same age as the characters, the world seemed full of endless possibilities, and my future was so excitingly uncertain.

At the time, "Before Sunset" struck me as poignant but also incredibly, almost needlessly sad. The characters were stressed and intense and (SPOILER) stuck in loveless relationships and thinking about what might have been if things had just unfolded differently on the platform six months after they first met.

But now, at age 31, I re-watched the movies at a vastly different place in my life and it was like watching completely different movies.

Now "Before Sunrise" was an exercise in nostalgia, remembering how intense conversations felt at that age, the sense of adventure, and the brave early twenties naivety of thinking life will be completely easy because we are the special ones, at long last, that truly get how the world really works.

And now it's "Before Sunset" that I identify with the most, not least of which because it turns out, like Jesse, that this year I was having a novel come out at the same time that I was starting a new life with some of the same weighty thoughts of what might have been. ...

That intense melancholy of "Before Sunset" that I once found almost maudlin is something I now see all around me in my peers. It's the quarter-life crisis of reaching a certain point in your life just by doing the right thing and hitting the right benchmarks of college, first job, dating, marriage, before inevitably being beset by forces outside of your control. There's a sense of wandering and uncertainty that sets in when you begin to face the weight of major decisions and choosing the right relationship (or not) or sensing you're in the wrong career.

Your early twenties are the time when you think you have everything figured out; at some point before the end of that decade you realize that you don't."

What Bradford has to say is, for me, an important guidepost for parenting grown children--in that it reminds me of what it is like to be that age, and how we, as parents, would do well to factor that into the way we deal with our grown and still-growing children.

Emerging Adults: Will they ever grow up? Patience is required. Sainthood, too.

I hear the complaints from friends with college-age kids and recent college grads in the house. They don't have the drive their father or mother had at their age, they aren't taking life seriously, they're lazy, willful, don't help around the house. Why it's just like having a teenager living in the house again. Only physically larger. And more worldly.

My children chose to go through this phase of "growing up" in apartments and group-of-friends houses far from the family manse. But as this wearisome economy rolls on and more and more of our children live at home--out of necessity--more of us are making our unhappy way through this stage. And it is a stage. So assures psychologist Carl Pickhardt in a newsletter he writes about the challenges of parenting young adults.

He call this stage trial independence (18 to 23-year olds). It's a time when, he writes, "the curve of parental impatience tends to rise." Parents are "really ready for their older son or daughter to get their life together, set an occupational or educational goal, show clear progress in that direction, and act responsibly grown up." When that doesn't happen--when there is what he calls "floundering and failing to make responsible headway," we may fear that our child will never grown into being a functioning adult.

Pickhardt suggests we relax and tell ourselves to be patient.  The parental job, he suggests, is to hold their emerging adult "to responsible account, affirm positive signs of growth being made, express respect for what the young person is learning from hard experience, and be patient as their son or daughter struggles to find an independent way."

So much easier said than done. If only we could tack those thoughts to our brains when we come upon our grown child sleeping through Monday morning and forgetting to check out that job lead.

Parenting Tensions: They may be grown ups but they can still be very irritating.

Whether they are emerging adults in their 20s, settling down in their 30s or marching into middle age of their 40s and 50s, they are still our children, and that makes them a source of great joy and of dreadful anxiety. In a 2009 study of the relationships between adult children and their parents, Kira Birditt, the lead author of the University of Michigan study, notes that the parent-child is one of the longest lasting social ties human beings establish. "This tie is often highly positive and supportive," she notes, "but it also commonly includes feelings of irritation, tension and ambivalence."

In short, the study, which was published in Psychology and Aging, found that the majority of parents and adult children experience some tension and aggravation with one another. Those tensions and aggravations, however, are harder on us than they are on them, particularly when it comes to issues regarding our children's lifestyle or behavior (finances, housekeeping). According to Birditt, we may be more upset by those tensions because we have more invested in the relationship. We're more concerned than they are about seeing them launched into successful adulthood.

Other points from the report:
--Daughters were more of a sense of tension than sons, not because sons are that much easier to get along with. Rather, daughters generally have closer relationships with parents that involve more contact and that may provide more opportunities for tensions.

--When it comes too unsolicited advice, moms are more the problem than dads. "It may be that children feel their mothers make more demands for closeness," Birditt said, "or that they are generally more intrusive than fathers."

--While the years when our grown children are in their 20s are filled with a lot of unresolved issues--what careers will they have, who will they chose as a life's partner--Birditt found it surprising that parental perceptions of tension increased with the adult children's age. "Middle-aged children," she said, "may be less invested in the parent-child tie than young adult children because they're more likely to have formed their own families and experience multiple role demands."

In related, unpublished research, Birditt analyzed the way some of us cope with the relationship tensions. While most of try to accept and understand our grown child's point of view, the more intense the tension level, the less likely we or our children are to use constructive strategies and the more likely we are to yell and argue or avoid the situation entirely. 

But here's the kicker. Though many of us have learned to keep our mouth shut when we don't approve of something our adult children are doing--the way they dress or their choice of friends--Birditt suggests there are limits to such a strategy. "The old adage, 'If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all,' isn't good advice for parents and adult children," she said. "Avoidance doesn't work as a strategy for dealing with conflicts. It appears to make things worse."

Go figure. Clomping around on the eggshells may be the healthier way to behave.

 

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Re-Nesting: Do we put out the welcome mat or shudder at their return?

My next door neighbor has three grown children, all of them in their 20s: a recent college grad, a part-time grad student/part time legal aide and one who is starting his own business. They all live at home with their parents.

These neighbors are from Uruguay, and they see nothing unusual in having their grown children live with them. The parents even re-did their children's bedrooms to make them more inviting for an adult to live in--new furnishings, fresh paint job, upgraded bathroom.

Not many of us feel this way when our grown children come back for re-nesting. Their appearance raises questions about their ability to be independent, to launch themselves into successful careers and relationships. Their return smacks somehow of failure--and a failure that reflects on us. (And they are returning in greater numbers during the Great Recession and Great Contraction. According to the most recent Census figures, adults between the ages of 25 and 34 are living in multigenerational households at a rate not seen since 1950.)

Economic pressures aside, I'm reminded that there is a cultural divide--of welcoming grown children back home as the norm versus readmitting them with a sigh of concern--by a recent piece in the New York Times.Why Rent When You Can Nest?

The author talks about a 28-year-old friend with a good job who is living at home with his parents to save money to buy into a business. He's Russian and it feels like the smart and culturally comfortable thing to do. The author, on the other hand, says he celebrated getting his first job by "promptly signing away half my take-home pay" on rent for an apartment. He grew up, he says, "with an unspoken assumption, just as my parents had, that I would live on my own after college."

"I suspect," the writer goes on to say, "that many young American adults who have to move in with their parents feel crummy about it. Most Russian immigrants I know do not. They don’t see it as a sign of failure but as a means to achieve their financial goals more quickly."

As to the parents, The Russian parents see their son's homecoming as the natural, expected one. American parents, on the other hand, "struggle to hide their disappointment when they tell their friends that their adult children have — oh dreaded words — 'moved back in.'”

 

Life with 20-Somethings: Is this the happy ending to a job search?

My friend Carol and I are starting out on a walk-and-talk when she blurts out this admission: "I'm a nervous wreck." Carol is normally a no-nonsense, assertive person; her remark is out of keeping with her hard-driving persona. The reason for the agita? Her 23-year-old son--he who graduated from a top college and has just finished up a low-paying internship with a nonprofit; he who she has been prodding and pushing to get off his duff and find a job--has finally been offered one and accepted it. He started working a week ago--when Carol and her husband took their son to the airport to catch a flight to the city where he'll be employed. A flight to Juba. Yes. Juba, the capital of southern Sudan--the country that broke away from northern Sudan, won its independence and is just beginning to set up a government and infrastructure. Juba does not have much of a Western presence--although that is growing. Carol's son is part of the opening wedge of that growth.

I think back to my own anxieties when my daughter went to live in Berlin for a year. But Berlin is an international capital and my daughter was attached to a major education institution. My worries were about missing her and her family--not about whether she would be safe or whether Americans would be welcome. Carol's son is attached to an NGO (Non Government Organization) that is in Juba on its first mission there.

I try to ease her worries. I talk about what an adventure this is for her son, what a challenge. If he doesn't do something like this at 23, when will he? Certainly not when he's started a family and has a mortgage and children to support. I tell her about the recent NYTimes article "What if the Secret to Success is Failure," which posits that happy, successful people tend to be ones who face challenges--even if they fail at them. I also remind her that her son is smart, that he lived in an Arab-speaking country for a semester, has studied Arabic and is an athlete who's used to team play--all of which will help keep him safe.

It is cold comfort. There's only so much positive you can say to the parent of a grown child who has put himself in a potentially dangerous situation--not out of some sense of adventure but to get a job. The latter was made particularly clear the night before he left. A neighbor who has a son the same age as Carol's, stopped by to wish him well and tell him how much she admired what he was doing. "My son is hanging around here, doing the boring city thing," she told him. His response: "I wish I were doing the boring city thing, but this is the only job I was offered."

No wonder Carol is a nervous wreck. It's not like her son is going off to pursue a dream he's had all his life--to walk across India or climb the Chilean Andes. He's no happier about this "great adventure" than his parents are. That's the reality of the Great Recession, and its follow-up, the Great Contraction. Jobs are hard to find. Our grown children are shipping out to the far reaches of the Third World to make a living--even though they would really, really rather not go there.

 

Emerging Adults: The four stages of job-search anguish for our college grads.

A friend, whose 23-year-old son has been looking for a job for six months now, has been through several stages of search anguish. He's a graduate of a top college where he got good grades. Last year, a long search brought forth a one-year, low-paying internship with a nonprofit group. That ended in August. He is likely filled with anxieties about his future--none of which he is sharing with his parents. The dad has urged his son to go to graduate school--while the dad is still employed and can pay for it. It would get him out of a miserable job market and garner further qualifications for a good-paying job.  But the son doesn't know what kind of graduate school he's interested in. The mom wants to see him employed. And she is going through her own stages of acceptance of the difficulties her son's generation is facing in finding a job.

Stage One: mild annoyance with her son: "How long does he think we're going to support him? When I was his age, I couldn't lean on my parents. I had to get a job or starve."

Stage Two: anger at her son: "He's lazy. He isn't taken this seriously."

Stage Three: fear of her son being resigned to joblessness: "I think he's thrown in the towel. He doesn't seem to be trying. He won't discuss it with us. He won't even tell me if he followed a job lead I gave him--and I don't think he has."

Stage Four: the unthinkable: On a family vacation with her son, her husband's three brothers and their children, my friend sat and listened while an uncle asked her son what was happening on the job front. First surprise: he answered! Second surprise: he'd gotten a job offer. It was for a job with an NGO [non government organization] in an African country. The country, however, was a desperately poor one riven by political instability. He has not decided whether to take the job or not. My friend finds the thought of him going to such a dangerous place frightening. So the stage she is now in is this: "I wish I had $100,000 I could pay someone to hire my son."

Now that is something that, when she was her son's age, she never could or would have thought about. But isn't that what some of us come down to--if only we could find someone willing to give our grown child a chance, we'd pay them a bonus to do it.

 

Emerging Adults: Their frustration at not having a good job vs. our understanding it.

I am having lunch with a friend when I ask about her son, one year out of college: Did he get the job he was applying for?

As far as she knew, the answer was no. Or possibly, not yet. Her son, she says, is incommunicado on the subject of job hunting. She's tried to get around a direct assault by asking round-about questions, such as, what search engines are you using for your job search? He saw that one for what it was and cut her off.

"When," my friend wants to know "is it going to be okay to ask these questions? How long are we going to have to support him?" 

It's not as though the lack of employment and the need to live at home is easy on her son--on any grown child. It's a trip back to adolescence. In a recent posting by Carl Pickhardt, Ph.D, he talked about a young man who, almost a year after graduating from college, was stuck in an entry level job with no future opportunity in sight. The young man--someone's grown child--was feeling anxious, disappointed, and angry. Pickhardt's suggestions to his patient may offer some insights for those of us with unemployed grown children struggling through the detritus of the Great Recession:

Pickhardt starts off with this observation: "When the reality we expect fits the reality we encounter, our emotional response is usually less upsetting than when the reality we expect does not fit the reality we encounter."

His patient has created three kinds of positive expectations about the reality he would face after college graduation. He has PREDICTIONS about what will happen after graduating. (He will find a job.) He has AMBITIONS about what he wants to have happen after graduating. (He wants an interesting job that will advance him into a satisfying career.) He has CONDITIONS about what should happen after graduating. (He should be paid a comfortable income at whatever job he finds.)

None of the three kinds of expectations came to pass. Pickhardt lays out the result:

"Because the prediction of easy employment is violated by reality, and after seven months of looking and he has yet to land a job, he feels surprised and anxious. Because the ambition for finding work he really wanted to do is violated by at last taking a routine assembly line job, he feels disappointed and let down. Because the condition of making a comfortable living right away is violated by making entry level wages, he feels betrayed and angry.

"Now this young man has two sets of problems, not one. He has the problem of choosing how to proceed with his life, and he has the emotional burden of bearing unrealistic expectations. For the sake of his emotional well being, he needed to give up his unrealistic expectations and create a realistic set instead. This is what he came up with.

"Just out of college I need to expect it will be hard to find a job, any job, right away. So I really need to look hard. Right away, I probably won't get a job like the one I really want. So I need to take what I can get and go from there. And financially, whatever job I get, I should have to struggle to get by on however little I am able to make."

Pickhardt's bottom line: "Accept what you have and you free up some energy that was spent protesting against it. ...Choice of expectations in life psychologically matters because these mental sets can have such powerful emotional consequences. Thus recent college graduates who choose to hold unrealistic positive expectations about their immediate prospects in life usually do so to their unhappy cost."