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

Supporting Grown Children: Golden Handcuffs Edition

It's a wonderful feeling to be able to be financially generous to our adult children--to support them if an unexpected need arises or to indulge them so that they can do or buy something they've always wanted. If we've got that bit of extra to spare, there's a deep pleasure in seeing our children enjoy it now rather than later--when we're no longer around.

And our kids are grateful. Why shouldn't they be? We've offered them support out of love for them and respect for their ability to handle the resource well. But sometimes, there's a little less of a heartfelt thank you. There can even be resentment, especially if there are strings attached. This letter that appeared in an advice column in a local Colorado newspaper spells out the dangers of attaching those strings--even if we do so indirectly:

When I met my wife five years ago, I had no idea of her financial status. I knew that her parents had a nice home and spent a lot of time traveling but she lived frugally and worked hard. When we got married, I learned about the extent of her family's substantial resources. Admittedly, they have been very generous — helping us with the down payment on our house, taking us on family vacations and starting college funds for our kids. The issue is that they've increasingly put pressure on us to raise the kids in specific ways, build our schedules and vacations around their needs and spend money according to their values. We, and my wife in particular, have been struggling to say no because of everything they continue to give us.

The letter was signed: Locked In Golden Handcuffs

The couples coach who answered the plea from "Locked" talked about the "aging" parents and their need to feel relevant. They also focused on what was triggering the son-in-law's negative response, such as feeling a loss of empowerment, freedom or authenticity or a sense of emasculation.

Whatever it is, it's not something I would want to visit on my son or daughter or their spouses. To give is to give freely. It's their lives to live. We are not in the driver's seat--even if we bought them the car.

 

 

Grandparenting: The no "Thank You" issue. Again

He's got an hilariously snarky point of view. Choire Sicha, the NYTimes Styles desk editor who is working his way through a three-month stint as the newspaper's "Work Friend," columnist, admits that he has only two to four ideas about life and that none of them are particularly original. That said, he notes that "Somehow long-running advice columnists, or really any kind of regular columnist or other Pez dispenser of thoughts, can reiterate their ideas for months or decades."

I thought about that commentary as I was reminded, yet again, of my replies to a sore that wont seem to heal for many grandparents: When they give their grandchildren gifts, they do not receive appropriate thank you notes from them. By "appropriate," most of the complainants seem to mean that a text or email will not do. They want a written note. I have posted my two-to-four thoughts on this issue here and here and a few other places.

And now I get to do it again, backed this time by the reliable Philip Galanes, the light-touch behind Social Q's.

Here's what his complainant had to say:

My teenage grandchildren have never sent us a thank-you note for any present we’ve given them. My husband and I are thinking of teaching them a lesson by skipping Christmas gifts this year. Thoughts?

Galane's thought:

Unless you believe your grandchildren can read minds, wouldn’t it be a more useful lesson to ask them for thank-you notes? I’m sorry that you and your husband feel underappreciated. But if the kids’ parents never insisted they write notes, and you never asked for them, how were your grandchildren to know?

If you expect thank-you notes, or if they are the price of admission for future gifts, tell your grandchildren. And you may as well specify whether email or text messages will suffice.

I couldn't say it any better and have tried. We live in a digital world, and it's a lot less formal than the good old days of personalized note cards and prized penmanship. Thank you notes--verbal, digital or hand crafted--are all welcome at our household.

If your grandkids don't respond to the request for a Thanks and you've set your priorities, well, then let the withholding begin. But remember this line from Dorothy Parker: "And if that makes you happy kid/You'll be the first it ever did."

Grandparenting: Ecstacy, agony and the mixed emotions of being a Nana or PopPop

The feelings we have on  becoming a grandparent aren't exactly oversold. Let's just say they're more complicated than the treacly bliss a Hallmark card might portray.

There's always been this joke about the up side of a day of grand parenting: The good news is that at the end of the day, your grandchild goes home.

There are other, more complicated feelings about being a grandparent. Yes, there is the unalloyed thrill of falling in love with a precious new life. But there is also the feeling of being an outsider. A friend--a single mother whose daughter had a baby a few weeks ago--finds her  relationship with her daughter has turned upside down. Where mother and daughter had shared shopping and movies and friendships, the daughter's focus is now exclusively (and rightly so) on her newborn; the future of the family is the baby. There's hardly a murmur about the well-being of my friend, who has been asked to babysit three days a week now that the new mom is going back to work.

It's a variation on another emotion: the feeling of being a guest in your child's life rather than an insider, a sense that we're looking in no matter how inside we thought we were. As Robin Marantz Henig wrote in a NYTimes essay, on grandmothering, "Even as you get to watch them, right up close, you're always outside with your nose pressed against the glass--and increasingly aware of how much of their story will take place without you."

Henig takes that last thought one agonizing step further.

I have internalized the stinging knowledge that, beneath all the encouragement you give your children to grow and walk and speak and leave, beneath all the wonderful moments you may be lucky enough to share in and enjoy, your grandchild’s life will be a long string of birthdays you will not live to see.

She calls this the doubled-edged nature of being a grandmother:

 Your thoughts turn powerfully toward the future — one that now includes the grandchildren you adore — at the very same moment you’re reminded of your own absence from that future. It’s an odd mixture of birth and death, which is what gives grandmotherhood its beauty, as well as its specific and poignant pain.

I understand what she's saying but personally,I have moments when I'm glad I won't be around to see how my precious grands cope with some of the awful changes the planet and the political world have in store. Or maybe our grands will be part of a solution. Still, it scares me just a little to think my dotage will be so prolonged I'll be here to see more than I want to see.