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

Re-Nesting: Our grown kids can make their fortune by moving back in with us.

We've all read or heard stories--or experienced the real thing--about college grads (or even older kids) moving back home. Thank you Great Recession and the Oh-So-Slow Recovery.

But that's only part of the re-nesting story. As I've written in a previous post, having our adult children live on their own after college is a socio-economic and cultural phenomenon. In many other countries (first world and otherwise), it's accepted as the norm that the kids will live at home until they marry. And for good reason: When they have a job, they can save money for their future connubial adventure or to invest in an entrepreneurial dream.

            All of this is the long way around reporting about a formula I came across recently: How much a stay with mom and dad is worth. The logarithm factors in the usual stuff--rent and food, as well as the other perks of living at home, such as having an Internet connection and cellphone paid by the parents and having laundry done by the host (usually, the hostess.)The findings? I'll let The Calculator tell it:

"I wish I’d lived in my parents’ basement the last four years. I’d be $85,000 richer. That would put me in down payment [on a condo] territory already.... Instead, I wasted all my money on rent, food, and TV."

Our hero kept a detailed spreadsheet of everything he spent in his four post-college-grad years living at home and used that journal to create, as he puts it, "a breakdown of the money I washed away."

       

Want to know what you're host-home is worth to your grown kid? You can go to the “living with your parents” calculator and plug in rent and other expenses (or use The Calculator's estimates of his spending habits) and see how much your grown child would save in four years of living in his or her old room at your house. Hint: The Calculator assumes you'll pay for car insurance and put him or her on your health insurance and that the money saved from living at home would be invested to earn a return.

Bottom line: Re-nesting is worth a sizable nest egg for them. For us, it's a less monetary formula: A chance to experience quality and quantity time with them. Fortune and fortunate tied up in one small bedroom. 

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Money Matters: When we help out our grown kids, whose hand pulls the purse strings?

 My friend Cathy's middle son graduates from a local college in May but he has a lease on an apartment that runs through August 1--at a cost of $1,000 a month for his share of the rent. Cathy has made it clear that he should find a sublet for his room and move back home to save the family the $2,000 in rent. Her son has countered that he doesn't want to live at home. She told him that was too bad but "we can't afford the rent and neither can you." He repeated his argument: "I don't want to live at home."

It's at this point in her "he said/she said" story that she tells me, "He'll probably tap his dad for the money. [The dad] can't afford it either but his pride will kick in and he'll do it."       

Cathy does not say this with admiration for her husband. All through their child-rearing years this has been the pattern: She takes a tough stand on financial matters and he's a soft touch. It drives Cathy crazy.

She might find comfort in a recent Ameriprise survey, Money Across Generations II that reflects her family's dynamics: It found that mothers are more likely to chat with their grown kids about money, but the dad is more likely to dole out the cash--for certain things. The "certain things?" Anything having to do with a car.

Here are the numbers: Of the 93 percent of baby boomers who say they’ve provided financial support to their adult children, 58 percent of fathers (versus 48 percent of mothers) have helped by putting up cash for a car; 51 percent of dads (versus 43 percent of moms) have paid for their grown kid’s car insurance; and 37 percent of fathers (versus 29 percent of mothers) helped with car payments.

There was one outlier: 42 percent of dads (versus 32 percent of moms) co-signed a loan or lease agreement.

Cold comfort, but there you have it: Dad's are likely to pony up the cash, especially if it has anything to do with a car or their adult child's ability to live on their own. The mom: She gets to talk about why she's saying No.

 

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Emerging Adults: What to do with the anger when our kids make us mad

When my friend Cathy got angry at her renested post-college son--for sins like not emptying the dishwasher; not taking the job search seriously--she kicked down his bedroom door. Not that she meant to. She was just kicking his closed door to make a point and Boom, her foot went right through it. It's a moment her son may  remember--not, at this point in time, in a good way, tho it likely will be a funny anecdote some time down the line.

                                                   

We may have thought that all the anger-inducing struggles with our adolescent kids were a thing of the past--now that they are adults. But they can still press our emotional buttons and make us really, really angry. Especially when they move back home for a while and fail to behave like the independent adults we thought they'd become.

Not that there's anything wrong with getting angry at them. Anger has an important function. It's part of our "affective awareness system," that is, psychologist Carl Pickhardt points out, it lets us "identify when something significant is happening in our internal or extermal world of experience, something that feels like it deserves our attention."

So anger isn't the issue. It's the lashing out that's a problem--with especially long-term consequences now that our children are grown and no longer dependents under our control. As Pickhardt points out, "in the heat of the moment it can obscure loving feelings causing unloving words or actions to occur."

Pickhardt recommends that we--as well as our grown kids--learn to, in effect, take a "time out" to cool down, and then talk further "when we can choose our words thoughtfully, and not emotionally.”

He  lists characteristics of people who are anger prone to the point of popping off in an unhelpful way:

--They are highly judgmental and need to be right.

--They feel strongly entitled and expect to get their way.

--They take events personally that are not personally meant.

--They use fresh offenses to revive memories of old grievances.

--They attack what’s wrong with anger by blaming others when problems arise.

These apply to both our kids and to us. For us, at this stage of parenting, there's a lot more at stake than there was when our kids were younger. My friend Cathy certainly expected to get her own way when her son was living under her roof again. And, of course, she didn't mean that tap on his door to be a surprising invasion of his privacy. But that little kick probably had a lot of lash-out fueling its power.

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Supporting Adult Children: The line between "Yes" and "Not Anymore"

Our kids coming out of college have been struggling--it's hard to find a job, no less one that is a stepping stone to a career. A lot of us are supporting those kids, either by hosting them rent free at home (goodbye emtpy nest) or giving them a monthly stipend while they job hunt. When times are tough, tough love doesn't quite seem the right answer. But when does the helping hand stop? Even if we can afford it, is there a point at which we have to tell our kids to sink or swim?

That was a question Carolyn Hax dealt with in a recent column. A mom, whose 26 year old daughter had had an assortment of odd jobs, finally landed a job at an art gallery--a job in her career arc. The mom has continued to give her daughter a $2,500 a month stipend to help cover living expenses. But she would like to break the habit. "I feel she should shoulder more of her own expenses, given what she earns. There always seems to be some unexpected expense that crops up, though, preventing me from cutting back my support." The latest unexpected expense: the daughter wants to quit the job and open up her own art gallery with a co-worker, who would provide the financial banking--but not a living wage for the daughter. 

The mom wants to retire but her retirement income isn't big enough to continue to support her daughter at the $2,500 a month level. There is a nagging reason why this mom keeps shelling out money: If her daughter fails at her endeavor, she might be destitute and "then she might have to move back in with me, which would be an intolerable situation."

It's easy enough to say, as Hax does, "Cut this parasite off." When the daughter worked odd jobs, Hax says, the mom was an enabler laboring under the fig leaf of need. But now, "you have proof that you're not preempting poverty, you're insulating her from the cost of her choices."

The fear for many of us is just this: if we don't help out, our children will slip into living in a way that we can't tolerate--and it will happen to them (guilt-inducing music in the background, please) while we have a comfortable place to live and more than enough food to eat. I hear friends raise the question of whether we owe it to our children--and to ourselves--to keep them out of poverty while they find their footing. The issue they raise: Can we afford not to do it?

Tough questions. And hard to deliver the tough love answer to our kids. There are practical issues--what happens when we can no longer afford to help, or like this mother, are ready to retire but can't afford to do so until our children have made their way up the career ladder. By continuing to support them, are we standing in the way of their being able to take care of themselves.

Carl Pickhardt, a psychologist who specializes in adolescence has this observation for parents of young adults: "Just as parenthood doesn’t come with a set of directions for how to get started, there is no fixed schedule for financial letting go. Thus many parents continue their parenting by offering extended help, often of the financial kind, until a firm hold on young adult independence is finally gained."

The tough part is not the tough love but knowing where that line of independence is or ought to be.

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Re-Nesting: Those emerging adults may be moving out and on--and soon!

He's 24. He's got a job. He's still living at home.

My friend Cathy is beyond frustrated. Her son is not helpful around the house. She's tired of asking him to take out the garbage, empty the dishwasher or run an errand--in the car she and her husband are providing.

Part of his inertia is his job history over the past four years. A graduate of a high-tier college where he got more-than-respectable grades, he's taken internships with  nonprofit organizations--even worked one that involved relocating to a destitute Central American country for a year--but doesn't feel he's on a career path. The current job is not in his field and is only a one-year contract. He's applied to graduate school and hopes to go next year. So right now he's feeling immobilized--despite his parent's suggestions that he have a plan B for living arrangements: They may sell the house this summer and move closer to the dad's job.

It may not ease her frustration to know that her son is part of a recent trend: the ever-so-slow growth in household formation. It's not only frustrating for those of us with adult children living at home, it's also a drag on the economy. Each time a household is formed, it adds about $145,000 to output that year as the spending ripples through the economy, according to an estimate last year from Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics [as reported in the New York Times].

Over the last year, household formation has been picking up as this map from the New York Times indicates.

Source: Census Bureau, via Haver Analytics.

The pickup, the Times reports, "is probably related to job growth, which has enabled multi-generational households to spin off into multiple new homes." 

The overall trend is good news for Cathy. Her son may be forced to move if she sells her house and will certainly move if he gets into graduate school [he's applied to schools one and two time zones away] and may even be heartened to move out by his improved chances in an improving job market.

“They can only live with their parents for so long," Zandi noted. "There are powerful centrifugal forces in those households, on both side. As soon as they have a chance to get out, many will take it.”

All of which could help Cathy feel better about putting her house on the market--That is, if her second son, graduating from college this spring, finds a more favorable job market than his brother did. It's still too soon to "amen" to the pressures of the re-nesting stage.

 

Emerging Adults: They get by with a little help from us

Yet another confirmation of what many of us know: We are the generation that offers our grown children financial help. Pew Research Center's latest poll finds that one in 10 American adults receive money or financial assistance from their parents or other family members. The bulk of those receiving help are emerging adults--men and women in the 18 to 24 year old range. It falls off from there but doesn't stop--some of us are still getting help from our parents. 

I'll let this Pew Research Center chart, courtesy of the New York Times, say it all:

Based on telephone interviews conducted Dec. 6 to 19, 2011, with a nationally representative sample of 2,048 adults ages 18 and older.

Re-Nesting: Boomerang kids like living with us. A poll tells all.

They're back. And they like the living conditions. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll,  68% of young adults ages 18 to 34 who are living with their parents or have moved back in temporarily because of economic conditions say they are very satisfied with their family life. (Roughly a similar proportion--73%--who are not living with their parents are equally satisfied.). Similarly, 44% of young adults who live with their parents say they are very satisfied with their present housing situation, while 49% who live on their own say the same.

The Pew survey had more to say about the circumstances of young adults (18 to 34 years old) who've come home to re-nest. They are less likely than their counterparts who are living on their own to say they have enough money to live the kind of life they want. It's 21% of those living at home who say they have enough money now; 38%  of those who are not living with their parents.

Not only are they satisfied, they're looking to the future with optimism. Says the Pew poll: "Living with mom and dad hasn’t dampened the economic optimism of these young adults. Overall, young adults are much more optimistic than middle-aged and older adults about their financial future, in spite of the tough economic times and difficult labor market they are facing."

As for 'We the Parents', the poll finds we're just as satisfied with our family life and housing situation as are those parents whose adult children have not moved back home. The kids, they're pretty satisfied with their relationship with us. Here's the 'loving relationship' breakdown in chart form.

 

Empty Nesting: The challenge young adults face living on their own.

Once they've graduated from college and gone off to seek their fortune, it can be disheartening to see them return home to live with mom and dad again. Psychologist Carl Pickhardt who writes about issues revolving around adolescents and post-adolescents--emerging adults is the latest term--has come up with eleven common challenges or reasons young adults might come back to the nest and what they learn from sticking it out and facing up to the challenge of independence.

You can read a fuller description here, but here's a brief rundown of the 11, with Pickhardt's take on the learning moment:

1. Loneliness or homesickness from living apart from family. Pickhardt writes: "Coping with this challenge can teach the capacity to live at a distance from family while still staying in touch, and to develop an independent social network of one's own."

2. The chaos of living with too many choices. Pickhardt's take: "Freedom isn't free because all choice is linked to consequence for which one has to take responsibility, and order must be established."

3. Finding and keeping a job. What your child learns from this, Pickhardt says, is that "there is no job security and it can take a lot of work to find work."

4. Flunking out of college--or coming close to it. The lesson: "It is easier to get into college than to complete it, and self-discipline to do the work is required to graduate."

5. Living with roommates who may have different life experiences or may be incompatible. The life lesson: "Skills in managing a domestic partnership can provide valuable preparation for a significant relationship later on."

6. Falling in love and losing out. "Love is challenging and risky, is not guaranteed to last forever, and a broken heart can be mended."

7. Living in a drug-filled world. Lesson learned is all about "moderating alcohol and other drugs meant to induce good feelings so that use does not cause bad decisions, at worst creating a reliance that is hard to break."

8. Being strapped for funds but trying to keep up with more affluent friends. Lesson learned: It takes work "to repay what is owed and the importance of living within one's means."

9. Stress from adjusting to the increased responsibilities that come with independence. "Coping with this challenge can teach how to moderate demand, physically maintain oneself, and keep the pressure down."

10. Negative feelings can overwhelm positive ones, leading to emotional disturbance. What do kids learn from this? "How to recover from intense unhappiness and develop strategies for maintaining a sense of emotional wellness."

11. Fear of the future and the ability to cope with the demands of adult responsibility. "Coping with this challenge can teach pride in having what it takes to brave the unknown and chart and chance one's course through life."

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.