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

The Only Child Speaks Up: "Take your hands off the controls."

A recent story in a Canadian newspaper touched a lot of buttons for parents of adult children, and particularly of "only children."  The story is the  adult child's complaint about the tight controls parents exert, even as the child approaches marriage. The writer, an only child who is marrying an only child, says she noticed the stepping-over-boundaries during the wedding-plans phase but that the over-involvement is moving into the choice of where to live.
Part of the answer to the writer's plea likened the only child to a little and much-beloved emperor. But the bottom line was this: Whether it's outwardly apparent or not, part of the parents' dream is that "you will become an independent adult with all the tools to make life choices yourself. Unfortunately, parents are rarely willful enough to cut the cord themselves--you have to do it." And it will hurt.
If you see yourself in this, you might want to check your intrusion factor and pedal back.

A New Baby: Offering help in one form and another

There's a lot of excitement in our small family. We have a new baby--that is, Uber Son and his wife have brought forth their third. Babies are something we know something about. And we also know--experience cannot be denied--how hard it can be to juggle taking care of a newborn while also meeting the needs of two young children, a spouse, a home and mealtimes. We know how helpful it is to have another pair of hands--especially hands that can drive a car and take a child to piano lessons, get another to soccer practice, race to the supermarket for supplies, cook meals that can be frozen for use on another day--and bring the nursing mother a glass of water while that new baby is taking nourishment (oh the thirst when you're nursing).

Paterfamilias and I just spent several days as extra pairs of hands. This is, of course, a basic service that comes with being parents of grown children.  But when we leave--we live a seven-hour drive to the south--both Paterfamilias and I key in on the same thing: How will they manage? I am distraught that I can't offer to spend another week or two to help. (It's something called a job.) What, after all, am I here for if not to help when help is needed. I look at my schedule and try to figure out when I can come back.

Paterfamilias has another solution. He sends them a check, earmarked for paying for babysitters. Get them often, he writes in his note.

It's practical. It's helpful. And it's also appreciated. And it's what we parents of grown children can do when we can't do the job ourselves.

Who's an Adult: Defining a point in time

A college professor takes a crack at pinpointing when an adolescent becomes an adult. It's not as easy as he thinks.

House and Hearth: The grown kids buy their first home

When paterfamilias and I bought our house--the one we're still living in--our children were five and six years old. My mother flew up from her condo in Florida to help with the dirty work of moving in. She and I hand-transferred to the new house a fragile antique wall clock and a gold-framed mirror that used to be hers but were now mine. Paterfamilias and I were taking up the carpeting the former owner had nailed down all over the house. We had the wood floors stained and burnished before we moved in. What I remember most about those first few days in the new house is my mother carrying things back and forth between kitchen and dining room, rags wrapped around her bare feet. "This is a good way to keep the floors buffed," she told me as she shuffled around. "You should do this all the time."

I'm reminded of this because Alpha Daughter just bought her first house. She closed on it on a Friday, and we flew up on Saturday to look it over. She and her husband were planning to strip out the old carpet and redo the floors before moving in. While we were poking around the front yard and inspecting its bushes, a neighbor came by--all big hellos and welcomes and wanting to know who was moving in. Then another neighbor appeared on the street. The first neighbor waved her over. "Lois," she said, "here's the new family that's moving in, and it comes with a Bubbe."

That would be me. Bubbe is Yiddish for a granny. And there certainly was a very active five-year-old clambering up and down and around the front steps. But use of the term was a bit of a shock for me--I'd always thought of a Bubbe as a person who's sidelined to the back seat of the car--a person who's no longer part of the main events of family life. Part of what happens as our children get older, something my friend Marian, the psychiatrist, calls "flattening the heirarchy." Others use the term Bubbe in a more benign way--as the neighbor did, to connote that the parents of the new owners were around.

This Bubbe, unfortunately, doesn't come with the house. Paterfamilias and I live a ten-hour drive away. I may never tie rags around my bare feet as my mother did. But like her, I hope to be there on moving day to help out with whatever needs doing. It's what we parents of grown children do, whether we think of ourselves as a Bubbe or not.