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

Holiday Surprises: What to do (and not do) when your child brings someone special home?

All families have their holiday traditions. For those of us who plan for a full family get-together over an extravagant holiday feast, there may be a surprise in store when our grown kids head for home. They may bring a new love interest, someone who may be a possible new partner in their life. Or they may use the family setting to announce a commitment to someone you've already met.

Amidst all the tumult of various family members pouring through the doors and taking up residence on the sofa, how do we deal with our child and their guest who may become an important person in our lives?

Writing in Psychology Today, Jane Adams has some pertinent advice. It starts with this important point: By bringing someone home and incorporating them into the family tradition, they're not asking for your permission or even your blessing.

Here's Adams' fuller expansion on that point:

The holidays, which often reunite far-flung kith and kin under one roof for celebratory rituals, are a popular season for couples presenting a ring or otherwise committing to a relationship with a future, whether or not an engagement or marriage is formally announced....

Although a blessing would be nice, it's not required. Young adults aren't really asking, they're telling. Their closed circle is opening up enough to admit you, unless you express your doubts, concerns, or misgivings. They don't want your judgments, they're not asking for your advice or opinion, and unless or until they do, keep it to yourself. Maybe you don't see what they see in him or her, but you don't have to, although there's nothing wrong with saying, "Tell me what you love about them," or even asking, "When did you know this was It?" not in a challenging tone but a gently curious one.

Her final piece of holiday advice:

Grab the newest member of your family, get them under the mistletoe, and plant one on them—after all, it's a blessed time to open your heart as wide as you can.

Leaving a Legacy: Keeping mum about our will and estate plan

I do not have the complication in my life of a second marriage and stepchildren. That means my adult children do not have to worry about whether step brothers or sisters will complicate the inheritance of the worldly goods their father and I leave behind.

I mention that because, experience-wise, I was unprepared for a complaint in a Philip Galanes Social Qs column from a reader whose stepchildren have stopped talking to their father (the reader's husband of two years but partner of 20). The husband's children asked for and were granted access to the terms of their father's will. They didn't like what they saw--their stepmother (the author of the letter to Galanes) stood to inherit a chunk of the father's property and money--and that's when the silent treatment began.

Galanes answer is specific to the problem of the letter-writer and the tricky business over property. But most of his observations are general enough to hold wisdom for us all.

You probably don’t need me to tell you that your husband’s children behaved atrociously — both by counting their father’s money as if it were their own and by disrespecting your relationship of two decades. I am not shocked by this story, though. Inheritance often brings out the very worst in people.

The gist of the rest of his answer was a version of this basic truth: We love our children but what we do with our worldly goods is none of their business, until it is (and we're no longer here to hear the arguments). There's this caveat: If we are favoring one child over another (one, say, is more successful financially than the other), we would be wise to alert them to our reasoning, an issue that I discuss here  and here.

credit: painting by Pierre Bonnard