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

Emerging Adults: What, me worry? All about a college grad who lacks ambition, to say nothing of a job.

I had lunch with a friend  who was worried sick about her college-senior son. Her complaint: He is directionless and unable to take action to get a job. Not only hasn't he signed up with his college's job-search office or applied to opportunities his mother has suggested or unearthed. He hasn't even written a resume--no less let his parents review it for him.

           

His post-grad plans, such as they are, include living in an apartment with his current roommate--a chemical engineering major--who landed a high-paying job with a corporation. How will he pay the rent? his mother asked. "He told me his roommate might help him out for a few months," the mom says, clucking her tongue and getting angry all over again.

It's scary. College days--and the comparative irresponsibility of those years--are coming to an end. Reality needs to be faced. When she was his age, this mom says, "I knew no help would be coming from my parents. I was on my own. You can bet I had a job by the time I graduated."

These years when our children are "emerging adults" are tricky ones. A lot of "tough love" v. "helping hand" decisions are suddenly upon us. Job  hunting is no one's idea of a good time. My friends older son, who graduated from a top liberal arts college, is still struggling to find a "career" job. He's taking himself off to graduate school next year--he sees that as the only way to get ahead in his field. His younger brother can't help but know how tough it's going to be out there. A good athlete and student, he seems almost unnerved by having to try his wings in an arena where he doesn't know if he'll be "good" or not. 

Mother and son are barely speaking at this point. The dad's job has taken him out of the country for long stretches so she feels she is on her own in guiding this talented but un-ambitious son.

I try to reassure her that he will grow out of his lackadaisical style, that he will figure things out.  [I've written this post on the outgrowing phenomenon.] That's what a growing body of literature suggests will happen. For my friend in the eye of the storm, it's hard to keep any perspective about eventual growth and growing up. Not when so many of her son's friends have done so already.

 

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Parenting Grown Children: Feeling our way when they are in harm's way

I was obsessed with the Boston Marathon-Watertown attacks. Followed the hour-to-hour headlines the first few days. When the action moved to Watertown on Thursday night and lock-down Friday, that changed. I became a live-action addict as police cars were spotted moving toward some sort of end game. Me and millions of others.

I had an additional reason for my addiction: A grown child--Alpha daughter and her family--lives on a street that's on the Watertown border.  Her emails were, as Uber son put it on his Facebook posting, "like a postcard from the edge of civilization."

The first one on Friday morning: "A minute ago, Tao started barking her alarm bark, and we looked out the window ... to see a lone man crossing Mt. Auburn St. (Belmont Ave.) wearing a hoodie and a baseball cap. ... Kind of weird. Weird that anyone would wear that right now. We decided he was bigger than the fugitive. However Tao is on alert by the window. Our neighbor, who just graduated from Rindge, was on the wrestling team with the guy (the younger brother) and said he was really nice, everybody liked him. Madness..."

Her brother called her to say that if she could find a way to do it, she should bundle the family in the car and drive to his house--2.5 hours to the west. She couldn't, of course. A few hours later on Facebook she posted this:

"Police helicopter hovering over the house & police lining the street at the end of the block, swat team in church -- we live on the Watertown line. Not sure when dog walking will be possible."

I was filled with nervous energy all day. There she was in a house that, it turned out, was nine streets away from the boat where Dzhokhar was shocked and awed out of his hiding. The town diner where swat teams assembled and police hung out--an easy walk from her house, one we take all the time when we visit.

We were all flooded with relief when the end finally came. For the country, for Boston, for Watertown--and on a more personal level, for my own little family. When our children are in the slightest bit of danger, our tiger-bear fur ruffles up. But the cubs are grown up, living their lives, managing this difficult experience without our help. It's their experience, not ours. They were under seige, not us.

And yet I still feel the need to vent, to bore friends with the "close call," such as it was. To show them the maps and point out where Alpha daughter lives, where the shootout was, where the boat was housed in a backyard--so close to her house and yet far enough away. I don't want to inflict my worries on my daughter--even in hindsight. But that doesn't make them go away. So I'm unloading on friends and on my blog. Does no harm. My silver lining: how bro and sis reached out to each other in a time of stress--and not with a heavy hand.

There's at least one person I know who shares my unease. A co-worker says his daughter, a graduate student in Boston, was walking from Brookline toward the Marathon finish line when the bombs went off. "She was too far off to see anything, but it was a close call nonetheless," he tells me. I understand. So far and yet so near.

 

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Re-Nesting: Our grown kids can make their fortune by moving back in with us.

We've all read or heard stories--or experienced the real thing--about college grads (or even older kids) moving back home. Thank you Great Recession and the Oh-So-Slow Recovery.

But that's only part of the re-nesting story. As I've written in a previous post, having our adult children live on their own after college is a socio-economic and cultural phenomenon. In many other countries (first world and otherwise), it's accepted as the norm that the kids will live at home until they marry. And for good reason: When they have a job, they can save money for their future connubial adventure or to invest in an entrepreneurial dream.

            All of this is the long way around reporting about a formula I came across recently: How much a stay with mom and dad is worth. The logarithm factors in the usual stuff--rent and food, as well as the other perks of living at home, such as having an Internet connection and cellphone paid by the parents and having laundry done by the host (usually, the hostess.)The findings? I'll let The Calculator tell it:

"I wish I’d lived in my parents’ basement the last four years. I’d be $85,000 richer. That would put me in down payment [on a condo] territory already.... Instead, I wasted all my money on rent, food, and TV."

Our hero kept a detailed spreadsheet of everything he spent in his four post-college-grad years living at home and used that journal to create, as he puts it, "a breakdown of the money I washed away."

 

Want to know what you're host-home is worth to your grown kid? You can go to the “living with your parents” calculator and plug in rent and other expenses (or use The Calculator's estimates of his spending habits) and see how much your grown child would save in four years of living in his or her old room at your house. Hint: The Calculator assumes you'll pay for car insurance and put him or her on your health insurance and that the money saved from living at home would be invested to earn a return.

Bottom line: Re-nesting is worth a sizable nest egg for them. For us, it's a less monetary formula: A chance to experience quality and quantity time with them. Fortune and fortunate tied up in one small bedroom. 

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Parenting Adult Children: Great gift ideas for grown children

In the annals of family gift-giving, I scored a home run recently: I gave my daughter—a grown child who already has 1 husband, 1 child, 1 dog, 1 highly competitive job and 1 small house -- the gift of once-a-fortnight housecleaning service.

 Not that I barged in with the present virtually wrapped in cheery gift paper.  I was, in fact, wary of presenting her with a gift that she might take as criticism of her and her spouse’s housekeeping skills. So I asked before I gave and I framed it this way: Given all the demands on her time, I didn’t see why she should use precious energy vacuuming, dusting and scouring her house when help was available—help that I could make happen.  

Reader, she did not take umbrage—she was thrilled. She had been thinking about it herself and trying to figure out a way to stretch her tight budget to cover the cost.

Score one for parents looking for gifts that can delight as well as help their grown children—whether that child is struggling financially or could use the boost of a little indulgence.

I stumbled into my unusual present, but others have given gift-giving more thought and come up with  presents that their grown children have really appreciated. The seven brilliant ideas of others are listed in my article on NextAvenue, the PBS Web site for baby boomers--everything the 50+ set is dealing with.

You can check them out there: "8 Gifts Your Grown Children Will Truly Appreciate." They range from paying off some of their debts--as in, a year's worth of monthly car payments--to providing meals when a new-born baby arrives to opening a Roth IRA retirement account for them.

Go forth and give non-gadgets.

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Emerging Adults: Giving up the old adolescent tics and other annoying habits

One of my children--he shall go nameless--was a mess as an adolescent: a mess in the sense that his clothes (clean and dirty) littered the floor; his school papers (due and past due) lay in disarray on his desk [this was the pre-computer era] and his organizational skills were low to none.

None of that is true today. Was it something we the parents did? Not to hear Carl Pickhardt, the psychologist who specializes in adolescence, tell it. "It never ceases to amaze parents, who have long since given up urging adolescent reform, to see that young person go through a positive growth reversal, often in young adulthood, and suddenly give up bad habits or correct wayward ways," he writes in a blog post, "Positive Adolescent Growth Reversals in Young Adulthood."

So the good news for us as our children come through the Emerging Adult stage is that much of the adolescence annoyances will fade and be replaced by their opposite: careless to careful, messy to neat, disorganized to orderly, scattered to focused, and--my favorite on Pickhardt's list--aimless to directed.

What accounts for this breath of fresh air--and feeling we've done a good enough parenting job that our child is set up to succeed at living an independent life? Pickhardt's take: onset of maturity, loss of the need to rebel, life-course correction, and actualizing a parental imprint. (So we had a role, after all.)

It is not a one-way street--this reversal thing. When our kids reach their 30s, Pickhardt tells us, they describe growth reversals in their parents. They find we've mellowed out, don’t worry so much and are not so easily upset. They report we're more patient and less controlling, even laid back. We're fun to be around! We are not, in short, like we were when they were growing up. "It’s amazing," Pickhardt observes, "how the shedding of parental responsibility, with all its attendant stress and worries, can relax older folks around adult children who now have children of their own."

 

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Parenting Adult Children: When we're faced with a crisis, our grown kids show their mettle

We worry about them. We get angry at them. Our grown children sometimes do things that disappoint, exorcise or frustrate us. And then, all of a sudden, they're there when we need them. They're the caring, mature, responsible people we always knew--hoped--they would be.

Two friends just went through difficult experiences. What struck me was how incredibly helpful, caring and mature their grown children were when it really, really counted.      

                 Here's what happened to Lucy. She and her 30-something son were hiking in Yosemite Park in California--a four day hike with overnight stays at refuges. Lucy's in great shape, though she worried that she hadn't done a big hike like this for nearly 20 years, when she'd done it with her husband. Her husband died recently so she and her son were hiking to a meadow in Yosemite to sprinkle his ashes. A hike with a purpose. Day one, 9 miles to the tent campsite. Day two, even longer and hillier. Day three was a "rest day" since day four would be the longest and most challenging part of the hike--and the spot where the ashes would be scattered. Lucy and her son decided to pack their books and spend the "rest" day at a lake that was a 3-mile climb from the refuge hut. When they got there, Lucy stepped out on a rock to get a better view. The rock was surprisingly--shockingly--slippery. Black ice slippery. Lucy fell and couldn't get up. Everytime she tried she was overwhelmed by dizziness and nausea---and pain. When her son and another hiker were finally able to help her to a rock where she could sit, the pain subsided. But walking down was not possible--the pain was too intense whenever she moved. Her son went down to the refuge to get help. By the time he got back, a helicopter was hovering nearby. EMTs carried Lucy by stretcher. But her son couldn't come with her. Moreover, he had to complete the hike back to the rental car.

Lucy was helicoptered down, transferred to an ambulance and taken to a hospital. Not only was she worried about the pain in her leg and hip, she was worried about her son making the long hike by himself without a cell phone--they had left their phones in the car. A nurse at the hospital called her son's cell phone to let him know where his mother was. When mother and son were finally reunited, the doctors at the hospital had figured out what was wrong: The femur was broken. Lucy needed surgery to put it back together again--either in California or at home on the east coast.

That's where Lucy's other grown chidlren come in. Her son called his sister, who is a doctor, who talked to the doctor at the hospital about what they planned to do, why and where it should be done (in California or at home). He then called his other sister who lived in Hong Kong to let her know what was happening. The sister knows a lot about travel--she does a lot of it for her job. She knew exactly how she could help: She used her frequent flyer miles to have Lucy's travel status upgraded to first class for her post-surgery flight home. As to Lucy's son, he stayed with her, taking his meals at the hospital with her and watching TV with her --the summer Olympics were on--for the four days until she could leave. When he finally got her home, Lucy says, "I'm sure he was glad to be rid of me." True or not, he had been there when it counted, and so were her other children--doing whatever they could do to make things go smoother and better for their mother.

        LInda's experience was more mundane. Her husband, Dave, was about to undergo open heart surgery. With no warning--he had simply changed doctors and the new doctor insisted on a cardiogram for all new patients--he went from a man who seemed to be slowing down naturally to one who had a life-threatening situation hanging over him. Linda's son --her husband's stepson -- started researching and adding to the information Linda and Dave were gathering about doctors, types of surgery [robotic or hands-on], which hospitals were best. It was a comfort to have his suggestions and informed opinions at a time when it's difficult to think straight--and you absolutely need to. Dave's son [Linda's stepson] flew in for the surgery, to be with his father and keep Linda company. When Dave was finally home from the hospital, Linda was feeling depressed and shut in--Dave couldn't be left alone; progress was measured by the one or two minutes he could sit up in bed. Her son had a suggestion: send out an email to the rest of the family and friends who live nearby and ask for an hour of their time so she could get out each day. Worked like a charm. Linda would probably have thought of a similar approach for a friend, but when we're in the midst of a crisis, it helps to have someone else thinking about solutions to the day-to-day problems. And who better than her son.

 

 

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