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

Overlooked: Do our children talk over us at family get-togethers? It may be our fault.

As soon as I read the letter in Social Qs from a man who felt he was being "talked over and generally excluded" from dinner conversations with adult children, I started counting. How many friends did I know who had complained about the same thing. They had had successful careers, experienced the joys of parenting and proudly headed the table at family functions. From Thanksgiving dinners to Christmas feasts, Passover Seders to Easter breakfasts, they had steered the conversation and made sure the value of their point of view was heard.

And now? Well, now the adult children are in charge and it is hard to have our voices heard--no less to take command. "They're no longer interested in my opinion," one friend put it. This was after a Christmas dinner hosted by his son (from his first marriage) and attended by his wife and wife's kids (ditto), the adult children's spouses and the grandkids. It didn't seem to count that he had long provided wise business counsel to three of the four grown children, all of whom had gone on to succeed in business.

His brief lament mirrored the longer tale told to Philip Galanes' Social Q's:

I am fortunate to be in a great long-term marriage that produced a wonderful daughter and an amazing college-age granddaughter. But lately, they have told me, in plain English, that my opinions and standards (from my education at a parochial school and military academy) don’t count for much. The last time we had dinner, they talked over me and generally excluded me from the conversation. My opinions were dismissed, and my values were derided. These are the three most important women in the world to me. How do I get them to stop using me as a piñata?

Philip Galanes suggests the writer might be dominating conversation and not falling in line with the more democratic approach of the current times. Here's Galanes point:

We all have a right to our opinions, of course. But one of the interesting shifts in the past few years has been a greater public awareness of who feels entitled to speak up and expect their views to be heard — and who doesn’t. You may not suffer from blind privilege, but it’s a question worth considering.

If you have been holding the Talking Stick for too long, perhaps the women have become impatient for their turns. So, share it! And especially because they are so dear to you, make an effort to understand how their views differ from yours. In my experience, the respect in that gesture is often reciprocated.

 

 

 

Empty Nests: When you don't really want them to move back home

This is the emptying nest season. A lot of our kids have left for college and parents are wistful and lump-in-throat sad to see their empty place at the kitchen table. We wish they were still youngsters living under our roof. Or so we think. But four years hence, we may not be so thrilled if the young adults return and set up headquarters in their former bedrooms (now our guest rooms or dens).

We were devoted parents while they lived with us but we may not be so happy to see them come back. That's the gist of a column by Charles Blow, an oped columnist for the NYTimes who usually writes about such weighty matters as racism and immigration. But Blow, a single dad since his son was six years old and his twins were three, has taken time to fill his column space with an essay on parenting. He acknowledges that when the twins went off to college a few years ago he felt "free, that I was entering a new life of my own, and I felt absolutely no guilt about that."

When the twins graduated from college, they moved back into his house and settled in as they searched for jobs and looked for their first apartments. Blow admits to, well, being less than happy about their return. 

I will say the thing that we as parents are not supposed to say: What happened to my empty nest? The very definition of home has changed. Mine will always be their family home, their spiritual home, but it cannot be their primary home. This is now my primary home, alone.

I know that this arrangement is temporary, and I want to help my children out in every way possible, but it would be dishonest to say that their reappearance in “their rooms,” which I now call guest rooms, has not been jarring.

Then he addresses the conflict many of us feel when our kids refill the nest and our culpability in making it oh-so-comfortable for them.

No matter how much I try to resist the urge, I’m reverting to my last-phase parenting mode — worrying about whether they’re eating enough and eating healthfully, washing their clothes and taking them to their rooms.

These are young adults and not children. I have to remember that. I also have to remember that this phase is temporary. But, I also have to prevent them from dragging their feet leaving home and starting their own lives.

When your children return to your empty nest, it is a good thing to firmly nudge them out. That, too, is what love looks like.