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

Parenting Grown Children: An adage to remember when arguments get messy

Here's a line to remember when we have a spat with our spouses or kids: "Conflict is inevitable but combat is optional."

Susan Adcox posted this Max Lucado line on her grandparents.com blog. She says she tries to remember the maxim when she has disagreements with her husband but "when it comes to family disputes, there's no surefire way to avoid them and no single best way to deal with them."

When we push one of the hot buttons we have with our grown children--or they push ours--the conflict may escalate into combat before we know it, and we may find ourselves powerless to stop it. It's much safer to go have a conflict with a spouse, with whom we have a one-on-one track record of 30 to 40 or more years. Been there, done that spat before. And we know we'll lay down arms and get back to our normal non-combative selves before long.

But with our grown kids, the relationship is somehow more volatile. Yes, we've got a long track record with them, but the stakes couldn't be higher. An argument with them carries the ultimate threat: They could cut off contact with us. Combat may be an option but loss of visiting privileges is not one we want anyone to exercise.

 

 

Parenting Adult Children: Will grown children ever appreciate their parent's world view?

When Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club came out, I sent a copy to my mother.

It was an interesting choice. The book, which details the lives of four women born in China and their daughters who grow up in America, covers the travails the younger generation [me] face when the immigrant mothers [my mother] are too firmly rooted in Old World ideals and ideas. I thought it would be a chance to discuss with my mother the tensions that lay between us.

She called after she read it. She loved the book. It was, she told me, just like her relationship with her mother. Turns out, we both saw ourselves as the younger generation jousting against our parent's Old World disciplines to find our place in the new culture.

More recently, I read Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin, a South Korean writer. [The book won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011].

In this book, all the children love the mother--mom--who goes missing. [Elderly and ill, she is parted from her husband by crowds at the Seoul subway station.] The book is partly about how we children take our mothers for granted, how we see them only as "mom", with no other life than that of being our mother. We hardly know our parents, Shin seems to be saying. And yet, the impact of Mom on her grown children is pervasive, powerful and dynamic. It seeps in everywhere--even though the Mom in Sook's book was an unassuming and uneducated woman.

In its way, it is the same struggle depicted by Amy Tan, although told in the voice of the grown children and with more of a guilt-trip edge to it. The children ask themselves, now that their mother is missing, why they took her for granted and why they treated her questions as intrusive inquiries into their lives rather than as her quest for knowledge. It certainly laid a guilt trip on me who kept my mother at bay with terse answers to her questions about my career and any parts of my life I feared sharing with her.

I think of both books now that the shoe is on the other foot--now that I am the mother with an older generation's ideas and the thirst to know more about my adult children's lives. Dare I share Please Look After Mom with them? Would we both see ourselves as the children fighting to set our mark and keeping our mothers at a distance so we can move forward unencumbered--and without their generation's disapproval? Maybe I should send them the pair of books. We could really get after that generational question.

Parenting Adult Children: Accepting the direction or misdirection their lives take

Some twenty years ago, Anne Lamott chronicled in "Operating Instructions" her first year as a single parent. It's been a mothering favorite--it has an almost cult-like following--since it appeared. Now comes the bookend, "Some Assembly Required," which lets us know how the baby, Sam, who's at the center of O.I., became a father himself at 19--making Lamott a grandmother.

 In discussing the new book, an olnline panel of New York Times readers (Motherlode book club panelists) talked about how they were drawn to the question the book raises: acceptance of what grown children choose to do with their lives. "The peculiar thing about it, and the thing that makes Some Assembly Required so different from Operating Instructions," they suggest, is that "the parent of an adult child with a problem is 'one step removed from desperate.'”

It can be the harder step. It's so difficult to stand by and see our grown children make their way through troubling situations or suffer the consequences of an unfortunate event or from an illness. It's harder to watch than to be the one in a position to act--and we're the watchers now. This was brought home to me recently when a friend's daughter was diagnosed with a chronic and debilitating illness. My friend's suffering is palpable and yet, she writes in an email, her daughter "is being so brave--unrealistic?--and is pushing herself to be active. It's painful to observe. I'm trying hard to compartmentalize and force some thoughts out and others in.  And I have to think positive thoughts and hope that wonderful new treatments can be effective. I'm not always so morbid.  It comes and goes."

The Motherlode panelists make a similar point: “Accepting” that your son will be a father at 19, or that he will travel the world without your help, is a different kind of acceptance" than memoirs usually deal with. Which dovetails with the real-world acceptance my friend has had to find with regard to her daughter. And the pain she feels being "one step removed from desperate."

While the crux of Operating Instructions was unexpected single motherhood, Some Assembly Required is in itself "one step removed": Lamott has less power to control events. This time around, it's her story to tell from the outside looking in--it is, after all, her son's life (and he writes some chapters of the book). But it's just another way in which, no matter how close we are to our grown children, we move off--forced or voluntarily--from the center of their lives.

 

Misunderstanding Social Media: The isolation of the Internet connection

I checked in with the Educated Grandparent, a site that's on my blogroll. The two women who write it--both grandparents and social workers --recently posted on a topic that is a hot button issue for many of us with grown children (and grandchildren as well): the invasiveness of social media activity, or as they put it "the technological world of internet, Android phones, iPads and instant gratification."

In a post they title Help! Help! Our Children Are Drowning in Technology, their worry is that "we're living in a world of virtual reality. It separates parents from children and us from each other. Talk TO me, not AT me. We definitely do things faster but not better. The internet, with its Facebook and blogs, is supposed to unite us but it really isolates us."

It's especially frustrating for those of us of a generation that expects visitors--our grown children, our grandchildren--to chat with us when they're sitting at our kitchen table.The Gameboy should be stored in the backpack; the cellphone set on mute--unless we want to let them play a game on our cellphone with us. Competitive BrickBreaker, anyone?

And yet, though our sense of social interaction demands eye to eye contact, we need our visitors to keep us up to date on the new tools. We can complain all we want about how unsatisfying a virtual Facebook friend is and how limiting twitter communication is, but personally, I also feel a need to be with it. I have a nephew who's in college. I can email him all I want and never get an answer. I can call him on his cell phone and reach a dead end. But if I text him, a reply comes right back at me. That's the way of their world.

So we can joke, complain and even sit back and marvel at the silliness of some smart phone apps, but they are part of our children's reality. Do we lose communication with them if we cut ourselves off from the technology?

Educated Grandparent ends with a wonderful little anecdote, one that makes you wonder what the point of keeping up is. "A friend of ours just bought a brand new smartphone," they write. "He showed us all its tricks and then said, “Look at this!” He typed in the name of our restaurant ...and sure enough, there it was on the screen of his phone. “Isn't this the greatest thing you've ever seen?” he gloated, “This is right where we are.” The only problem was we already knew where we were."

Yes we do. But the frustrating thing is that where we are is not where the world is going. Do we also need to adapt to move forward in our grown- and grand children's wake?