Parenting Grown Children: What Dr. Spock Forgot to Tell Us: May 2013

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May 2013

May 28, 2013

Paying for College: Congrats on graduation. Now here's an update on whether the degree is worth it.

The assumption has always been that a college education is the ticket to a good job--a career that will lead to financial independence and middle or upper middle class solidity. Then came 2008 and the great Recession. Kids who graduated from college since then have struggled to gain a foothold in career jobs. Friends whose kids have been entering or trying to enter the workforce since 2008 --well, those kids bear the marks of trauma. They are saving their money more carefully. They are not as free spirited, not as blithe about taking a post-grad year or two off to be a ski bum or bar tend their way across the country as a lark. A serious job outlook calls for a serious mien.

Today, only 45 percent of young Americans in that age group have a job, almost 6 percentage points less than when the recession started in December 2007. This trauma has raised the question about whether college--which can cost upwards of $200,000--is worth it. Is it worth it for our kids to take out loans to finance an education or for us to invest our savings--or income--in paying for four years of college? Some studies during the Great Recession and the slow-as-molasses recovery suggested it was a close call. But now there's this.

Writing on the New York TImes' online Economix, Catherine Rampell notes that "despite all the questions about whether college is worth it or not, college graduates have gotten through the recession and lackluster recovery with remarkable resilience."

The unemployment rate for college graduates in April was 3.9 percent, compared to 7.5 percent for everyone else. Moreover, among all segments of workers and their educational attainment, college graduates are the only group that has more people employed today than when the recession started.

Here’s the graph the TImes ran to show how employment has changed.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, via Haver Analytics. Data refer to workers age 25 and older.

And here's another chart that shows that the number of college-educated workers with jobs has risen by 9.1 percent since the beginning of the recession. Meanwhile, those with a high school diploma and no further education are the near mirror image, with employment down 9 percent on net.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, via Haver Analytics. Data refer to workers age 25 and older.

"In other words," Rampell writes, "college-educated workers have gobbled up all of the net job gains. In fact there are now more employed college graduates than there are employed high school graduates and high school dropouts put together." Even young college graduates are finding jobs.

So congratulations to all you college grads out there--my nephew among them. (Yay Ray!)

For them and their parents, it's a brighter picture out there than it was a year or two ago. It was worth the time and effort--and money it took to get that degree. So props to you and an old fashioned pat on the back, too. Now, can you pick up the tab for dinner?

Posted at 12:17 PM in college debt | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 21, 2013

Money Matters: Caught in the web of generosity guilt

The subject is a tricky one: Generosity guilt. If we share the wealth with our grown children in the here and now, do we risk doing them more harm than good? Do we do more harm than good by indulging them--and ourselves--in making life easier for them?

It's a question we were hashing out with friends where we were house-guests at their home on a lake in a development where the neighbors tend expansive lawns and mind lush rose gardens. Both our friends are recently divorced from their previous spouses. Paying the bills for the lakeside house--its dock, two boats, swimming pool, six bedrooms and huge windows overlooking the lake--is not a problem for either of them. Moreover, they have the money to travel--for pleasure and to visit their grown children who live in various cities throughout the country.

His three children are recent college grads feeling their way career-wise. He is mum on how he does or doesn't help them. Not so her. She bubbles over with fears that she is overindulging her two daughters who are in their late 20s and early 30s and not living anywhere near the level their parents eventually achieved.

"I feel guilty," she says of her willingness to give her daughters (both of whom have small children and husbands) money, treats and other indulgences whenever they ask or she feels they need them. "I'm a terrible patsy," she says, while her current partner nods in emphatic agreement. "I'm an endless stream of money for them." At the same time, she confesses to worrying about their psychological health. "I feel guilty that I enable them to be dependent on me. I don't make them stand on their own two feet. It wouldn't hurt them to be self reliant, but it gets complicated."

One of her daughters has what the mom calls "a black cloud that follows her"--a child needed surgery and there were medical bills over and above insurance; a mistake was made when starting a business and it required cash to rectify. "She's under a lot of stress," says my friend. "I worry about her mental state. If I can relieve her stress by helping her financially, I want to do it." That said, she would like her daughters to distinguish between I need and I want. And to feel less "entitled." When shopping with one of her daughters, the two of them saw necklaces the daughter liked. "She wanted two of them," the mother says, adding that she put her foot down, sort of. "I told her no, just one."

Her desire to indulge her children is mixed with few rules over how far the giving should go. The indulgence argument is simple: She has more than enough money to take care of herself. "I get to do everything I want. I have not said 'no' to myself on anything," she says. "Why make my children miserable for lack of money when they're going to get it anyway?"

Being guilty about being generous is awkward--a conflict in competing values, a feeling of ambivalence about which value should take precedence. This lack of clarity is a point Gretchen Rubin makes in a post on PsychCentral when she writes about wanting to do one thing but wanting something else that conflicts with it. Two of her examples: I want to eat healthfully; it’s wrong to waste any food. I want leisure time when I come home from work; I want to live in a house that’s clean and well-run. "These days," Rubin writes, "when I’m trying to get myself to pursue some course of action, I work hard to make sure I know exactly what I expect from myself, and why, and what value I’m choosing to serve."

Generosity guilt is certainly a push and pull between two values--and which one wins out depends on a whole lot of other values: does a grown child need support because he or she is doing work that helps others but doesn't pay very well? If we value such work, we might chose to enable our child to continue doing it and not suffer the consequence of living within low-income means. A similar reasoning applies to paying college bills or support during graduate school. And if a grandchild needs medical care not covered by insurance, doesn't it make sense to cover those bills that would otherwise stress the parent, our child? On the other hand, two necklaces versus one or even none is a different value.

There's another way to look at the guilt side of generosity guilt: As a manifestation of helicopter parenting.

The question Eli Finkel and Grainne Fitzsimons pose in a New York Times story, "When Helping Hurts" is on point for those of us who help our grown children financially. "How can we help our children achieve their goals without undermining their sense of personal accountability and motivation to achieve them?"

Their answer, based on research they have reviewed, is a pretty solid guide to those of us like my friend who worry about the complications of generosity guilt: "...Our help has to be responsive to the recipient’s circumstances: it must balance their need for support with their need for competence. We should restrain our urge to help unless the recipient truly needs it, and even then, we should calibrate it to complement rather than substitute for the recipient’s efforts."

Posted at 04:25 PM in supporting adult children | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 14, 2013

Money Matters: Retire? Not as long as we feel our grown kids need our help

A friend and i have this conversation almost every time we meet for coffee. We are both still working--me part time, she full time. We have other projects we'd like to attack but work pressures get in the way. We both admit that part of why we continue to toil away is the money. Not that we need the cash to survive or even live well: we've both got adequate retirement nest eggs and pensions. Rather, we like the extra money so we can spend it on our grown kids.

It is a luxury to be able to do things to help them out--she likes paying the daycare tab for her grandtwins to make sure they are going to the best possible facility. I like sensing a need and providing for it--be it summer camp for a grandchild or a cleaning lady. [My story on Great Gifts for Grown Kids is on nextave.org.] Our paycheck feels like a windfall that we're free to share--no questions asked by our spouses or household partners.

At least this is what we tell each other--and possibly ourselves. It is, of course, more complicated than that and we're hardly alone in staying on the job past the "normal" retirement year. In 2005, 20 percent of all middle-aged parents were the primary source of financial support for a grown child. Now, 27 percent of parents fit that description, according to a recent Pew Research report:

As I've noted in previous posts, the recession/sluggish recovery is part of the reason we are helping out our kids--it has taken a huge toll out of the earnings of young adults. In 2010, according to the U.S. Census, the share of young adults who were employed was the lowest it had been since the government started collecting these data in 1948. Moreover, from 2007 to 2011 those young adults who were employed full time experienced a greater drop in average weekly earnings than any other age group.

So we soldier on. But supporting our kids--whether as an indulgence or to carry them through hard time--is only part of the reason we're still on the job. A lot of us are in better health than our counterparts a couple of decades earlier--and we may live longer. In which case, we like the idea of piling up the resources--or letting the piled-up resources lie there untouched while we use the still-on-the-job earnings for spending sprees. We don't want to outlive our nest eggs and be a burden to those whose loads we've just helped lighten. Or is that part of the indulgence factor?

Posted at 03:29 PM in emerging adulthood, supporting adult children | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 07, 2013

Parenting Grown Children: "The Way We Were" isn't necessarily the way they want to be.

There's a lot of griping about us out there. Grown children writing in to the Carolyn Hax's, Ask Amy's and Social Q's of this world, whining about the way we behave or the unkind or ungracious things we say. Sometimes, we may mean one thing, but it gets taken another way. The world is full of mis-cues.

I was struck by this one, described by a grown son complaining about the way his mother talks to his wife. The issue: The Mother keeps making critical remarks about the son's wife, who is a pediatrician and the mother of small children. The Mother is critical about such things as the Halloween costumes (They're store bought!), help being hired to clean the house ("It is a real shame that people can't take the time to clean their own home anymore.") and dinners not made from scratch ("It isn't a homemade dinner if the chicken came precooked from a store.")

Who would like to have those kinds of comments rain down on your head when you're working full time and raising children? Or even if you're not working outside the home. Carolyn Hax suggests the son have a conversation with his Mother that lets her know that when she makes these comments she denigrates his life choices and that when she compares his family life to the one she created as a young mother, she's "entering cats in a dog show." Hax also points out that the Mom might be defensive about the way she lived her life--that she may feel like an anachronism--and may need reassurance.

All true and all helpful. I see an additional point. Many of us may take to the snark attack when we feel left out--unconsulted, tuned out, useless. There are better ways to work out those feelings. I'm not sure what they are--but giving in to attacks isn't helpful. Nonetheless, the Mother has some of my sympathy. We're there but we're not; we understand the pressure of their family-raising lives but good luck getting that understanding across. We're not as out-of-it as they may think. But when we impose our own Good Housekeeping Rules--well, see notes to self [in the column to the left]: Our ideas about how to do things "the right way"are better left unspoken. Who really cares who made the Halloween costume, anyway? My kids had to pull together their own looks. As for the store-rotisseried chicken--we'd starve at my house if those were eliminated. My mother, however, would be aghast. And she would probably let me know it. Cue up another mis-cue.