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

Emerging Adults: Their dating life and your input

"What does he see in her?" 'How could she go out with him?

As our kids move through their "serious" dating years--as they prepare themselves to find and settle down with Ms or Mr Right--we may get to meet a lot of their romantic interests. The historical  marriage age, after all, has moved up to 26 for women, 28 for men, and that could mean we'll witness either one or two long-term relationships or a lot of serial dating. Few of the "interests" will meet our criteria as worthy of our precious child's love and devotion. We inevitably set a high bar. But even so, some will fall far far below it. And the longer the relationship lasts, the more tempted we'll be to try to steer our child away from a mistake.

Not a good idea. As we all know, even if we can't help ourselves, negative input from mom and dad is likely to push two young people together. But what's a parent to do? I recently read some good tips on the subject in an AARP posting by Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, who's been a leading voice in research on "emerging adulthood," and Elizabeth Fishel, a writer on family issues. Here are some highlights beyond the "keep your opinions to yourself" stuff:

"If you must say something, comment on what you observe, rather than on the person in question...such as: "He puts you down" or "She interrupts you."  Sticking with observed behavior gives your son or daughter room to open up — or tell you to back off.

"Hold the judgments and...listen with empathy. We call this approach "friends with barriers," and it's all about the delicate balance between support and intrusion, between staying connected and being overly invested in your emerging adult's every move.

"Ask yourself what your child's relationship is providing that you're not seeing. Just considering this question reframes your perspective from criticism to greater understanding.

 

 

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.

 

 

Visiting Privileges: Talking to your grown children when the grandkids are around

A reader writes: "How do you have an adult conversation with your adult children when they are so focused on their children?" When the family is all together--out for a pizza dinner or sitting around in late afternoon--it is hard, he says, to get the conversation away from his grown children's constant monitoring of and chatting with the four- and six-year olds and onto affairs of the world or state. Or just anything that would constitute a grown-up conversation.

Is he being unrealistic? Is this the norm for how the generation of our grown children behaves. When I open the question to friends, most nod knowingly. Yes, their grown children are child-centric; yes, it's difficult to talk about anything that is not relevant to their offspring or of interest to said small children. What do they do about it? Grin and bear it. And wait for the pre-schoolers and kindergartners to grow into school-age children who can be induced to take an interest in the world outside the nursery  (if nursery is still an appropriate word).

"Children should be seen and not heard," is a point one friend made. He was harking back to what he thinks was his back-in-the-day day. But were our parents ready to ignore our presence to the extent that our grown children are not similarly willing? Is that progress? What would a Tiger Mother say? Her children would probably be giving us a large and loud dose of Mozart's Rondo a la Turk on the piano and there would be no room for conversation.

The reader's frustration may also hark back to the reality for our generation: We are no longer central to the family--our grown children are. We play by their rules. And we may not like them.

 

Letting Go: Knowing when to take our hands off the control button

We've all had an Aha! moment--the little epiphany that tells us, it's time to let go of the controls, that our children are adults and it's time to treat them that way. For me, it was when Alpha daughter came home from college for the summer of her junior year. She asked if I was excited about a vacation I was planning--a hiking trip in Corsica. I would be, I told her, except that I couldn't think about it: I had so much to take care of to get her brother and her ready to go back to school. "If you did a little less," she told me, "and we did a little more, we'd both be happier."

I thought about that moment when a friend from my own college days sent an email commenting on control issues and adding one from her own experience. "My son," she wrote, "had been married almost a year before it dawned on me that I should no longer buy his underpants."

Aha!

 

Emerging Adults: Is post-adolescent parenting a demotion?

Moving off the center of the stage--recognizing that we are no longer the key players in our children's lives--is an issue many of us struggle with. It starts  when our children move from being teens living at home to college students to young adults moving out into the world. Writing in Psychology Today, psychologist Carl Pickhardt looks at three phases of transitioning from parenting adolescent children to being mother or father to an adult. His overarching point is that it's easy to see this parenting passage as a demotion. And it is, but in the better sense of that word.

Here are some of Pickhardt's points:

"It is the blessing and the curse of doing their job well: when parents succeed in growing their children to independence, now these adults will act more independently of them.

"So does parenting end with parents not mattering? Not at all, if parents remain mindful of their primal roles. Remember how the little child called "Watch me!" "Listen to me!" "See what I can do!" "Let me tell you what I did!" What was it the little child wanted? The answer is parental attention, interest, and approval, needs the adult child never really outgrows.

"So when parents continue their roles as emotional supporter, as rapt audience, and as tireless cheerleader, what they have to offer their adult children never goes out of style, never loses lasting value."

Pickhardt ends with a quote from the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke: "Once the realization that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky."

"Loving the distance." What a fresh way to look at our loss of centrality as a gain.

The Kid Grows Up: They are more capable than we think

A friend writes a letter of admission: "I go to my 45-year-old daughter’s house once a month to OPEN HER MAIL and sort it. Otherwise she wouldn't do it. I also help with her taxes. She doesn't seem to know how to organize her papers." Though she sees her daughter as a person in need of her mother's organizational talents, last year my friend had her eyes opened on that account:

She writes: "This past May I was hospitalized (11 days in ICU, 2 weeks in Rehab, home, then back to hospital for pneumonia, pleurisy and severe anemia.) Through it all, my daughter was more than in charge.  She started a new job the day before I went in, yet she took care of me AND my friends. She set up a web thing where they could talk to her and each other, and she kept them informed of my progress.  When I got better (it took 3 months), I could finally talk to my friends. After saying they were so glad to hear my voice, they all said, "You have a wonderful daughter.'"

She still helps with her daughter's mail and taxes--old habits die hard; both are used to them--but she has new respect for her daughter's managerial abilities. She's even let her plan a vacation they took together. It was, she says, the first time she let her plan anything.

Emerging Adulthood: Finding something illegal in your grown child's possession.

A friend's college-sophomore son came home for Spring break. Rule of the house: do your own laundry. But morning of day he was to leave and return to school, his room was piled high with dirty laundry. The mom was holding her ground on the rule when the dad asked his son to help him out at a soccer game he was coaching. The mom, liking the idea of father and son coaching together, decided she'd "help out" by doing her son's laundry. When she was dumping the first load from washer to dryer, she discovered she'd washed his wallet--it had been in the pocket of a dirty pair of pants. I'll let her words take the story from here:

"So i took everything out of the wallet to let things dry. And I found a fake ID [a driver's license form another state, giving his age as 21]. I was very upset about it. It's illegal to have such a thing and when our son was home at Christmas break, he'd gotten drunk with a friend and caused a commotion in our backyard that caused a neighbor to call the police. I didn't want to confront him with the fake ID so when everything was dry, I put it all back in the wallet --except the fake ID. I kept it.

"When he came home, I told him about washing the wallet by mistake. Later, as he was getting ready to leave for the airport, he went through it. And he asked, Wwhere's my ID?' I said, 'Your ID [his real license] is in your wallet.' Well, he got really angry and we were shouting at each other. I said the fake ID was illegal and that given the drinking problems last Christmas, this was no way to win back his parents trust. He said he didn't use it to buy liquor. He used it to get into concerts. The shouting went on. It got so bad I refused to drive him to the airport.

"He hasn't spoken to me since. I wrote him an email explaining why I did what I did and how I felt about fake IDs. He sent back a reply that was just short of saying f--- you."

What an issue! You find something illegal in your 20-year-old's possession, something that could, in the long run, bring him harm. But you found it going through his wallet--even though you didn't mean to be going through his personal items.

My friend says her friend with a son her son's age says, "all the kids have fake IDs. Forget about it." She doesn't buy that would-you-jump-off-the-cliff argument.

I asked a friend who has a 24-year-old son what he would have done. "It depends on what was going on in the household. Were the parents letting their son have parties in the home where his friends were allowed to drink? If so, they don't have much to stand on about using the fake ID to buy liquor. I would have taken the ID but talked to my son directly about it--about my concerns about under-age drinking. I wouldn't have waited for him to discover it was gone."

Paterfamilias, a lawyer when he's not a sounding-board dad, saw the situation differently. He was not primarily troubled by the illegal document but by the mom's actions. By his lights, she should not have looked in the wallet--should not have taken stuff out to dry. And if she did and found the fake ID, she should have tucked it back into the wallet. If there was an issue about drinking and his buying liquor with a fake ID, she should address that separately--not connect it to the fake ID. Going through his wallet, however inadvertent, and then using what she found there to confront her son, "breaks a bond of trust."

Another friend, whose youngest is 33, makes light of the "illegal" act. She had a fake ID when she was growing up in Brooklyn. All her friends did. LIke me, this friend had an intrusive mother. So she reacted as I did: "I would have tucked it back in and never said a word about it."

For some of us, a fake ID is not a big crime. But what if the item she found was worse--illegal drugs, say, or evidence of an interset in child pornography? Does that change the way a parent would react? It's a slippery slope between inadvertently finding damaging evidence and behaving like an intrusive snoop.