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

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.

 

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.

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.'”

 

Supporting Grown Children: The story in stats

While many of us came of age without financial help from our parents, that has not been the case for the past generation or two. Many of us have been helping our kids pay off their college debt, buy cars, put a downpayment on a first home. For the most part, it's been a way to share our good fortune with them--to cushion the first few years of career-building or to give them a boost until they come into their own. But with the Great Recession, that helping hand has taken on a new width and depth.

Here's the toll the Great Recession is taking, according to a study this spring by the National Endowment for Financial Education and Forbes.com:

--59 percent of parents are still providing financial support to their adult children who are not students, many of whom are living at the family home--either they were never able to leave or they have had to return.

--50 percent of the parental support is for housing; 48 percent for living expenses and 41 percent for transportation.

--75 percent of grown children living at home say they are helping to defray their parent's costs, with 52 percent chipping in toward food expenses, 34 percent helping with utilities, 31 percent putting gas in the family car and 29 percent helping with the rent or mortgage.

--43 percent of parents say they are supporting their kids because they are legitimately concerned with their child's financial well-being; 37 percent do not want to see their children struggle the way they had had to; and 32 percent say their children are worse off than they were when they left home.

 

"Parents are continuing their [financial] involvement longer than we expected," Ted Beck,the president  of NEFE, said. "The general sentiment is that financial pressures are higher for this generation."

 

Here's a nifty chart on where the parental support goes:

 

 

 

Supporting Grown Children: The job market they face

Consider this an addendum to my last post about the frustrations parents of grown children feel when their newly minted college grads can't land a job-- any job, no less one for which those college years prepared them. The generation has won such unattractive terms as The Lazy Generation and Generation of Slackers. And why not: there they sit, living at home with mom and dad and not seeming to lift a finger to get a job. Or so it seems.

But not to economists, who have a little more sympathy for the crowds of kids getting out of college but not into the kind of job they would ordinarily merit.

Here's the New York Times' Charlotte Rampell taking note of the job market for recent college grads, based on data from the labor economist Andrew Sum. From October 2010 through March 2011, 74.4 percent of college graduates under age 25 had jobs but only 45.9 percent of them had jobs that actually required a college degree. The rest of this group were bar tending or waiting on tables, looking for work, or out of the labor force altogether--perhaps because they were back in school.

Sound like anything that's happening around your once-empty nest? Rampell goes on to compare today's numbers to those from a decade ago. It's quite a shocker.

Andrew Sum; Bureau of Labor Statistics

Source: Andrew Sum; Bureau of Labor Statistics Numbers for 2010 refer to January through October of that year.

Rampell's bottom line: "The damage this recession will do to these young people may be permanent, too. Starting one’s career in a lower-quality job or one with low pay places workers on a worse pay trajectory for years to come, as research from Columbia’s Till von Wachter (among others) has shown."

We may need to shower our "slackers" with a little tough love--but a little tough understanding, too. And this little reminder from an observer of human nature: When the economy is bad, we (the older generations) tend to blame young people when they can't find a job.

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.”

 

Re-Nesting: College grad moves in but not on

The complaint comes not from the mother of the son who has returned to the nest. It comes from the sister. The brother, a recent college grad, has a low-paying, late-night-shift job and can't afford to rent his own place. So he's moved back home with mom. His girlfriend is the problem. She doesn't officially live with the brother but she's there all the time--and she sits in his room all day, stoned, the sister says. She wants to know what her mother can do about this inappropriate and unhealthy situation--a situation that bothers the mother. The sister/daughter writes Carolyn Hax, a Washington Post advice columnist,that her mother "is at a loss as to how to confront my brother and this girl without stomping on his nascent adulthood and causing a huge fight."

Ah, yes. The "trampling" on the "nascent adult." Just what so many of us face when college students, young adults or emerging adults move home while they come to terms with where their life is going--and all the anxieties that accompany that: for them and us. It's a problem. We don't want to step on their toes, but when they start stepping on ours or we are confronted with unhealthy choices they are making, we may have to do some trampling--nuanced and with some with some emotional subtlety--but nonetheless something that addresses the point.

Here's Hax suggestion: Mom needs to treat son like an adult, not as an emerging one. She could say something straightforward and non-emotional, like, "I've said nothing about your girlfriend's staying here, hoping you would recognize for yourself that it is totally inappropriate for her to sit in your room, full-time, stoned...Please steer her out of your room, and ideally to some help, or else I will have to get involved."

Hax's point--and it's one I find worth remembering--is this: Don't get sucked into an argument. That would send the message that the mother sees her son as fragile, and that would undermine her respectful intent.

To say nothing of trample down hard on his nascent adulthood.

Re-Nesting:The rules when a Boomerang kid moves back home

After her 37-year-old (and single) daughter lost her job, a friend had a new roomer for six months. No surprise there: A 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center reports that 13 percent of parents with grown children say one of their adult kids has moved back home in the past year--much of that thanks to tough economic times. Before this mom's out-of-work daughter moved in, though, the mother set some rules. No, they weren't about who would wash the dishes or whether rent would be paid. Instead, the mom emailed me the following dictum she asked her daughter to abide by: "You will not talk to me about what I eat or what I wear (my hot buttons) and in return I will not ask you where you are going and when you’ll be back. I will not expect you to show up for dinner (a good thing, as I don’t cook)."

The simple rules worked well on both sides. The daughter kept her side of the bargain and more: Even though she wasn't expected to, she usually called to let her mother know where she was and when she would be back. As for the mom, she once asked her daughter who it was she was talking to on the phone. "I  was told, 'None of your business.' I have never done that again!"

At the end of the "visit," both mother and daughter agreed that living together again had been really hard but that the understanding of what the ground rules were helped.

A lot of articles I read on the subject of re-nesting--of boomerang children moving back home after living independently--list a host of rules to follow: set clear expectations regarding expenses and household chores; set a time limit; charge rent. And key to it all: Write it all out in an agreement. This is good, solid advice. Practical. Sound. But, frankly, if one of my children were moving back home, I can't see myself doing it. There would be so much emotional overload and this would just add to it. It makes more sense to put your finger on the hot buttons--we all know what ours and our children's are, or at least we should--and make an agreement to steer clear of them.  Not stepping on each others toes is never easy. But at least spelling out what it is you would find most difficult for a long or short co-habitation is a start. And it probably has very little to do with how much rent they will or will not pay--unless money is one of the hot buttons. 

 

 

 

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."

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.