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

Parenting Grown Children: The question of pressure on our kids to produce Grands

In the middle of a four-way coffee get together of my former office mates, one of the coffee drinkers passed around the photos of her first Grand--a very cute baby who's now two months old and belongs to her son. After a pleasant few minutes of oohing and aahing, our former office mate talked about driving her grown daughter to the airport--her daughter lives in a city down the coast from her parents and her brother. The daughter had come to town to be there for the birth of her first nephew.

On the drive, my friend tells the three of us, her husband announced he wanted to ask his daughter, who is in her 30s, single and self supporting, a personal question. My friend says she clutched for a minute--what could he want to bring up? His question: After being here for the birth of her brother's child, did it make her want to have children?

Her answer was a simple 'no." She said she had never particularly wanted to have children and though her nephew was adorable, cuddly and the most wonderful baby ever, she didn't want one of her own. She said she knows what it takes to be a good parent and she didn't feel that was a road she wanted to take. And now, with her brother having brought a child into the world and into the family, she felt relief: the pressure was off to reproduce.

How did my friend feel about that? It can be disappointing for a parent to here her--or his--child is not going to participate in the warmth and charm of growing her own family. "I wasn't surprised," my friend says, and then offers this kicker: "What I am is happy that she lives at a time when she has alternatives, when she doesn't feel she has to have children to be validated--the way my generation and my mother's generation did."

We who grew up in those 'bad old times,' can only add our Amen--grateful though we are to have the children we have. It doesn't mean we didn't feel an unseemly pressure to have children--pressure from our parents,from society at large and probably from ourselves as well.

Although Tina Fey talks about the pressure to have a second child in her essay Confessions of a Juggler: What’s the rudest question you can ask a mother?, (in her book BossyPants)  her point rings true for women who opt out of becoming mothers.  Fey describes the constant questioning--from friends, acquaintances, store clerks and the like, about whether or not she'll have another child. Her answer to an issue that produces personal angst suggests that the decision is an on-going and ever-mutating one. Fey writes: "My parents raised me never to ask people about their reproductive plans. 'You don’t know their situation,' my mother would say. I considered it such an impolite question for years I didn’t even ask myself.”

 

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So the kids have made their way through college. They're launched into the world of work and creating their own families. We're still their parents, of course, but the financial part is over. We can now center our financial plans around us and our retirement needs. At least that's what we're thinking.

Think again. Turns out that for many of us, that was an incorrect assumption.  A Merrill Lynch Retirement Study, conducted in partnership with Age Wave, finds that 62 percent of those of us older than 50 have provided financial assistance--a helping hand--to family members during the last five years and that most of us never budgeted to do so.

A few other points from the report ("Family & Retirement: The Elephant in the Room.")

Payback: Those helping family members rarely do so because they expect future help or financial payback. Older adults are 20x more likely to say they are helping family because “it is the right thing to do” than because “family members will help me in the future.” They are 5x more likely to stop family support because the recipient is not using the money wisely than because of worries about being paid back.

--The Now Factor: Those giving money to family members are 3x more likely to feel “appreciated” than “taken advantage of.” This generational generosity also extends to a shift in mindset regarding inheritance and giving to family. Three in five (60%) people age 50+ say it is better to pass on their assets now rather than waiting until end of life. Age 50+ women are even more likely than men to say it is better to pass on inheritance during retirement (65% vs. 53%).

--Favorite Subsidies: We tend to help out our adult children by paying for rent or mortgage payments, insurance, cellphone bills, car purchases or leases and tuition expenses. These subsidies averaged a total of $9,200 over the past five years among people with less than $250,000 in investible assets, and $19,100 for people with between $250,000 and $500,000 in investible assets. Among the very wealthy (those with more than $5,000,000 in investible assets), the average five-year family outlay was $313,000.

--The Stepkids: Adults age 50+ generally feel some financial responsibility for stepfamily members (most particularly stepchildren), but usually less responsibility than they feel for biological relatives. That said, three in ten (32%) also say that they and their spouses have different financial priorities for their own children than they have for their stepchildren. Those with stepchildren are less likely to divide their assets equally than those without stepchildren.

 

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Grudges: When our grown kids won't talk to each other--or us.

 A friends son and daughter stopped speaking to each other. It lasted more than a year. It wasn't just talk. They refused to come to the same Thanksgiving meal together--a meal my friend prepares for a large group that includes her two other children, their spouses and children.

One of her sons tried to mediate a peace. Her husband tried talking to each of them. No luck. The offended daughter even approached her offending brother to spell out her complaint against him. It only made matters worse.

Though the siblings have since come to terms with each other, I thought about my friend and the bad blood that existed between two of her children when I came across a Sheila Heen column on Family Grudges. I've been reading a lot of Heen recently (more on that in another post). She's got some very commonsensical suggestions on how to work around family conflicts. After reading her recent column, I sent it off to my friend. It turns out, her kids--as well as my friend and her husband and their other children--had been taking the wrong tack.

Heen's suggestions for working through a grudge match start with a Do Not Do. Specifically, do not write a letter or email spelling out your perspective--or even apologizing for something you may have done wrong.

Sounds counter-intuitive, but here's Heen's rational: "Inevitably some aspect of what you describe will feel “off” to them (“That’s not what happened!”) or will leave out parts that they feel are most important. And their interpretation of your motives for writing the letter is colored by emotion. Your desire to reconnect is seen as a desire to absolve yourself of guilt, to manipulate, or to appear to be righteously taking the high road....Remember that email and letters aren’t dialogue. They’re monologue. And they’re the channel of communication that can escalate conflict most quickly."

So what can you do to ease the path of reconciliation? Here are some of Heen's basic approaches, which can be adapted by an interested parenting hoping to give grown children a chance to reconcile--or to make peace with a begrudging child:

Strategy 1: Don’t talk, just do. Often family members cut off contact not because they like conflict, but because they hate conflict. Avoiding the stress seems most easily done by avoiding the people who produce the stress....Sometimes, depending on the personalities involved, the best approach is to avoid the “big conversation” altogether, and just to start acting “normal” again.

Strategy 2: Propose a conversation just about the future. Sometimes it’s not worth sorting through the details of who did what and reacted to what. It may simply be that you want to propose talking about how to move on.

Strategy 3: Initiate a conversation to understand the rift. Let them know that you’d like to talk. Not so that you can talk them out of their feelings or their behavior, but so that you can better understand what’s happened between you. ...In that conversation, first listen to them. Why? Because people simply do not take in what you have to say, cannot question or shift their perceptions, until they feel understood. To get meaningful communication moving, someone has to be the first to listen and that someone is going to have to be you.

 

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Grandparenting: The gift of helping Grands understand how children in other parts of the world live.

A host of brochures are spread out on my desk. I'm looking for just the right gift for the Grands. One of my favorites: Give a Goat, courtesy Oxfam. Would or would they not be charmed by giving children in another--and less developed--part of the world a cute cuddly animal that could also support and feed them and their family?

The goat wasn't the only child-appealing possibility. Another charity was offering to send a heifer in my Grand's name to a child in a third world country. 

                       

My Grands are among the very fortunates of this world who have almost everything they need, want or could dream of. I thought they would be intrigued with the story of how the animals would become part of a family--and help them understand how life is lived in other parts of the world.

Turns out, I am part of a burgeoning trend: using gifts as a means of opening our Grand's eyes to the world--especially to the needs of those who live in economies that are not as fruitful as ours. It is also in keeping with a story that ran recently in the New York Times about grandparents giving their grandchildren the gift of financial awareness.

The NYTimes story was about a more sophisticated concept--teaching the grandkids about financial literacy. Most grandparents, the article argues, have an advantage over parents: They can talk more freely with their grandchildren and, in return, their grandchildren tend to open up to them.

So how do you do it? If you don't want to read the full story, here are the how-to highlights:

One grandparent gave his grandchildren “money savvy pigs,” which were created to show children the four uses of money: save, spend, donate and invest. He asked them to divide their allowances into the four categories and then talked to them about their decisions. Eventually, he introduced the idea of giving away some of the money in the donate bank by introducing his grandkids to various catalogues and brochures for helping people in developing countries--such as a flock of chickens, mosquito nets or vocational training. When one of his Grands didn't have enough money to buy what she wanted to donate--a latrine for a neighborhood that didn't have clean water--the grandfather suggested she write to family members who might want to donate to her cause.

A less formal approach might be to start a conversation about the difference between a need and a want. Or, create a financial memory bank by talking about how you [the grandparent] struggled or failed, what your first car or house cost and the like.

The main point to remember is to clear what you're doing with the parents. Ultimately, it’s up to your grown kids to be involved in teaching their children about money. What we, the grandparents, can do is strengthen their message--which, presumably, they learned from us in the first place.

 

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Conversation overheard two days before Thanksgiving:

First woman [who lives in Florida and has come north to see grownkids/grandkids}. "I flew into New York City to see Jacob [grandson] in a recital but the rest of the time I just ran errands for everyone--picking stuff up here, taking someone there. Now I'm here [Washington, D.C.] to see my son and his family and all I'm doing is running errands."

Second woman [who lives in Washington as do her grown children and Grands]: "I know what you mean. If my kids asked me to run out into the street and stop traffic, I'd do it."

Neither one's tone suggested they were complaining. To the contrary, there was a little bit of preening, an edge of braggadocio.

Truth be told, I wasn't an idle eavesdropper to this conversation. These were two acquaintances chatting away--as I pulled on my coat and gathered my belongings. I was on my way to the airport, to catch a plane to join my grown son and his family for the holiday. Paterfamilias and I were heading there, as usual, two days before the family festivities. The theory: not only would we miss the worst of congested Thanksgiving travel, but all the work of preparing the turkey feast wouldn't fall on my daughter-in-laws shoulders. We would be there in time to help with, yes, errands. 

What is it about errands for our grown kids and their family: Are we hoping to make life easier or more pleasant for them--save them a few steps here and there. Are we proving our value. Or just giving ourselves a pat on the back for being so supportive and wonderful.

And why do we chit-chatter on about the errand running. Do we do it to tell each other how useful we are to our children, to make ourselves feel needed, to let our friends and acquaintances know how busy and successful our children are--and how we are helping make that possible.

Or are we just talking about doing something our parents did for us: Seeing a need and filling it. A family tradition--for the holidays and beyond.

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