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

The New Rules for Grandparents during the Corona Crisis: The where, when and how of visiting hours

Pieter de Hooch@National Gallery

Is it safe for our grandchildren to visit us or for us to visit them? For the past two and a half months of the coronavirus pandemic, visits have been limited to waves from backyard windows or FaceTime calls.  For most of us--those of us who don't live with our grown children--in person contact has been verboten. As state economies open up and Phase 1 morphs into Phase 2, some of those visits are moving toward in-person get-togethers: socially distanced, well-masked and one family group at a time.  No hugging allowed.

Some of us are willing to take the risk of mingling with our Grands (and our grown kids), even as our grown children are hesitant. (They look at that ugly CDC statistic: Eight out of 10 deaths from Covid-19 are in people aged 65 and older.)

Surely there are ways to make in-person visits safer. After all, we need to take into account not only  our physical well being but our mental health as well. We get lonesome for our loved ones; isolation is depressing.

The experts have some advice about how to make visits with Grands and their parents less threatening to our well-being. Tara Parker-Pope provided such guidance in her story “When Can I See My Grandkids?” Here are some of the tips:

--No one self-evaluates as reckless. Do a reality check about the actual level of vigilance by every member of the visiting household.  Some questions to ask every member of the household would cover: How many times did someone go to a store or meet a friend for a walk.  Did a teenage boyfriend/girlfriend stop by for a visit? At the park, did the grandkids run up to another child before the parents could stop them? Does everyone wear a mask?

--There's no perfect. But greater vigilance should be hyped up for 14 days before a visit.

--The al fresco answer.  The transmission risk is far lower outside than inside. But even outdoors, everyone should wash their hands and stay at least six feet apart (10 to 12 if anyone has a chronic health condition). Everyone over the age of 2 — and not just the grandparents — should wear a mask. Children are more likely to wear one if they understand that it’s to protect someone they love.

You've heard it before on the importance of masks, but here it is again from an expert with enough research and hands-on experience to know what he's talking about, Dr. Asaf Bitton. 

“A sneeze without a mask can spread up to 20 feet. It’s also the act of speaking — we expel droplets even in quiet speech. The mask really contains a great amount of them. The mask is protecting all of us from each other.”

So in-person visits from grandkids who live nearby are possible for those of us lucky enough to have backyards or access to outdoor parks. But the hugging part--that will have to wait.

Refilled Nests: Coronavirus, adult children and our no-longer-empty guest bedrooms

                                         painting: Edward Hopper (at National Gallery)

Some of our grown kids have come home to ride out the Covid-19 crisis. We may be happy to have them under our roofs again and to provide safe shelter in the corona storm. But the impact on us is not negligible: Keeping the refrigerator stocked. Cooking bigger meals. Sharing bathrooms. Overhearing conversations. Feeling frustrated by online habits. Dealing with their hygiene and laundry. Plus, the diminished privacy of having another adult in the house all the time. We love our adult kids but we don't necessarily want them living with us again.

This is an issue addressed recently in the New York Times, with a headline that acknowledged the reality: "Young Adults Take Refuge in Parents’ Empty Nests." The article also notes that some parents are moving in with their adult children. For some single parents, it means avoiding the loneliness of sheltering alone. It can also be helpful to children who are raising young children and can use an extra pair of hands, especially if they are telecommuting to their jobs.

There are all kinds of situations and reasons for re-habitating with our grown up children or them with us. Here's a link to the full NYTimes story, but if you don't want to read the whole thing. here are three highlights:

One mother summed up the reality of her refilled nest this way:

We have to rethink everything. What we've worked really hard to get to--our independence, their independence--is just gone."

An economist's observation on the impact on careers, particularly of children who have moved back home and left their jobs behind.

There are lasting consequences, a qualitative impact on workers who are forced to take a step backward, and that can really perpetuate a downward career spiral.

An historical perspective on multi-generational co-habitation:

Multigenerational households have been on the rise since 1980, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center report. In 2016, a record 64 million people, or 20 percent of the U.S. population, lived with two or more adult generations.

FOR ANOTHER TAKE on what it's like when a college student moves back home, here's an essay from The Atlantic. Stuck at Home With My 20-Year-Old Daughter

The author, Todd Purdum, writes about his own reactions (The family of four together again for family dinners.) and talks to his daughter about what the adjustment has been like for her. Here's some of what she told her dad:

“One of the hardest things has been going—and for better or worse—going from being independent to suddenly living in my childhood bedroom again. I would go to the dining hall or I would cook for myself, but I would be on my own to secure three meals a day. And I would do my own laundry—and wouldn’t have to do other people’s laundry!”

“I just miss being a college student and making, you know, a fine but maybe mediocre dinner in someone’s communal kitchen. And having a sense of purpose.”

 

 

 

Mother's Day, GrownKids and Guilt: Does anyone else dislike this "Day"?

I'm not sure what possessed me, but when I was a youngish mother of 'tweens I told my kids not to do anything for me for Mother's Day. It's not a day for me, I told them.  At the same time, it was a day when I had to call my mother and make sure the card and a gift were in the mail. Ditto mother-in-law.

Well, now I am the mother of mothers--my daughter and my daughter-in-law.  I still feel Mother's Day is not My Day. Now I see it as a day that's just a pain in the neck and a source of tension. It is such a struggle to be a mom today. I don't want my grownkids-mothers worrying about whether they sent me a card (the cards are too treacly anyway) or calling me because that's what you do on the second Sunday in May. I'd like to send them daily bouquets of flowers to  honor the job they've done so far. (They are a major reason I have such wonderful grandchildren, if I say so myself.)

I'm ambivalent about this holiday. I see it as a guilt-maker, as a day of emotional demands suggested and policed by outside forces. It's not as though it's a day specific to someone--like a birthday or a remarkable day in their life. 

I'm reminded of these queasy feelings by a Carolyn Hax column that appeared close to Mother's Day.

The Dear Carolyn writer, like me, seems to be pulled in many Mother's Day directions. Her story: When she was younger, she had  "felt the Mother's Day guilt of wanting to make my mother and mother-in-law happy." Now, she sees how overwhelming it is "for young mothers to be pulled in many directions" when it comes to dealing with Mother's Day.  Since she once felt that emotional workload, she has asked Carolyn, "What is the best solution for mothers of adult children with their own families? "

Here's part of Carolyn Hax's answer:

[You] can tell them that [your] Mother’s Day gift to them is an unconditional release from all obligations on Mother’s Day. Say you’d love to see them (if true), and will be happy to plan or play along or observe it on the day of their choice, or babysit so they can have time alone, or whatever else (if true), but you will not be a duty they have to fulfill.

To that I say Amen.

Here's a further point a reader made:

Don't just free them for Mother's Day. Do it for all the holidays.

Wouldn't you rather have a sweet phone call a week after the fact than hear, "Why didn't you call?" So would your children. The benefits are enormous for everyone. No worries, no guilt.

I give that another Amen. And a thanks for helping me feel less alone in my perverse reaction to Mother's Day--although I have good company in painter Mary Cassatt.

Here's this from the National Gallery expert on Cassatt::

When I curated the Gallery’s exhibition Degas/Cassatt in 2014, I learned that Mary Cassatt—known almost exclusively as the painter of motherhood—was dismissive when the idea of creating Mother’s Day was first proposed in 1913. As a staunch supporter of woman suffrage, she thought granting women the right to vote was a far more pressing issue than a single day celebrating mothers. Two years later, Mother’s Day was established by an act of Congress. Women had to wait five more years for access to suffrage, much to Cassatt’s disappointment.

 

Grown Children, Us and Covid-19: Updating Advanced Directives

                                             Romare Bearden Tomorrow I May Be Far Away

I am no longer a New Yorker but, in this time of coronavirus, I am a regular viewer of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's daily press briefings. When he reports those stress-inducing intubation statistics, he reminds us that 80 percent of patients who are intubated and placed on a ventilator don't have what he calls "a good outcome." He doesn't spell it out but the data shows that those who survive the worst trials of Covid-19 may have continuing, life-altering struggles.

The decisions about what to do  if we were on the cusp of being intubated will fall into the laps of our children, spouses and siblings. A friend of mine's daughter-in-law who is a hospice doctor says she now spends a lot of her time counseling families who have to deal with these very difficult ventilator-related decisions.

Which brings me to this point: We may have left our children general guidance (advanced directives) about how we want to be treated if we can't make decisions for ourselves, but in the Age of Coronavirus they may need an update on what we want done for or not done to us. I  brought up this question briefly in a post that ran a few weeks ago. Since then a NYTimes article has been even more blunt, headlining its story: "Do You Want to Die in an I.C. U.? Pandemic Makes Question All too Real."

The article starts off with what a 69-year-old retired teacher told her son--her health care proxy--about whether or not to put her on a ventilator should she become ill with Covid-19. Her son, who happens to be president of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, said his mother discussed her concerns with him. He was able to understand the pragmatism behind her directive. He knew what she would want him to do it worst came to worst. Beyond the particulars of his own situation, a point he made was this: “It’s the kind of conversation everyone should be having with their loved ones.”

The article also brings up an issue that, even if months or years ago we gave our children general Advanced Directives, there's one point that may not have been covered in that guidance:

When seniors and their families engage in what’s called advance-care planning, they often focus on the D.N.R. question — whether patients would want to be resuscitated after cardiac arrest.

But because Covid-19 is a respiratory disease, the more pressing question will likely be whether a hospitalized patient who’s seriously ill will accept intubation and ventilation.

It's never easy to discuss these kinds of issues with our children--they resist; neither they nor we are keen to deal with our mortality. We figure we'll talk about it 'one of these days.' But with coronavirus cases still on the rise in the U.S. and treatment more complicated and drastic than anyone imagined, that day may be here.