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.

 

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?

 

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.

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.

 

Emerging Adults: The four stages of job-search anguish for our college grads.

A friend, whose 23-year-old son has been looking for a job for six months now, has been through several stages of search anguish. He's a graduate of a top college where he got good grades. Last year, a long search brought forth a one-year, low-paying internship with a nonprofit group. That ended in August. He is likely filled with anxieties about his future--none of which he is sharing with his parents. The dad has urged his son to go to graduate school--while the dad is still employed and can pay for it. It would get him out of a miserable job market and garner further qualifications for a good-paying job.  But the son doesn't know what kind of graduate school he's interested in. The mom wants to see him employed. And she is going through her own stages of acceptance of the difficulties her son's generation is facing in finding a job.

Stage One: mild annoyance with her son: "How long does he think we're going to support him? When I was his age, I couldn't lean on my parents. I had to get a job or starve."

Stage Two: anger at her son: "He's lazy. He isn't taken this seriously."

Stage Three: fear of her son being resigned to joblessness: "I think he's thrown in the towel. He doesn't seem to be trying. He won't discuss it with us. He won't even tell me if he followed a job lead I gave him--and I don't think he has."

Stage Four: the unthinkable: On a family vacation with her son, her husband's three brothers and their children, my friend sat and listened while an uncle asked her son what was happening on the job front. First surprise: he answered! Second surprise: he'd gotten a job offer. It was for a job with an NGO [non government organization] in an African country. The country, however, was a desperately poor one riven by political instability. He has not decided whether to take the job or not. My friend finds the thought of him going to such a dangerous place frightening. So the stage she is now in is this: "I wish I had $100,000 I could pay someone to hire my son."

Now that is something that, when she was her son's age, she never could or would have thought about. But isn't that what some of us come down to--if only we could find someone willing to give our grown child a chance, we'd pay them a bonus to do it.

 

Emerging Adults: Their frustration at not having a good job vs. our understanding it.

I am having lunch with a friend when I ask about her son, one year out of college: Did he get the job he was applying for?

As far as she knew, the answer was no. Or possibly, not yet. Her son, she says, is incommunicado on the subject of job hunting. She's tried to get around a direct assault by asking round-about questions, such as, what search engines are you using for your job search? He saw that one for what it was and cut her off.

"When," my friend wants to know "is it going to be okay to ask these questions? How long are we going to have to support him?" 

It's not as though the lack of employment and the need to live at home is easy on her son--on any grown child. It's a trip back to adolescence. In a recent posting by Carl Pickhardt, Ph.D, he talked about a young man who, almost a year after graduating from college, was stuck in an entry level job with no future opportunity in sight. The young man--someone's grown child--was feeling anxious, disappointed, and angry. Pickhardt's suggestions to his patient may offer some insights for those of us with unemployed grown children struggling through the detritus of the Great Recession:

Pickhardt starts off with this observation: "When the reality we expect fits the reality we encounter, our emotional response is usually less upsetting than when the reality we expect does not fit the reality we encounter."

His patient has created three kinds of positive expectations about the reality he would face after college graduation. He has PREDICTIONS about what will happen after graduating. (He will find a job.) He has AMBITIONS about what he wants to have happen after graduating. (He wants an interesting job that will advance him into a satisfying career.) He has CONDITIONS about what should happen after graduating. (He should be paid a comfortable income at whatever job he finds.)

None of the three kinds of expectations came to pass. Pickhardt lays out the result:

"Because the prediction of easy employment is violated by reality, and after seven months of looking and he has yet to land a job, he feels surprised and anxious. Because the ambition for finding work he really wanted to do is violated by at last taking a routine assembly line job, he feels disappointed and let down. Because the condition of making a comfortable living right away is violated by making entry level wages, he feels betrayed and angry.

"Now this young man has two sets of problems, not one. He has the problem of choosing how to proceed with his life, and he has the emotional burden of bearing unrealistic expectations. For the sake of his emotional well being, he needed to give up his unrealistic expectations and create a realistic set instead. This is what he came up with.

"Just out of college I need to expect it will be hard to find a job, any job, right away. So I really need to look hard. Right away, I probably won't get a job like the one I really want. So I need to take what I can get and go from there. And financially, whatever job I get, I should have to struggle to get by on however little I am able to make."

Pickhardt's bottom line: "Accept what you have and you free up some energy that was spent protesting against it. ...Choice of expectations in life psychologically matters because these mental sets can have such powerful emotional consequences. Thus recent college graduates who choose to hold unrealistic positive expectations about their immediate prospects in life usually do so to their unhappy cost."

Supporting Grown Children: Jobs, the economy and the future for college grads

Her son is 24, graduate of a good college where he got good grades and behaved well--well, well enough so that nothing shows on his record. Even his Facebook account is 'clean." But finding a job since he's gotten out of school: tough going. He's in that cohort I wrote about in a previous post: 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.

His mom has been warned--by the hostility of his answers--not to ask him how the job hunting is going. But shes' worried. Not just about how long she's going to have to help  support him since a minimum wage job, on those occasions when he has landed one, would not pay the rent in even a group house. But the real concern is about the long-term implications: Will it put him in a lower salary bracket than he might have earned had he come out of college when jobs were available; will he lose his zest and enthusiasm for trying hard and let the lassitude of unsuccessful job hunting bring him down. 

Kevin Carey, an education writer and policy analyst, did some research that gives fresh perspective on that particular worry. Carey went back and looked at what happened to kids in 1982--young adults who struggled to find jobs in another difficult recession--and wrote about his findings in The New Republic.

Of the "sad cases" described in newspapers in 1982 [cases similar to my friend's son], he found the formerly under- or unemployed thriving. One of them, a Peace Corps alum with a master’s degree in international affairs,had been toiling away at a “mindless” file clerk job. He went on, Casey reports, "to a series of nonprofit management jobs and, by 2010, was a senior research project supervisor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Health." Another "sad case" is "a senior manager at an international development consulting company that works under contract with USAID. Her recent work includes building railroads in cyclone-devastated Madagascar."

They overcame. They suffered under the recession in which they came of age but they made up for it over time. There's nothing good about an economic downturn--and certainly nothing good about one as deep and prolonged as this one has been. So this is a note of hope to my friend who is struggling with the day to day pain of watching her talented and worthy son struggle and fail in a terrible job market. It will get better, and in his lifetime. 

 

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.”