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

Empty Nesters: Who loses more sleep over the kids now?

We worried about them when they were toddlers; we had anxious moments when they started school; our hearts were thumping when they were learning to drive. Most of us thought we would sleep a deeper, sounder sleep when our kids became adults.

Researchers have come up with some interesting findings in that regard. Dads may lose more sleep over the adult kids than moms.

The study, which ran online in January in the Gerontologist, looked at data from interviews with 186 married couples who had two to three adult children. The underlying premise was that sleep problems in older adults are associated not only with a variety of negative physical and mental health problems but with relationship issues with their grown children. To compile comparable measures, researchers asked parents how often they provided different types of support to their grown kids. The list included almost every interaction we might have with our children--from  talking about daily events to offering emotional support, practical help, advice and financial assistance. They also asked the parents to  assess their sleeping.

The findings conclude that relationships with adult children have different associations for sleep quality among middle-aged husbands and wives. Overall, though, when it comes to worrying over supports for grown children, dad's are the bigger nail biters than moms--as measured by quality of sleep.

Here's what the study says:

...husbands’ more frequent support provided to their adult child was associated with less sleep, which validates the findings that support may be an indicator of caregiving (suggesting burden) rather than an indicator of a parent/child connection for fathers. When husbands provide more frequent support to adult children, it is often more need based than mothers, that is, it is in relation to life problems experienced by the adult child.... Thus, support may be more taxing for fathers making it more difficult for husbands to get a sufficient amount of sleep as a result of the time and energy demands related to giving such support.

The researchers see their study as a way of fine tuning sleep therapy for parents of grown children. We may see it as confirmation of what we already know: The kids may be grown--they may have kids of their own--but being their parent never ends. We are, as the old saying goes, only as happy as our unhappiest kid. Even if that kid is forty.

 

 

 

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Observation: Trust your adult kids to make the right love-life decisions

          Steve Almond                                                                      Cheryl Strayed

 Steve Almond and Cheryl Strayed, authors of books and books that have been turned into movies, are co-advisers on a love and life podcast/column, Dear Sugars.

A recent call for their help came from a mom who worried that her daughter wanted marriage and children while the boyfriend of five years was making decisions that moved the young couple away from that goal. Was the relationship one-sided? Were her daughter's wishes being subsumed by the boyfriend? The mom's question: "Should I share my concerns with my daughter or stay out of it. What are the boundaries with adult children?"

 Here are two nuggets from their fuller discussion that hold for any parent of grown children.

Cheryl: The best thing you can do is to stop seeing yourself as someone who should intervene in your daughter’s romantic life, but rather as the person who will support her and be there for her when she needs a sounding board as she navigates this relationship.

 

Steve: It’s important to remember that your daughter is an adult. You have to trust her capacity to make wise decisions, and to survive her less wise ones. Just as crucially, you have to trust yourself and the work you’ve already done as a mom in helping your daughter develop the wherewithal to stand up for herself.

 

 

 

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Leaving a Legacy: Sharing our values and history with our grown kids and grandkids.

 

Here is my legacy mantra. I hereby leave my grown kids and grand kids a legacy in three parts: Material goods. A sense of  my values and life experiences. Clean closets.

I've blogged at length about the clean closet thing--it came to a head when we downsized for a move from our rambling suburban house to a storage-challenged urban apartment. When spirits flagged over the sorting and dumping, I reminded myself that this was part of my gift to my kids: They wouldn't have to clear 50 years of memorabilia that had been stuffed onto shelves and into bins and file cabinets.

Now I'm working on the middle part: values and my life experiences. What kick-started me was a recent event--seemingly minor--in our family's life. This Spring, Paterfamilias forwarded a link to his grandkids of excerpts from an interview between PF and an historian from the Library of Congress.  The historian was putting together a history of how Congress worked--how legislation was actually passed, what compromises were made, how power was leveraged.

PF had worked for California Congressman John Moss and several congressional committees in the 1970s and 1980s--the fruitful years when Congress passed enduring legislation that has impacted our lives in a good way. (Like product safety, car safety, investor safety)  The interview was about the legislative process but the historian also delved into PF's childhood--he even had a news clip from PF's radio appearance as a pre-teen whiz kid. Now, excerpts from the interview were being posted on the Library's website and that's the link PF sent his two grown children and their teenage kids-- in the hope that they would read it, if not now at least some day.

So, in effect, without lifting a pen or his typing fingers, without making a recording or pasting photos in a scrapbook, PF has his legacy: a document about his life's work and how that work reflects his values. The teen grands didn't say much about it, beyond a promise to read it. Someday.

Then in June, he mentioned his work for the Congress to one of those teens who was wrapping up a semester on 20th century American history. She asked some relevant questions but that was as far as things went. She was, after all, 14 years old and we all know how difficult it is to keep a teen's attention, to wean them from Instagram, texting and game-playing on their phones.  But then, weeks later, when she was on the West Coast for the summer with her parents and not much to do, she read the interview and started texting PF about subjects the piqued her interest. What did he know about Ronald Reagan and the air controllers strike? He called her to discuss. Then came another text: What did he know about gerrymandering? Another chat appointment.

This was an unexpected connection. It is not easy to set up lines of communication with our teen grands. They are moving away from the home as the center of their universe--pushing back their parents and looking for independence. To have one of his Grands turn to him as an expert--as a reliable source--was thrilling.

It was also a reminder of how much impact our past can have on our Grands. But they have to know about it--in some form or other that they can digest at their own pace. I'm picking up my pen.

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