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

Money Matters: When grown children bite the hand that feeds them

Ever since the grand-twins were born, Pam and Dan have been very involved grandparents and parents. The boys--their daughter's children--live just 15 minutes away. In the first year or two, Pam and Dan were there to change diapers, feed babies and babysit so the parents could have a "date night" together every Sunday evening. Now that the boys are six, Pam and Dan pick them up from school once or twice a week and continue to babysit as well as host the family for Sunday and holiday dinners. They even put a swimming pool in their backyard to make summer visits more refreshing for the young family. They've always helped out a little financially--just to make things a little easier for a family that wasn't living high but also wasn't earning high, either.

Everything was in balance until this past March when the son-in-law lost his job. Now Pam and Dan, who was a physician until he retired, are supporting the young family. And that has thrown a lot of other balances out of kilter. Dan says that for now he can pay the mortgage and other basic bills for his daughter and her family. The son-in-law is no laggard: He is hard at work looking for a job and at other entrepreneurial opportunities. Pam and Dan would rather help them now than leave them money later.  But there is a question of how long they can continue --and what they would do if the financial burden started to impinge on their life style. So money is not the immediate problem.

And yet is it. The daughter has asked Pam to step back from grandmothering, to not be a regular presence. Pam isn't sure what else her daughter said--the conversation was so scary and upsetting. Would this mean the end of the grandparent's relationship with their grandsons? With their relationship to their grown child?

Dan's advice was to step back and let is pass--that the daughter's "demand" would go away of its own accord. Pam's worst fear--that she and Dan would be cut out of their daughter's and grandchildren's lives--does not seem to be happening. Things are almost unchanged. The Sunday dinners have continued. But Pam has an undertow of worry. She wonders what she did to cause the outburst. She's an ebullient person--was she too exuberant around the boys? Was she overwhelming?

More likely it isn't anything Pam did or said. Her daughter's change in financial circumstances has probably pushed her to assert independence and control where she can.

It is so hard for us to distance ourselves from hurtful words our children send our way. While others can see the less personalized side of the story, we are so tied into our grownchildren and our grandchildren that any threat to the strength of that relationship feels like a dagger to our heart--even when that isn't necessarily what our children meant to do or convey.

 

Leaving a Legacy: Letting your grown kids know what you are willing their way.

Estate planning is a funny thing: We don't give it much thought--until we do. When we're leading active, vigorous lives, who can be bothered--who wants to be bothered--by thoughts of mortality? As we get older and more isolated, we may start seeing those wills and estates as a 'pay back' device. And we do so at our peril.

I was reminded of this by hearing Hendrik Hartog  talk about his book, "Someday All  of This Will be Yours," on the Diane Rehm show.  Hartog catalogues a century's worth of emotional perils and legal pitfalls that come with leaving an inheritance that is seen as unfair to  one or all of your children. As he explained on air, his aim in presenting a history of cases between 1850 and 1950 was to look at what they show about parent-child relations and how, in a time before pensions and Social Security, people used the promise of inheritance to secure care for themselves in old age--a grown child was often called upon to stay home and care for an aged parent-.

But Hartog made an important point beyond legal and cultural history. Even though the cases he discusses come from a different time and era, some things never change. People he talks to today tell him similar stories of inheritance plans gone bad in terms of family harmony and unity.

All of this is just another way of saying, it doesn't have to be so, that we can clear the air so that our grown children not only know what's in our estate but what our guiding principles are in dividing up those worldly goods between them and others. Great movie scenes though they make, the reading of the will ought to have no unpleasant surprises--in fact, no surprises at all. The more our grown children know what we're thinking and where and how we saw fairness in drawing up our will, the fewer sources of disharmony we'll leave behind.

The will isn't pay back time. We do want to be remembered fondly, don't we?

 

Money Matters: Is a loan a gift when we help grownkids buy a house?

Whenever we talk with friends about grown kids and money, one connection is a constant. Almost all of us have helped or plan to help our children buy a house. We're the generation that was lucky enough to buy our homes before the infamous bubble and whose overall estates have benefited from the pre-2008 relentless climb in home values. The climb has been such that many of our children, successful though they may be at this point in their early careers, can't afford to buy a house. And we want them to have one: Not just as a shelter, but as a solid financial investment. (Yes, we still believe those days will come again.)

When we do extend that helping housing hand, it tends to fall into one of three forms: an arms-length deal in which money for a downpayment is loaned and repayment is expected; a loan that's not-so-arms length and will be repaid when the house is sold; a loan that's really a gift that comes with no strings attached. (There is a fourth form--or so I've heard: Some buy the house outright for their kids. They put up the downpayment and pay the mortgage fees. But that seems a whole 'nother category of house "loan.")

Here's the story in stats, from a 2010 survey by the National Association of Realtors (Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers): 27 percent of first-time buyers who made a down payment received a gift from a friend or relative, typically their parents; 9 percent received a loan from a relative or friend.

For those 27 percent who give housing help as a gift, the survey includes some non-economic factors to consider: either don't attach any strings or declare upfront what those strings are. They can be anything from eventual repayment of the "gift" (which makes it more of a loan) to calling home more often. Not sure how well that latter point works.

Grandparenting: Are we willing to share the wealth with our Grands?

A few days ago, I wrote about a 2011 MetLife survey on boomer parent's spending habits vis a vis their grown children. (Long story short: Most of us want to help our adult children with college tuition; fewer want to help them buy a house.)

There's also a 2009 MetLife survey on how grandparents feel about spending money on their grandchildren. The 2011 survey already covered the college tuition question for grandchildren--most of us say, 'no way.' But this survey has more specific questions.

How do we feel about financial assistance or monetary gifts for grandchildren? Two out of three of us give our grandchildren money; The average amount in the five years leading up to 2009: $8,700.

Why did we do it? The reasons most cited were general financial support, education, and major life events.

Do we want to give them gifts while we're still here or leave them a lump-sum legacy once we're gone? Nearly 80 percent of us would rather distribute smaller gifts. Nothing beats seeing them enjoy an indulgence or appreciate real-world help.

Has the Great Recession and its aftermath made us more generous toward our Grandkin? One in four of us report we are providing more assistance than in the past, due to the current economy.

Do we give advice along with the money? Not so much. More than two-thirds of grandparents report that they are not providing any financial advice or guidance to their grandchildren. Among those who are talking to their grandchildren about financial issues, the most common advice is “start saving early in life,” and “don’t get into too much debt.”

Isn't that what our grandparents told us?

Money Matters: What are we willing to pay for when our grown children are grown up?

There's a new survey out on how generous--or not--we are with our adult children. Overall, the 2011 MetLife survey found that four out of five us are willing to help out in a variety of ways. But we have our limits. 

Topping the list in priorities is college education. Nine out of 10 of us believe we, as parents, have some responsibility to pay for some of their higher education, with half of us seeing this as a strong or absolute responsibility. The survey even put some numbers on that assistance: More than half of us  would contribute 10,000 a year or more to the tab for our child's higher education.

In terms of percentages, we're more generous than our parents. According to the survey, only 35 percent of baby boomer parents helped with the college bills. As to helping our grandchildren with their college bills, two-thirds of us don't think we have any responsibility in that regard--love those kiddies though we do. Only only 15% of us report that we have contributed toward the costs of a grandchild’s education. 

We don't see helping our grown kids buy a house as nearly as compelling a responsibility as a college education. Half of us suggested that we had no responsibility at all to contribute to the down payment on a house. Among those 23 percent of us who felt we had at least a moderate responsibility to help, half of us said we would contribute under $10,000 for that purpose.

The survey also looked at how much responsibility we felt in helping out a grown child whose fortunes were flagging--who had lost jobs, were going through a divorce or meeting some other financial setback. More than four in 10 of us reported that, in such cases, we feel a strong or absolute responsibility to help out--if the setback was not of their own making.

Woe betide the grown child who spends recklessly and causes his or her own financial debacle. We are not as forgiving--at least our purses are not. Only 11 percent of us feel the need to bail out a child when the debt is due to overspending. We draw the line at those closets full of Jimmy Choo shoes, crazy weekends in Vegas or a drug habit. But even  here, the MetLife survey puts a number on how much we'd be willing to spend to help out--if we were willing at all. And it's not $10,000. It's half of that.

What about leaving them a legacy? Half of us in the Baby Boomer generation feel little or no responsibility to leave something behind for our heirs. For those of us who do, MetLife has some numbers: Those of us who would leave something behind see the appropriate amount as somewhere between $20,000 and $50,000. 

They survey also looked at what obligations our children feel toward us. Take a deep breath and read on: (all percents are for feeling a strong or absolute responsibility):

62% feel called upon to call us at least once a week to see how we're doing

58% would have us live with them if we weren't healthy enough to live on our own

50% would take us in if were financial destitute

46% would provide financial support in our later years if we were having financial reverses.

Not that we'd want that. 42% claim we wouldn't take the help.

Does this make you want to rethink those contributions to their financial health, education and housing?

 

Leaving a Legacy: Letting grownchildren in on the plan for your worldly goods.

In the French movie, Summer Hours, three forty-something siblings grow apart over how to dispose of a beloved summer home and the valuable items inside it. When their mother died, she left no specific instructions--just the hope that the place would be kept going for the next generation. I'm not giving the ending away to say that the mother's wishes go unfulfilled and that the relationship among the siblings deteriorates.

King Lear also fumbled his estate planning. He let his children know  who would get what--but not in quite the best way.

Movies and literature are filled with sad tales that surround the making or not making of plans for worldly goods. Estate planning runs amok or doesn't take place at all. While some of us have been orderly about the process--made out wills, told our children where accounts can be found. We may have skipped one important step: talking with our children about the disposal and dispersal of the lesser items.

Not that I've taken this advice myself, but I'm reminded of the need to make such arrangements--to ask my grown children who wants the piano and who would enjoy the Phyllis Plattner watercolor that hangs in the living room? Would anyone like my collection of wood, porcelain and tin cats? And what of the other things in our house--items paterfamilias and I might not prize but that may carry great sentimental value for one of them. I should gather our grown children together and do a walk-through. It needn't be gruesome. It doesn't mean we're about to leave this world. It's just a chance to put a plan in place that everybody is happy with--and avoid a post-mortem blow-up. Of course, we wouldn't be there to see the latter, but still....

In a Washington Post article, Adolf Gundersen wrote about his experience in doing just such planning with his 80-year-old parents and his siblings. The evening--his wife dubbed it a "pre-mortem"--of putting on paper what would happen when his parents were gone "combined the gravitas of a memorial service with the easy sharing of a holiday dinner. And the best part of it was that my parents were there to enjoy being the center of attention." The author and his four brothers decided what would happen to a cabin in the woods that they all loved but didn't want to manage.The get-together also touched on discussions about financial and health care planning that his parents admitted they were "weary of dealing with on their own."

Gundersen writes about some of the reasons why he, his brothers and parents waited so long to have this conversation. "Getting us kids actively and directly involved in so many facets of their lives would mean a huge role reversal....For a long time neither of them had seemed psychologically ready for such a gathering."

Depending on where we are in our life cycle, we don't necessarily have to invite our children into a full "pre-mortem" discussion. (One friend admits that her mother has a dispersal discussion with him and with each of his brothers whenever they visit. Her agenda: to find a home for her clown collection--something none of the children admire or desire.) But it wouldn't be a role-reversal for us to invite our grown children over to tell us which of our possessions they'd like to have once we no longer need them. Not that I need them to assure me that someone will keep my cat collection together.

Emerging Adults: If there is such a thing as affluenza, should we worry about it?

They are a two-car family living in an affluent neighborhood. With her son, a junior at college, home for the summer, a friend was sharing her car with him. Though he had been unable to get a regular job, he had cobbled together a coaching business with a friend: the two--both college-level athletes--were tutoring neighborhood kids in the fine art of hitting a baseball and kicking a soccer ball.

The timing part of sharing the car was going smoothly enough. What got my friend ticked off was getting into the car in the morning and finding the fuel gauge on empty. Not once. Several times. She insisted her son chip in for gas--not necessarily refill the tank to its upper limits but put some gas in when the tank neared empty. 

He didn't want to. He didn't have the money to do it, he said--even though he'd just gotten paid $20 for a coaching gig. She retaliated by setting limits on his use of the car unless he shares in the gas bill.

But the gas is not the real issue. She is worried that her son, surrounded by affluent friends, is picking up a sense of entitlement--something psychologist Gary Buffone, in his book "Choking on the Silver Spoon," describes as "expecting rewards without effort." And Buffone takes that sense seriously. He considers it one of five traits that indicate a serious case of affluenza or, in his words, "Silver Spoon Syndrome." He defines the latter as a set of symptoms "resulting from an inappropriate relationship with money or wealth."

Some of the other traits--a lack of motivation and drive, a low tolerance for frustration, failure to handle money responsibly and overvaluing material things--are hard to distinguish from adolescent ennui. The question for my friend is whether her son still has one foot planted in adolescent rebellion--he's spent two years away at college and has yet to exhibit the academic drive his parents would like to see--or whether he is growing up to be a young man with full blown a case of affluenza.

A reality check on use of the car fits in with one of Buffone's approaches to curing Silver Spoon Syndrome: give your child increasing responsibility. "The only way to break the back of entitlement is to lean on it--hard!" Buffone writes. "Parents must put relentless pressure on kids to make them earn what they get in life." 

Given the current price of gas, my friend is applying no small pressure.

 

Supporting Grown Children: How much help to give in harsh economic times

When Carol heard from a friend about a job that suited her son, she got in touch with the 22-year-old immediately. He was finishing up a one-year internship in another city; the new job--a year in a Middle Eastern country teaching English to Arabic-speaking children--would start two weeks after the internship ended. But her son was less than enthusiastic when she called with the lead--even though he loved spending his junior year in Egypt studying Arabic. Instead of thanking his mother for the tip, he told her the job was "teaching spoiled rich kids English so they could pass their SATs and get into college here. No thank you."

His mom's reaction? "It was all I could do to say, if you don't apply for this job, don't bother to come home" when the internship ends. "How long does he think we're going to support him?"

isn't that the ultimate question? If we're providing a free-rent nest for them to live in while they are job hunting, how much influence should we have in what they apply for and the decisions they make about taking one job and not the other--or none at all. When Carol asks her son what he's doing about job hunting, his curt answer is, "I don't want to talk about it." Clearly, he is anxious. It took him months to get the paid internship--after applying for what seemed like 100s of jobs. Now, he's had a year of living on his own. Could he really want to come home and bunk in with mom and dad again? Is he right, as his answer suggests, that he should not take a job that he sees as wasting a year of his life.

And yet, from his mom's perch, he's not doing anything to get on top of things. "He's given up," she says. And when she compares what he's doing now with what she did as a young woman on her own--he comes up looking like he has thrown in the towel, doesn't care or is content to freeload. But these are different--and difficult--times. Our experiences when we were their age may not apply. Is a tough love approach a better one? Maybe she should tell him he can't come home again--that he has to take a job, any job, like it or not, and support himself.

It's not just tough love. It's a tough call.

Meanwhile, Carol is certainly not alone in helping to support her grown child. The New York Times ran a piece recently headlined "A Generation of Slackers? Not So Much," that touched on these issues. The Times also ran a chart, based on a survey by Rutgers University, on its Economix blog that shows what parents, circa 2010, are doing for their grown children.

“Unfulfilled Expectations: Recent College Graduates Struggle in a Troubled Economy,” Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, Rutgers University.

Some other findings from the Rutgers study: 60 percent of the graduates of the college classes of 2006 through 2010 said they held a part-time job while enrolled in school, not including jobs held during the summer or between semesters. Another 23 percent said they were working full time or both full and part time during school. For 44 percent of students, work or personal savings helped finance their schooling. "Today’s young people," said Carl Van Horn, a labor economist at Rutgers and co-author of the study, "are very focused on trying to work hard and to get ahead.”

 

Money Matters: Why our grown children may not take our financial advice

When it comes to financial decisions--paying off debt, buying a car--we just don't understand our 20-something kids. Why would they buy a flashy car and ignore that student loan? And when we give them the benefit of our advice, why don't they take it?

Turns out, there's a scientific reason for that. There's a big difference between the way a 20-something's brain works and the way ours does, especially when it comes to financial matters. Our brains have grown and matured into a different set of skills than the one we had at our children's age. That's a point Barbara Strauch makes in her book, The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain. She takes note of work done by Harvard economics professor David Laibson, who has done research in the field of neuroeconomics (how people use their brains to make financial decisions). Laibson has found that when confronting complex money issues, such as mortgage or interest rates, those in middle age (40 to 65) make the best choices. Not only that, the "sweet spot" for having the best judgment in matters of personal economics is the 50s.

On the other side of the divide are our grown children--especially the newly grown in their 20s (emerging adults)--who are just coming into their own and are facing critical personal economic decisions: not just how to pay for beer but whether to rent or buy housing, how much debt it's safe to carry, the financial implications of taking one job over another. Their brains are skilled--their memories and brain speed are sharper than ours. But brain research suggests that our minds have developed in a way that gives us better, more long-range judgment about financial matters. Theirs are at a less mature stage. And that's where the conflict comes. Just because they have adult bodies and hormones and jobs or positions with responsibilities, their brains are in a "primitive" stage in terms of neuroeconomics.

Which doesn't mean that unsolicited advice won't help them avoid the financial shoals of life. Or that giving advice is necessarily an exercise in frustration. It just means there may be a reason why they don't see the wisdom of our financial ways.

 

 

Money Matters: Teaching your kids about taxes

Back in the day when her kids were pre-schoolers, Enid did their taxes--her parents had set up education trust funds for each of them. She kept on doing their taxes for as long as they lived in her house and while they were in college. Now, the funds are spent, the kids are working, own homes, have investments and their own bank accounts. But old habits die hard: they still come home for help in filling out their taxes. "My goal," Enid says now, "is to get all my children to do their own taxes."

She's closer to that goal than most of us would be. She may have "done" their taxes while they came of age, but they had to be at the dining room table with all their papers organized while she loaded Turbo Tax onto the laptop and plugged in the numbers. "I made them sit there with me, and we did it together."

Now that they are on their own, they still come home for help with their taxes. But they come home prepared. "They know what stuff to bring," Enid says. "They know what to collect. They organize it. They really don't need me anymore."

And yet they do. Independent though she would like them to be, she likes to review their final filing. "Everyone needs somebody--a friend or parent--to check that you haven't missed anything."

This year, she recommended that one of her children take his tax form to the next level: to an accountant. The reason: The son bought a condo, sold stocks and had some other complicated financial dealings. "I told him to get an accountant but to sit down with the person and let him walk you through things so you can do it yourself next time."

I can only sit in awe of the way Enid's children have been prepared for their tax futures. I had no such help as a young adult, and I am embarrassed to admit, neither I nor paterfamilias gave our children such guidance--though we did offer the services of our accountant. They chose to muddle through with Turbo Tax.

All I can do now is share with them (and anyone else out there who wants to guide their young adult children through their first few tax seasons) a piece of tax advice Enid swears by. It comes from her father. "If you really work on an issue in your tax form and it's still not clear, decide on a common sense way to deal with it--and then write an accompanying letter that says, in effect, 'I found this hard to understand so let me tell you what I did.' What you don't want to be accused of is fraud. if you come across as straightforward and tell the IRS what you did and why, you can't be accused of fraud."