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

The Anxiety Brigade: When does the parental worrying stop?

They may not live in our houses anymore. They may have families and responsibilities way outside our ken. But we're still their parents. And we're still their children's grandparents.We may not worry about them on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis, but there are still times when that old anxiety rises. Since we're usually called on to be the ones who serve by waiting and watching--we're not usually in a position to do anything about what's happening to them--our worry meter can start to run as soon as we smell trouble or a challenge of any kind.  A friend's email spells out the complexity of the worries that can storm up in our role as parents of grown up children:

"Last weekend [my son] Marty went to the emergency room in the a.m. with chest pains. Jaycee [his wife] called me  to come over and watch the kids [9 and 11 years old] as she would be in the ER with him all day while the doctors did loads of tests. I was taking the kids here and there to their activities and had such anxiety I was operating like a robot. Marty's chest pains turned out to be pleurisy--coming after a really bad chest cold which he is prone to get fairly often. The doctors were able to rule out all other possibilities and pleurisy is very treatable with, of all things, Advil. He is feeling much better now, and he and Jaycee and the kids are on their annual RV trip.

"What absolutely amazed me was how vulnerable I was. I carried the remains of that anxiety the rest of the weekend. Thank God for pills. [My husband] Dave was feeding me Elavil like I was an addict.  Apparently the mother-kid thing lasts forever.

"I forgot to mention, that [my granddaughter] Alice tried out to become part of a dance company at a local dance academy where they choose kids to be part of a troupe that enters competitions and does recitals. She loves jazz and ballet and is quite good.  So I took her to the tryout since Jaycee was at the ER room with Mike. She would find out the following Monday if she made it.  Bottom line is, she did get in. But let me tell you, the anxiety over whether she would or not was the same as when I thought poor Marty might be having a heart attack."

Money Matters: A graduation gift that keeps giving

Let us now praise our college grads. Grown ups at last. Let's not minimize their accomplishment. They may have had their wild moments on campus, but they've made it through at least four years of academic rigor, learned something and matured.

Some of us want--and can afford--to reward that accomplishment with a gift that will give them a lift or leg up the ladder of life. Some parents deposit a check in a bank account. Some buy their college grads a car. Those thinking really big have come up with an even greater gift: an apartment.

For the parents whose children are moving to a big city, it's a two-fer. They give a gift and they rest easy, knowing their child is living in a safe place. For others, the gift of an apartment--which alleviates the need [or cuts the cost] for their child to pay rent or make mortgage payments--frees their child to take that nonprofit, do-good job that they couldn't otherwise afford to take. Or to take their time job hunting for the right slot. Whatever the reason, the New York Times reports that New York City realtors, in particular, are seeing a surge in such gifts--from native New Yorkers as well as parents from other parts of the country whose children are heading for a bite out of the Big Apple. For the latter, the apartment is part gift to themselves--it's potential pied-à-terre when the child decides to move on or it can be a place to crash when they come to the city to visit.

A condo can be a straight-out gift, sweetened by the current generous tax exclusion. Or it can be an  investment in which the parents retain ownership.

No good gift goes without rules to consider. Do the parents have a right to stay there or drop in whenever they want? Who pays for maintenance? Who makes the profit when the unit is sold?  One simple scenario: the parents buy and keep the apartment in their name and agree to pay the monthly carrying costs. The grown child lives there as a family member, not a renter.

And of course: We, the parents, are always welcome.

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:

 

 

 

Grandparenting: The legacy of the soccer pitch.

Hello soccer moms and dads out there. Or, rather, soccer grammies and grandpops. If it's spring, here we are again, out at the soccer pitch, only this time we're watching our grandkids swarm the ball, miss a kick, pick daisies, then suddenly, dribble down the field and score a goal. We went through this with our children when they were young and now we get to do it again--with these caveats.

We have been warned [and I use the "'we" both literally and figuratively] not to shout at games, not to coach our grandkids from the sidelines, not to be critical of their play after the game, not to rob them of the joy that participation brings. In short, keep our competitiveness in check and remember who's the parent and how those parents are choosing to handle this rite of passage in their child's life.

Along with those admonitions, though, there is a special bond in passing a sport or art--be it piano, acting, painting or anything else--down to our kids and then on to their kids. We are there to share the excitement and--given our vast past experience--understand the nuances of accomplishments small and large. For those of us who live far away from our grown children, we find that they take time from their busy lives to send us photos of special moments [see above: a grandson executing a move he has been practicing]. It comes with an email detailing the excitement of the parent. After all, who can he share it with? His parents (or more precisely, paterfamilias, his former coach), who have been there when he was just a kid and struggling to learn the finer points of the game. We are there now in spirit and consultation as his son and his daughters go out on the soccer pitch and learn to play as a team.

The transcendence is a wonder.

Money Matters: Who pays for what on vacation?

His son-in-law proposed the idea: The two couples--the daughter and her husband, the father and mother--plus another daughter would go on a short vacation together. They would rent rooms at a resort they all liked. Each one would pay for their own room and each night, one of them would be responsible for dinner--whether it was ordering pizza, buying food for a picnic or going out to a restaurant. Great idea. The son-in-law even took responsibility for figuring out when everyone would be available and for booking the rooms.

Then came the vacation. Unfortunately, in between the planning and the date, the son-in-law was accepted into a grad school course where he had been wait-listed, which meant he was tied up for the first part of the vacation. 

And that changed the dynamics of the trip. One room was canceled until the son-in-law could arrive. The two sisters bunked in with each other. "Softie that I am," dad says he paid for that room.  He also didn't have the heart to ask his daughters to pay for dinners. He picked those up, too. When his son-in-law showed up, he let him cater the pizza party.

It's a fine balance. When the best made plans go awry, the softie in us rises. The Dad enjoyed being away with his grown daughters--he hadn't vacationed with them since they graduated from high school. He'd like to do it again. The unplanned expense? Well, it didn't break the bank, and he doesn't feel it set a precedent for future trips. 

 

Grandparenting: The sin of interfering in our grandchildren's upbringing

"So our first grandparenting challenge is how to be involved in grandchildren's lives, without committing the grandparenting sin of interfering."

That's one of the opening lines in an English study on 21st century grandparenting. Based on 46 in-depth interviews of English grandparents, the University of Manchester study comes to the conclusion that most grandparents feel that interfering means they aren't being a good parent or grandparent. The study summed up the grandparents' opinion this way: "Grandchildren might be confused if they get mixed messages from parents and grandparents, and they might question their parents' authority."

Yes, we here in the U.S. don't want to be guilty of the mixed message, either. But what makes not interfering a challenge, according to the study, "is that grandparents naturally want the younger generations of their family to turn out well which can make it hard for them to stand back if they disagree with how their grandchildren are brought up." 

So true. The stakes are high. And we know the parent is the disciplinarian-in-chief. and yet, it takes a saint--or a very evolved grandparent--to hew single-mindedly to the non-interference track. So hard to see the right path and not share that wisdom.

But even among the English grandparents in the study, there are times when they found it appropriate to interfere: if they thought that grandchildren were being brought up in a way that could cause long-term damage, or if the parents were divorcing or splitting up and needed more support.

And if their grown children ask them for advice? "In this case," the study says, "interfering is more likely to be described as offering support."

The English are so nuanced.

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.”