"I'm an adorer." This is my daughter's college roommate speaking--several years removed from her college days. We are having coffee together--she has come east for a conference and had some spare time. After running down the ages and genders of her three children, Paterfamilias asks her what kind of parent she is. With a half-guilty, semi-embarrassed smile, she gives the "adorer" answer.
I know exactly what she's saying. I was too, I tell her. I thought my daughter [her roommate] was the jewel in the family crown and that our son was the most amusing person to ever walk, well, if not the earth, at least our small part of it. A friend--and I use that word advisedly--once told me that she and her family used to laugh (and not in a good way) about how I would gaze at my son when he talked and laugh so over-enthusiastically (in her opinion) at all his jokes. Oh well. maybe she didn't find her kids as delightful as I found mine. Clearly, she wasn't an adorer.
My point is that even if my delight in my children went overboard, it didn't hurt them then --and it doesn't hurt them now. I am still an adorer--of them and now of my grandchildren as well. (To my credit, if I am over the top on this, let the record show that I don't force tales of adorableness on friends.) Not that I don't have reality-check moments about my children, but I like to think that a parent who thinks her kids are the greatest may be blind but is also offering her kids a solid base to grow on. They can graduate from my home to a life lived independent of me and know that someone out there--someone who knows their messy habits and teeny tiny temper tantrums--thinks they are wonderful.
So adore on, I tell my daughter's roommate. There's nothing to feel embarrassed about.
Gorgon Head Roman Baths, Bath (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Our son has packed up his family of five and moved them to London for three months. They are living in a sweet little house in a leafy neighborhood. They can walk to several parks. They've played Scrabble at a nearby pub, climbed Primose Hill and visited Bath--spending some time at Farleigh Hungerford Castle. The two eldest kids have kicked the soccer ball in North London near Wembly and are trying out for youth football teams there.
We don't know this because our son, daughter-in-law or any of the kids have emailed, texted, Skyped or cell-phoned to tell us so. In fact, there's been very little personal interchange. We know what we know from the Facebook posts, photos and lengthy caption descriptions--down to their visit to Bath and their delight in a tour of the 4th century Roman baths --that are on our son's Facebook page and on a Shutterfly account he set up.
Even though it's informative, the means of communication feels impersonal . We don't know what the 6-year-old thought about the walking tour of Medieval London or how the 11- and 13-year-olds assess the football/soccer played by Londoners their age. Or how the home-schooling is going. We know what they're doing, and we can see by the sweaters they're wearing that it's a lot chillier in London than it is here, but that's it.
It isn't the same as keeping in touch by Skype or Google Chat--something we did regularly with our daughter and her family when they lived in Berlin for a year. Clearly, three months is not a year, so there isn't the same need. Still, we wouldn't mind the chance to sit in their kitchen--virtually, as we did in our daughter's Berlin apartment--and chat about this and that.
We shouldn't complain. We're part of a general (albeit select) audience. This is how information is shared in the digital age.
We're not alone in our social media half-life. In answer to reader-parents who wanted to know what to do about the online means their son uses to inform them (and everyone else) about his activities, Philip Galanes, the New York Time's Social Qs columnist, suggested this: "Find a way to stop feeling slighted by your son's use of social media. It is not about you....Think of your son as a newfangled memorist. That's what his blog and social media posts are aiming for. And read them. What better way to show him that you're interested in his life."
We're heeding that advice and staying au courant. We're also solving our personal communication issue the old-fashioned way. We're cashing in our frequent flyer miles for a week-long visit across the pond. Nothing social media about that.
One of the breakthroughs of Obamacare is our ability to put our college- and post-college-age kids on our health insurance. No more hunting down an affordable individual policy for them that will see them through a medical emergency. Once you've got them covered under your coverage, they can stay insured until they're 26--even if they get married
So far, so good. But a friend pointed out a little flaw in that coverage. You may get the paperwork and a bill for a visit your 20-year-old paid to a doctor but you may have no idea what health issue your son or daughter was addressing. Your grown child may have been to see an orthopedist, family doctor, Ob/GYN or psychiatrist. You may be worried about what the visit was all about, but short of directly asking your progeny 'wassup?', you can't find out.
Under the health privacy rules of HIPAA, you would need their signed authorization for the doctor to hand over any information.
Maybe that's as it should be. But there's a crucial reason to have that authorization in hand. If your son or daughter has a medical emergency that lands them in an emergency room, you can't get information from the nurses or doctors on the case.They are not permitted to disclose details to parents about the medical condition of a child who's older than 18. Or as one attorney put it, “Once a child turns 18, the child is legally a stranger to you.” That is, you have no more right to that information than you would to details about the treatment or condition of a stranger--even though you're paying the tab.
The way around the issue is to have grown children sign a HIPAA authorization form. It allows health care providers to disclose a person's health information to anyone specified in the form. Your child can also stipulate that certain information is out of bounds. So they can still keep you from learning about medical issues that touch on sex, drugs and other personal stuff. But you'll be in a position to be there for them in a real emergency.
I have just come from having dinner with a woman involved in an academic program for health technicians. She has just finished telling me how stunned she is when parents drop by to complain about or protest the grade or other assessment their grown child has received. My dinner companion is a woman who also makes some hiring decisions and recommendations for them. When presented with a helicoptering incident, she says she makes a mental black mark that here is a student who may lack the independence to function in the workplace.
She isn't saying the helicoptering behavior is pervasive--just that she sees an increasing amount of it. Having heard of even worse interventions--parents sitting in the waiting room while a child is interviewed for a job; going into the interview with their child--I am not all that surprised.
Wherever you fall in the debate over overly protective parents, here are some excerpts from Kohn's post--with links to his research--that apply to the parenting of grown children.
On intervening during the college years:
--"Yes, most parents are in touch with their college-age children on a regular basis. But communicating isn’t the same thing as intervening on a child’s behalf, and the latter seems to be fairly rare. The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), which reached out to more than 9,000 students at 24 colleges and universities, found that only 13 percent of college freshmen and 8 percent of seniors said a parent had frequently intervened to help them solve problems."
On intervening in the workplace:
--"Michigan State University researchers found that 77 percent of the 725 employers they surveyed 'hardly ever witnessed a parent while hiring a college senior.' "
On intervening in a grown child's life outside of college and the workplace
--"The only study on the topic I could find, published in 2012, reported that just one in five or six parents seemed to be intensely involved in their children’s lives."
--"Three small studies have raised concerns about the more extreme versions of HP, connecting it to anxiety or a lower sense of well-being. ... the items on these questionnaires were mostly tapping how controlling the parents were. If the problem is control rather than indulgence, that forces us to rethink the “coddled kids” narrative offered by many critics of HP."
--"It’s not clear that HP caused the problems with which it was associated. The researchers in one study acknowledged that unhappy students “may view their parents as more intrusive.” Those in another admitted that “when parents perceive their child as depressed, they may be more likely to ‘hover.’” In other words, pre-existing unhappiness may have drawn the parents in, or it may have led the students to interpret their parents’ actions as excessive.
--Other research makes the "case in favor of parents’ being actively connected and involved with their young-adult children. The NSSE survey didn’t find a lot of HP going on, but students who did have such parents reported 'higher levels of [academic] engagement and more frequent use of deep learning activities.' In fact, children of helicopter parents were more satisfied with every aspect of their college experience."
--"Support (not limited to money) from one’s parents may be helpful, if not critical, when students graduate with a crushing load of debt."
-- "Most developmental psychologists have concluded that the quality of relationships, including those with one’s parents, continues to matter even past childhood. Good parenting is less about pushing one’s offspring to be independent at a certain age than being responsive to what a particular child needs.
--"Independence is closely connected to an individualistic worldview that is far from universal. Some cultures are more likely to emphasize the value of interdependence. And the cultural bias that seems to fuel condemnations of HP has a very real impact on students’ well-being. A fascinating series of studies published in 2012 by a multi-university research team revealed that “predominantly middle-class cultural norms of independence” are particularly ill-suited for young adults who are the first in their families to attend college."
