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

Milestones: A son is engaged, Mom gets to bond over the ring.

He's her third and youngest and, at 44, the last to get married. Or he will be the last. Right now, he's engaged, and though he leads a very casual life style on the West Coast--there is not a button-down shirt nor suit in his wardrobe--his mother thought he might want to give his bride an engagement ring. A symbol to seal the deal. The bride to be--a physician with a demanding practice--was definitely not as casual in style. 

When she proposed the idea of his buying his fiancee a ring, her son liked it. He just didn't like the idea of shopping. Nonetheless, on a visit to his mom and dad in New York City, he and his mom went off to shop together. Destination: Tiffany's. I'll let the mom tell the story from here:

"When we got there, we told the saleswoman he wanted something understated but elegant--not a knock-your-socks off kind of ring. The first ring she brought out she said was just to see the style, but it came with a $62,000 price tag. We gasped and worked down from there. I was very careful to withhold any judgment about what to choose. I restrained myself from imposing my taste. After about an hour, my son said he had had enough looking, that he couldn't do this anymore. So we moved quickly. He chose a very lovely ring for a very reasonable price.

"Shopping together for the ring turned out to be a very emotional experience. For a son to agree to share with his mother a major life experience--getting engaged and giving his fiancee a ring; to trust me--that was important to me.  When we left Tiffany's, we walked the streets of New York and both felt elated."

 

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."

Crossing Boundaries: Tiptoeing thru a grownchild's house

This is a story Pat, who babysits her four grandchildren two days a week, tells me: She is careful--very careful--about housekeeping on the days she spends in her son's and daughter-in-law's house. If she sees dirty dishes in the sink, she'll clear them. If she sees a floor that's particularly dirty--and with four kids aged 5 through 12, floors are bound to get messy--she might clean it up. But not so that it's obvious. And she would never undertake a large, clean-up project, That is how she operates.

And yet, one day, her daughter-in-law came home from work, looked around her kitchen and asked her--in a tone that had an accusatory edge to it--whether she had rearranged her kitchen cupboards. Things had been moved around and re-stacked. But she had not had a hand in it, Pat informed her daughter-in-law. She knew nothing about it.

Turned out, her son had done it. He liked things arranged in an orderly way and upped and reordered the kitchen cupboard.

Phew. Not guilty. And yet: the first one to be blamed. No matter how carefully we tread, it is not easy to be a guest in a grown child's home.

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. 

 

Crossing Boundaries: The fine line between helping out a grown child and being intrusive.

Paterfamlias and I are arguing. To pull or not to pull the weeds. PF wants to sheer them down--they are almost as high as he is. I say, hands off. The reason: the weeds in question sit on a small plot in front of our daughter's home and, for all we know, may not be weeds. We are there, a day ahead of her return from spending a year abroad.  The plan is to meet her at the airport--not just her but the dog, the husband, our Grand and a ton of luggage--and help them settle back into their home. But also to make the beds and buy some basic groceries to see them through the first night and morning.

So there we are at her house--some 400 miles from ours. The tenant-for-the-year has departed and left the house clean. So we don't have to worry about that. And yes,  if this were our house, those weeds or whatever they are would be pulled or shorn. But it is not our house. We are not the gardeners in charge. And that's what I struggle to remember. We--PF and I--see all kinds of things we want to do to the house--buy new blinds [the tenant left one ripped],  a new cloth for the kitchen table [we can't find hers] and the list goes on: a bathroom rug, new towels for the guest bathroom, chairs for the front porch. It's all we can do to contain ourselves. But we must.

To do all we would like to do would be to put our imprint on her house. It would be to forget whose house it is and that it is an implied criticism to go out and make decisions--and take actions--about her house without asking her.

So we resist. The weeds stand tall;the kitchen table, bare. But the next day, when I mention to Alpha daughter that we had almost bought chairs for the front porch, she says, "That would have been nice."

Maybe I'm too busy worrying about being intrusive and not enough just going with the heart and the instinct to be helpful. Still searching for that fine line.

Parenting Grown Children: A grown daughter returns home from abroad

A year ago, I was filled with the warring emotions of sadness and joy. Joy that Alpha daughter was leaving on a great adventure: She and her family--one of my Grands and my son-in-law--would be living in Berlin for a year. What an opportunity. What an eye-opening challenge for my Grand who was then eight years old.

But sadness: They would be gone for a year--an ocean and many time zones away. As I wrote at the time, I felt the pain in parting. A friend whose daughter lived in Israel with her first grandchild said I could cheer myself up with visits--which I did, one with Paterfamilias and one by myself, which had satisfactions of a very singular kind, as I posted this winter. And then there was Skype and more Skype to make a connection feel like a real drop-in visit.

And now, Alpha Daughter returns in a few days. She'll move back to her house in a city that is only a few hundred miles from us.  I am filled with warring emotions again. The joy is in the return--she and her family will be in the same time zone as we are. We still won't be able to drop in whenever we want but visits will be much easier to do and more frequent.

But I feel a sadness as well. The adventure is over. Yes, it was her adventure not mine, but there were vicarious thrills for me: hearing about the friends she made, the colleagues she got to know, the trips to Paris and Prague, the little and big adjustments to life in another city and another language. The fun of learning German sayings. We ended our Skype talks with a cheery 'tschuss' rather than 'bye.'

So there it is. That cheery Tschuss is now a fond and final sigh of 'auf Wiedersehen.'