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

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).

Holidays with Grown Children: That outsider feeling

The December holidays are filled with warm, fuzzy feelings: parents and their grown children get together to pay homage to cherished family traditions. There may be minor blowups and some discord, but the family is together again and that counts for a lot.

Then there comes a time in the life of almost every family when those traditions shift their ground, when our grown children start building their own family traditions with their homes and families at the center. And that can bring on a quietly sad trauma for us, the parents of grown children.

Here's one example of what I'm talking about:

Sam moved to Oregon 40 years ago--alone. None of his east coast family moved with him--not his mother, father, sisters or cousins. Sam married a west coaster and had one child, a daughter, who is now grown. Last year, she married a Portland man--a man whose family is three generations deep in that city. And that's what is making the holidays so difficult for Sam. In year's past, Sam, his wife and daughter came east for the holidays. They spent time with his sister and nephews in New York City, visited the tree in Rockefeller Center, window shopped the department store's Christmas extravaganzas and cooked Christmas dinner together. This year, his daughter, in the flush of her first year of marriage, invited her new Portland family and her parents to her house for a holiday dinner. Goodbye trip to New York and visits to all the cousins and nephews.

Sam's daughter decorated her house with garlands and tinsel. Made a good dinner for her first time at entertaining a lot of people. Sam's son-in-law's family was there by the dozens, people he barely knew. And that was the sad trauma for Sam. "It was the worst feeling in the world," he says, "to be a guest in my daughter's house and feel like an outsider."

Time and acquaintance may soften the feeling, but as our grown children put down roots with other families, we no longer make the holiday decisions or impose the traditions--regardless of how warm and cozy they felt for oh so many years.

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.

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.

Empty Nesting: The bright side of being home alone

I used to joke that senior year in high school was designed to make parents willing to part with their kids. It was my way of taking the edge off the blue feeling of an empty nest. But those blues didn't last all that long. Most of us find the up side of our new situation--time to do things we always wanted to try, and when we want to try them. It could be grabbing the watercolor paints and heading for a hill or breaking out the wine and cheese and calling it dinner.

Though the "empty nest syndrome" is supposed to be one of the major adjustments of life--we miss the little critters and their soccer games, swim meets and theatrical performances--but researchers now say that the empty nest syndrome is a fiction. Not that our children--the birds finally out of the nest--don't think we're suffering from it. Karen Fingerman, a psychologist at Purdue University who teaches classes on family issues, asks incoming freshmen how they think their parents are doing now that the children are in college. Every year, the students answer almost uniformly: They must be "devastated" by our absence.

But in fact, Fingerman's research finds that we the parents are thriving--and with good reason: All that teenage tension has left the building. While we may experience wistfulness for the excitement they brought into the house--their music bouncing off the walls, the buzz of their endless telephone chitchat--scientists are coming around to the view that even among women who devote all their time to raising kids, there is no empty nest syndrome. Instead, there is a feeling of satisfaction at a job well done: The kids are independent!

Fingerman fingers another source of the positive vibe: As we get older, she says, "we get better at emotional regulation." Moreover, a lot of the volatility that had been in our lives when we were younger has diminished--we're more settled. By the time our children are young adults, most of us know where our careers are heading, where we're going to live and with whom. The empty nest gives us time and chance to reach out and bring more activities and relationships into our lives. We may start reconnecting with old friends, relatives we haven't seen in years. And tracing the family tree--an activity that's grown a thousand fold in recent years, made possible not only by the Internet but by the energies and interests unleashed by no longer having our kids--and their tensions--in the house.

Empty Nesters: Dealing with the feelings of loss--and gain

When it comes to our children--grown or otherwise--strong emotions roil through us, especially at points of passage: their birth, the first day of school and their leaving home for college. Whether we admit it or not, the latter is a big deal--the last big event that takes place under our protective roof, the transition from child to young adult, the end of our tenure as hands-on parents. It's hard to put in words just what and how much it means to us. And that's what I was looking for when I picked up Andre Aciman's recent essay in the New York Times, "The Day He Knew Would Come."

Aciman did not let me down. Written as his boys--twins and an older son--returned to college after the Christmas break, he ruminated on the stillness of his household. "..when you wake up in the morning, the kitchen is as clean as you left it last night. No one touched anything; no one stumbled in after partying till the wee hours to heat up leftovers, or cook a frozen pizza, or leave a mess on the counter while improvising a sandwich. The boys are away now."

He also takes note of the up side of life as an empty nester. "All things slow down to what their pace had been two decades earlier. My wife and I are rediscovering things we didn’t even know we missed. We can stay out as long as we wish, go away on weekends, travel abroad, have people over on Sunday night, even go to the movies when we feel like it, and never again worry about doing laundry after midnight because the boys refuse to wear the same jeans two days in a row."

One point that had especial resonance for me was his realization that he now had time to reacquaint himself with himself. "Months after they'd left, I finally realized that the one relationship I had neglected for so many years was none other than my relationship with myself. I missed myself. I and me had stopped talking, stopped meeting, lost touch, drifted apart. Now, 20 years later, we were picking up where we’d left off and resumed unfinished conversations."

I had a similar epiphany--not as well or deeply articulated perhaps--but, like Aciman, it came a few months after my children left the nest. It was a sudden realization that I was now number one, Numero Uno. Decisions on what movies to see, what to prepare for dinner, where to go for a vacation--I could now afford to think of myself first. Twenty years of child-rearing tends to drop you to the bottom of the "what do you want" list. During the years my children lived at home with paterfamilias and me (and even now, when they return for a visit), I was happiest when everyone else was at peace with whatever decision had been made. It wasn't all that easy readjusting to the new reality. I had to, as Aciman put it, pick up where I left off and resume unfinished conversations.

Let me end with another comment from Aciman: "The best thing is learning how to give thanks for what we have. And at Christmas I was thankful; their bedroom doors were open again."

 

Re-nesting: When the grown kid moves home for the long haul

The tough economic times keep on coming on. If the downturn hasn't hit us directly, it may have hit our kids. They may need a safe harbor while they job hunt, reassess their life's plan, pull their post-college lives together. No one has the magic formula for making the move back home work. But here's some realistic advice--most of it the usual stuff-- from a recent blog:  

Starting with attitude, there's this reminder: "When the kids come back home, there's no doubt that there's an adjustment for everyone. Parents suddenly have a full nest. Kids don't really want to be back home, but need to be - at least for awhile. Individual roles shift and conflicts occur."

Seven Tips to Remember:

Recognize that the situation is only temporary (if it is).

Set some mutually agreed upon guidelines and parameters for successful cohabitation.

Share chores and expenses.

Consider each other as friends / roommates and behave accordingly (as much as humanly possible).

Spend some quality time together to build on the positives in the relationship.

Share your lives with each other to build trust and understanding.

When conflicts and/or resentments start to build, talk them out in a cool and rational way. Above all – treat others as you would like to be treated."

Anticipating the Empty Nest: A poet says it best

Some parents say they stand and cheer when the last kid leaves the nest. Some of us get a bit testy. Even weepy. Here's a poem I read recently that brought a huge lump to my throat--and my kids left the nest years ago. It's by Mary Leader and I read it in Garrison Keillor's "Good Poems," a book, fittingly enough, given to me by my daughter to mark my most recent birthday. Here it is:

HER DOOR

There was a time her door was never closed.

Her music box played “Für Elise” in plinks.

Her crib new-bought—I drew her sleeping there.

The little drawing sits beside my chair.

These days, she ornaments her hands with rings.

She’s seventeen. Her door is one I knock.

There was a time I daily brushed her hair

By window light—I bathed her, in the sink

In sunny water, in the kitchen, there.

I’ve bought her several thousand things to wear,

And now this boy buys her silver rings.

He goes inside her room and shuts the door.

Those days, to rock her was a form of prayer.

She’d gaze at me, and blink, and I would sing

Of bees and horses, in the pasture, there.

The drawing sits as still as nap-time air—

Her curled-up hand—that precious line, her cheek…

Next year her door will stand, again, ajar

But she herself will not be living there.

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.

Helping Hands: A 20-Something moves out and on

Here's what Carol did last week for her son, who is 23 and moving out of her house to an apartment in another city. She paid the first month's rent and the security deposit; gathered 'extra" stuff from  her kitchen to set up his kitchen; bought him a bathroom plunger ("He doesn't even know how much he'll need that"), curtain rods and curtains, a bed and new clothes ["He has to look like a grown up, not a college kid."].

Here's what she says her son, who graduated from college in June, did on his own: Got a job starting in September with a volunteer service agency. Found the 4-bedroom townhouse rental ("I wish I'd been there to help with that. It's too far from the place where he'll be working.") and found three roommates who will be working for the same volunteer agency as he is.

Here's what he didn't do this summer that his mother thought he should do: Get a summer job. Study and take the GREs in preparation for applying to graduate school. Contact the roommates to coordinate what items--kitchen supplies, furniture--they would bring. Contact the utility company and persuade them to drop the security deposit--since the new tenants would be doing volunteer work. Show some excitement and enthusiasm for the next phase of his life.

Here's what Carol had to say at lunch, a few hours after this much-loved eldest son drove off to start his new life: "I need a drink to celebrate. Thank God he's gone."

The relief came from no longer having to nag him--and from no longer having to shoulder the responsibility for getting him set up and ready to go to work at his first real [9-5] job. There was also a little bit of rage, too. "When I was his age, I moved to my own apartment and no one helped me. I had to take care of everything all by myself."

So, I ask her, what would have happened if her son had to manage the move all by himself?

"Oh he would have been fine," she tells me. "But I would have been a basket case."

Case closed on why we hover and helicopter our adult children--children who are old enough to make a few mistakes on their own.

But here's some perspective on what we're dealing with when we're nurturing a 20-something toward independence. According to a recent New York Times article by Robin Marantz Henig, "What Is It About 20-Somethings," the 20s can be viewed--and are viewed by a growing movement in psychology circles--as a distinct life stage called "emerging adulthood." This stage, says Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a psychology professor at Clark University, is marked by, among other things, the need for more education to survive in an information-based economy and fewer entry level jobs even after all that schooling. The emerging adulthood's psychological profile is marked by identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between and "a sense of possibilities."

The piece, which explains how 'adolescence" came to be considered a stage of development and how 'emerging adulthood' is taking a similar path, is must-reading for anyone who is dealing with, has dealt with or is about to deal with a 20-something. Bottom line: Maybe they aren't ready to do what we did at their age.