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

Granny as Nanny: Offering your services, even from a distance.

The magazine where I've spent the past 20 years of my career has been sold. The new owners have, as they say, brought on their own editorial team. In other words. my work-family of 20 years is no longer under one roof. So now I am free to spend more time on this blog (a plus) and to be available to help my grown children, who live in cities far from me, should they need it. This is the message I relayed to Alpha Daughter. To which she replied: "Well, I have a real problem with child-care coverage on Wednesday and Thursday. It would be wonderful if you could come up here from time to time to help out." I would pick up my little Grand at school, amuse her, get dinner ready--in other words, I would be a helpful, hands-on grandparent and parent.

It takes some recomputing on my part to figure out how this would work: Free to travel on a Wednesday and Thursday? I'm used to thinking Saturday and Sunday. But why not? "Have computer. Will travel. Can help out." That should be my new motto--if I can just wrap my mind and new reality around it.

Moving in Together: Giving grown children a home or vice versa

Hard times are here and there are lots of changes afoot: parents and their grown children are finding themselves more economically inter-dependent. Between 2000 and 2007, according to the U.S. Census, the number of parents living with an adult head of household increased by 67 percent. The numbers for 2008 and 2009 are bound to exceed those.
Sometimes, the move-in together is driven by the grown child's problem: loss of a job or a drastic cut in paycheck. (A growing number of companies are shaving the base salaries of employees by 5 percent--or imposing furloughs that take a salary down several pegs. Or the parents suffer the same layoff/salary decrease issue or their retirement savings are greatly diminished or gone.
Here's a story from the Chicago Tribune that catalogues some of the variations on this theme. One of the trends it takes note of is of parents moving to be physically closer to their children--even when the move means pulling up stakes and resettling in another city. They may settle in a place of their own or with their children. Many are doing so to provide babysitting--grandparents as nannies.