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

Emerging Adults: When is it time to cut the cord on financial support?

 These have been rough economic times and they aren't over yet. Young adults (recent college grads in particular) are having a much harder time than we did in latching onto a career job--harder even than their older brothers and sisters. There are  economic stats and charts ad nausea that support the discouraging outlook.

All of which brings up the question: Should we help support our struggling young adults and if so, for how long?

                                                  
  

The question is discussed in a recent column by Carl Pickhardt who writes about adolescence but often about the upper end of a still-turbulent age--the 18 to 23 year olds. Here are some his observations about extending their financial dependence on us:

--Some of us may "enjoy parenting and don’t want to quit or don’t know when to quit or believe a period of older adolescent struggle is no time to quit or that a good parent never quits or they have an older son or daughter who doesn’t want them to quit."

--"Just as parenthood doesn’t come with a set of directions for how to get started, there is no fixed schedule for financial letting go. Thus many parents continue their parenting by offering extended help, often of the financial kind, until a firm hold on young adult independence is finally gained."

--"What age should young people be expected to live dependently at home before leaving and beginning their actual independence? There is so much cultural variation. In the United States, we seem to have a common parental expectation that after high school graduation age, young people should be ready to move off more on their own. ...The point is: there is no universally fixed schedule for when the departure from home and the undertaking of full financial independence should begin."

--"In one sense, the young person who claims the inability to “afford” to live independently on the little money they can make may not exactly be speaking the truth which is that they can’t live as comfortably as when living with parents. In fact, electing comfort they may be missing out on learning some pretty powerful survival skills such as doing without, scraping by on less, prioritizing fundamental needs, buying cheap, sticking to a budget, making ends meet, living within one’s modest means, and maybe working more than one job to get from one week to the next to support a fragile independence. So if your son or daughter is up to the hardship, don’t automatically jump in and try to spare them the challenge."

--"You want parental help to foster self-help, not discourage it. This is why the helping contract must be conditional: 'Before we help you, we need to see efforts (actions, not words) of self-help from you first; and once we start helping you, we need to see evidence that you are gathering more power of independence as you grow.'”

--"[P]arenting is a lasting commitment -- to be there for your children whatever their age, not only in constant love, but in times of need. Life is an unpredictable journey, what Thomas Wolf called “the groping accident of life,” where happenstance for good and ill plays a huge role in the challenges that arise and must be met. It is a source of security to know that membership in family is life-long."

To end this post on a more mundane note, here's a chart reflecting a study by Pew Research Center on the change since 2005 of the percent of us who are helping to support our young adults.

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Understanding Social Media: Questions of etiquette

Gotta face the truth: We will never understand--or accept--all the subtleties of social media. There is a generation gap. Not that we don't have Facebook, Twitter, and other social media accounts. StumbleUpon, anyone?

 

The gap comes in the way we use those sites and the way our adult children--and their children--do. I'm not talking about the teen-like behavior of letting it all hang out there on the ether--the stupid pranks played on friends, the rowdy behavior at beer parties, the unfortunate experiments with illegal substances, all the stuff we know shouldn't be up there for future employers (or even us) to read. Stuff we may even warn our emerging adults or grandchildren about.

What I'm talking about are subtle offenses as we stay in touch via the Internet. To judge by the advice columns, a lot of us get really upset over our adult children or their children sending us an email thank you note instead of penning one on paper. Personally, I think we just have to get over it and be glad we got any acknowledgement at all. What's the big difference between pen/paper and a txt message or an email--or even a Facebook acknowledgement? A thanks is a thanks.

But breaches of etiquette can be trickier than a thank you note. A recent writer to Philip Galanes  Social qs in the New York Times wrote about a young man in his early 20s who posted his father's death on his Facebook page and announced it via Twitter to his friends and followers. The young man's mother--who was the father's ex wife--was appalled. So, how serious a breach of etiquette was it?

Galanes agreed that Facebook and Twitter are "too chilly for sharing tragedies with our nearest and dearest. Not to mention that these posts would be sandwiched between gags by Jimmy Fallon and clips of Honey Boo Boo." Social media, he suggests, is better suited to spreading the word to workaday pals.

That said, Galanes faces reality. "It’s only natural that he would turn to his comfort zone in a time of grief. For you and me and others north of 32, that would almost certainly involve a telephone. But for your son, who probably picks up the phone to speak rarely, if ever, his impulse would be to text and tweet and post his sad news on Facebook. There is little use in bemoaning our changing times. I just hope we all find what we need in our dark hours."

Just to put the "changing times" in perspective. A recent Pew survey on the use of social media in political life, found 60 percent of American adults use either social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter; 66 percent of those social media users--or 39 percent of all American adults--have used social media to post their thoughts about civic and political issues, react to others' postings, press friends to act on issues and vote, follow candidates, ‘like' and link to others' content, and belong to groups formed on social networking sites.

That being the case, is it any wonder that young adults who grew up on Twitter and Facebook would use it not just for civic statements but to express other near-to-their-heart sentiments and a thanks to their parents or gramps.

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A friend I haven't seen in a while has moved back to my city. Her daughter and family live here. So she and her husband have a built in welcoming committee. At least, that is how we outsiders whose children live elsewhere see it.

As she and I are talking--we are trying to make plans to have lunch--I suggest we meet onThursday or Friday of the next week.

She is hesitant. She and her daughter are planning to have lunch on one of those days, but the daughter hasn't let her know which one yet. "It's a difficult situation," my friend says. My answer: "Let me know which one your daughter doesn't want and we'll have lunch on that day."

I don't need to know the specifics about "difficult." I just know we are all on eggshells and in touchy situations when we deal day-to-day with our grown children. We want to do things together--have lunch with a daughter, invite a son over for dinner--but some of us are wary of intruding on their time and in their lives. And they seem to be equally wary about being intruded upon.

Whatever difficulty my friend and her daughter are having, I figure I can at least be willing to help. We may have to be flexible when it comes to our grown children--adaptable in finding graceful ways to accommodate their needs--but when it comes to friends we can just be flexible, as in plain old flexible.

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Grandparenting: A home run with the Grands and the Grown Kids

"Only connect." That's the guiding principle of E. M Forster's Howard's End. And it applies to our lives as they revolve in and around our grown children and their progeny. We're always looking for that special way to connect--to say something meaningful or just amusing that hopefully they'll remember us by or think of us fondly by.

All of which is a long way around saying that in that regard, I Hit a Home Run. At least I think I did. Both my grown children and their families live in cities impacted by the mountain of snow that fell in early February. [Does that storm have a name yet? If so, I missed it.] In any case, when a friend sent a series of snow humor cartoons my way, I clipped two that I thought would inspire the young "build stuff in the snow" set and sent them to my Grands via their parents' email.

This was one

This was the other

I got the ultimate compliment, given the limits of email correspondence: I quote my daughter-in-law's message in full: "Kids got a kick out of this." Short but sweet. In my mind's ear, I can hear them chuckling over the clips.

Warms the heart. Makes all that downloading and dragging of images (some of the images were not appropriate for the younger set)--and the pleasure you anticipate the Grands will get--worth the effort.

In case you're wondering what sort of snow humor would not be quite right for toddlers and pre-teens, here's one I'm still giggling over.

 

 

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Supporting Adult Children: The line between "Yes" and "Not Anymore"

Our kids coming out of college have been struggling--it's hard to find a job, no less one that is a stepping stone to a career. A lot of us are supporting those kids, either by hosting them rent free at home (goodbye emtpy nest) or giving them a monthly stipend while they job hunt. When times are tough, tough love doesn't quite seem the right answer. But when does the helping hand stop? Even if we can afford it, is there a point at which we have to tell our kids to sink or swim?

That was a question Carolyn Hax dealt with in a recent column. A mom, whose 26 year old daughter had had an assortment of odd jobs, finally landed a job at an art gallery--a job in her career arc. The mom has continued to give her daughter a $2,500 a month stipend to help cover living expenses. But she would like to break the habit. "I feel she should shoulder more of her own expenses, given what she earns. There always seems to be some unexpected expense that crops up, though, preventing me from cutting back my support." The latest unexpected expense: the daughter wants to quit the job and open up her own art gallery with a co-worker, who would provide the financial banking--but not a living wage for the daughter. 

The mom wants to retire but her retirement income isn't big enough to continue to support her daughter at the $2,500 a month level. There is a nagging reason why this mom keeps shelling out money: If her daughter fails at her endeavor, she might be destitute and "then she might have to move back in with me, which would be an intolerable situation."

It's easy enough to say, as Hax does, "Cut this parasite off." When the daughter worked odd jobs, Hax says, the mom was an enabler laboring under the fig leaf of need. But now, "you have proof that you're not preempting poverty, you're insulating her from the cost of her choices."

The fear for many of us is just this: if we don't help out, our children will slip into living in a way that we can't tolerate--and it will happen to them (guilt-inducing music in the background, please) while we have a comfortable place to live and more than enough food to eat. I hear friends raise the question of whether we owe it to our children--and to ourselves--to keep them out of poverty while they find their footing. The issue they raise: Can we afford not to do it?

Tough questions. And hard to deliver the tough love answer to our kids. There are practical issues--what happens when we can no longer afford to help, or like this mother, are ready to retire but can't afford to do so until our children have made their way up the career ladder. By continuing to support them, are we standing in the way of their being able to take care of themselves.

Carl Pickhardt, a psychologist who specializes in adolescence has this observation for parents of young adults: "Just as parenthood doesn’t come with a set of directions for how to get started, there is no fixed schedule for financial letting go. Thus many parents continue their parenting by offering extended help, often of the financial kind, until a firm hold on young adult independence is finally gained."

The tough part is not the tough love but knowing where that line of independence is or ought to be.

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Money Matters: There's still a positive ROI in a kid's college education

Does it pay to pay for your kid's college? That's a question that's being raised in many circles as the recovery from the recession drags on and our college grad kids struggle to find a career job. Our sons and daughters who took out loans and now have to start repaying them--without a job to help them do it--are questioning whether they should have racked up that debt. And those of us who invested in our children's college education may be wondering how wise it was to put our money into tuition, room and board--upwards of $200,000 for some of us--when our kids are struggling to find work. What kind of return on investment is that?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics latest figures suggest that, all other issues aside, it is financially still a worthy investment. The unemployment rate for college graduates was just 3.7 percent in January and that was less than half the rate (8.1 percent) for those with only a high school diploma. Here are the stats in chart form:

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

 

Catherine Rampell, writing in the New York Times blog Economix, notes, "the wage premium for those with a bachelor’s degree compared to those without one is also growing, particularly when you factor in the fact that college-educated people are more likely to be employed at any given time than less educated workers. One troubling trend hidden in all of these numbers is that the unemployment rate for those with some college but no degree — 7 percent — is not that much lower than that for people with no college at all."

Bottom line: It's not only worth the investment, it's worth that extra push to get them to stay the college course.

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Emerging Adults: The line between being a parent and becoming a best friend

I didn't mean to eavesdrop. It couldn't be helped. I was sitting at Panera's having a late morning latte when a trio of friends sat down at a table next to me and started chatting. In my defense, they were using their outside voices--or close to it.

I started picking up on the conversation when one man, a father, started waxing caustic about his son's request to be treated as a "best friend" rather than as the man's son.

"I told him," the dad reported to his captive audiences, "I'm your parent. I'll be your best friend when I can come to your house, open the refrigerator and eat anything I want; when I can drink your milk right out of the carton; when I can sleep over anytime I want; when I can drop by without letting you know; when I can leave without closing the door."

His friends all gave him a fist-bump of an Amen. Given his parade of horribles, I did too, although I did want to turn around and reassure him that his young-adult son was likely to outgrow his juvenile habits; that if he could give his son growing bits of leeway, their relationship would morph from parental disciplinarian to comradely adviser. His son might be chaffing against parental control--isn't that what growing up is all about?--but the dad was fortunate that his son wanted a friendly relationship, even if it was an eventuality. But I kept my comments between me and my latte.

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