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

Fighting over the grandbaby: New grandparents behaving badly

The Scottish poet Robert Burns had it right: "O would some power the giftie gie us, to see ourselves as others see us."

I was reminded of that line while reading a Carolyn Hax advisory in the Sunday Washington Post. Here's the gist of the complaint: Young couple with first baby are facing out-of-control competition by grandparents for them--new mom, new dad, new baby--to come visit. The divorced grandmother resents any visits to her ex--one of the granddads. Meanwhile, the young dad's  parents keep count of how many times they visit them versus one of her parents. "It has gotten so bad," the new mother [and someone's grown child] writes, "that they ask us where we are on weekends to see whether we are at another grandparent's house, and if we are, all hell breaks loose."

I know wherein she speaks. Several of my friends have voiced concern that the other grandparents get to see their grandchild more than they do, that the other set will have more influence over, gain more love from, be more important to the grand child. The feelings run deep. I've had little inklings of them myself--don't we all? Fortunately, most of us keep these thoughts and emotions to ourselves or vent them to friends. As you can tell from reading this Post clip--"how can we help them to understand how hurtful it is to be given so much guilt"--the situation there is out of control. But more to the point, there's nothing these grandparents are gaining by making their grown children feel guilty.

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

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

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

Traveling in Asia: Sharing your trip with the grandkids

Paterfamilias and I have returned from our trip to Vietnam. We are still recovering from jet lag and the challenges of dealing with the impenetrable language [they use the same alphabet as we do but not the same pronunciation of the letters], the different culture [this was our first trip to a country not dominated by Western language and thought], the traffic [hundreds of thousands of motorbikes; no traffic lights!] and the climate [hot and hotter in the south, though it was winter].

While we were there, we decided we would share the trip with our Grands. Almost every hotel we stayed at--from the shabby place in the Mekong Delta to the spiffy hotel in Ho Chi Minh City [Saigon] to the business-like hotel in Hanoi--had a computer with access to the Internet. So every evening before we went out to dinner we sat down at the computer and distilled the day for our Grands--filtering the day's activities to focus on what a 6-, 7- and 8-year old would find interesting.

So, we gave them our rules for crossing the streets [if there's a Vietnamese person crossing, go with them. If not, wade into the traffic and walk across it at a stately, measured pace; do not look at the traffic--it will terrify you and make you stop in your tracks and that would be a dangerous thing to do.] We told them how hard it was to speak VIetnamese [Nguyen is pronounced Win; Thu is pronounced Toe; Thuy is pronounced Twee--and that doesn't account for having one of 8 accents on the vowel]. We told them how sweet and friendly the children were [When we were bike riding in rural Mekong Delta, kids would run over and call out, "Hallo, Hallo." One little boy jumped on his bike, rode over to us and called out, "Hallo, Hallo. Good Afternoon," and rode away laughing merrily.] We would describe an ancient temple or tomb we saw and give them Internet links to it. When we moved from city to city, we encouraged them to get their maps out and follow our progress from the south of the country to the north and then over to Cambodia.

One of the wonderful things about emailing about the country and culture we were experiencing was getting an occasional email back--either a question from one of the Grands or a comment from one of our grown children to the effect of how much they were enjoying the reports and the details. In our last email, the day we were leaving to fly back home, one of the Grands is reported to have said, "Oh no. They're coming home. Does this mean no more emails?"

Bottom line:The feeling of inclusion with our children and their children while we were far from home was beyond wonderful. We were still connected.

Getting the Empty Nest Back: Living with you had its hardships on them, too.

Most of the stuff I read on kids moving back home with their parents focuses on the challenges for the parents: The loss of privacy; the need to share personal space; the noise level that seems to keep rising; the questions over who pays for what. I could go on--and you can read all about it in some previous posts. Recently, I came across a Baby Boomer Grandparent blog that had some insight in what it was like for the grown kids to live with their parents in their parent's home. IN this case, the grown children, who had moved home [due to financial difficulties] and finally moved on, out and into a neighboring house.

Here's an excerpt:

"It’s moving day again!  Six months have passed since our son and his family [three small children] have moved in with us.  .... After their first week in their “new” house, I saw the immediate change in my daughter-in-law.  She was calmer and for the first time in months didn’t feel it was necessary to tell the kids to be quiet.  I gave her a hug and thanked her for being such a great house guest all those months.

Six months have passed and although my son still doesn’t have a full time job, my daughter-in-law was called back to her full time job and he took her part time one.  They have settled into the house and are considering buying it soon."