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

Doomed: Our adult children's concerns about our drag on their future

Our adult children are worried about us. Not necessarily about our health and well-being. It's more a generation vs generation thing and the fear that the aging population (that's us) might doom their economic future. That is, we'll drain the purses that support  Medicare and Social Security and leave them working without a future safety net and in a disrupted economy. Here's why: Those of us who are currently working pay into a fund that pays benefits to those who are retired. Since we're living longer than our parents and their parents did, we're using up those funds faster than they can be replaced. The math is not in Gen Z's favor.

To sum it up with brief factoids:

The share of Americans age 65 or older is expected to grow faster over the next 30 years than the share of Americans between the ages of 25 and 54, the so-called “prime working age.”

The labor force participation rate is expected to dip over the coming decades.

With more people in need of care and fewer people working, economists see a potentially crushing burden on the U.S. economy and welfare system.

All is not doom and gloom. There are economists out there who see an alternative reality. A 538 story  reports on three scenarios that tackle the labor part of the problem and one that takes a less gloomy look at the financial side.

Encore Careers: Jim Johnson, a professor at UNC's business school, sees us--America’s 70 million or so baby boomers --as an asset that could help build “the longevity economy,” which is what the economy will have to look like to accommodate an aging population. Here's how he puts it:

“Everything has to change in both the built environment and the social environment to accommodate an aging population. ... Given the labor market challenges that we're facing today, post-COVID, ‘encore careers’ [beginning a new vocation later in life] are something that we're going to have to pursue in a major way.”

Immigration Boost. Higher rates of immigration help countries experiencing population aging because immigrants tend to be younger and therefore more able to work than the domestic population. Many economic forecasters assume that by 2030, population growth from immigration will supersede that from natural increases (births minus deaths).

Recruiting Workers. Only two OECD countries spent less than the U.S. on programs to encourage labor market participation — like job training programs and employment subsidies — as a share of their GDP. Economists suggest that we (theU.S.) invest more in such programs to get more people working.

We Have Assets: We may not be the drain on the social security purse that everyone fears. As retirees, many of us have saved for our so-called Golden Years. What sets us apart from our European counterparts is the share of income we older residents draw from assets, rather than government transfers, in our old age. That means we may not be the burden Gen Z fears we will be.

painting: Heidi Malott

The New Sandwich Generations: We're in the mix somewhere.

 

 

We've all heard of the sandwich generation--the one where we're on the hook for caring for our aged parents and our young children. What with many of us living longer and the needs of our adult children changing, there are two variations on the sandwich motif.

One is the club sandwich: We're taking care of our aging parents and still supporting our adult children.

The other is the grand-sandwich: We're taking care of our aging parents and helping out with our grandchildren.

Either way, the generation in the middle (it may be our adult children rather than us) has a load of emotional stress and time-consuming responsibilities say nothing of dealing with a financial squeeze.

A Washington Post story posts some of the details for those of us caught in the middle or worried about our adult children who are stuck there:

Point one: The financial burdens associated with being responsible for multiple generations are rising, but the main culprit may not be elderly parents but adult children.

With more post-college youths coming home to live with parents or doing so throughout school, there are now estimates that nearly 30% of 25-to-34 years olds live with their parents. Essentially this leaves parents taking care of many of their children's financial burdens in addition to tending to other responsibilities they may bring about.

Point two: The emotional stress of caring for elderly parents runs deep.

Those amid the sandwich generation are handed double duty by also wanting or needing to help take care of their aging parents—a role many consider far more their responsibility than taking care of adult children. Whether their parents live at home, in a facility or within their home, the stress can become overwhelming. The burdens of medical costs, helping with daily activities, overseeing supervision, legal considerations and other concerns can take a physical and emotional toll on top of ongoing financial concerns.

art: Rauschenberg

Our Children, Our Bosses: A change in the dynamics of who's taking charge of whom.

Friends of ours just returned from four weeks in Italy. Days of sunshine. Mornings with una tazza di caffè. So delightful. They stayed at a four-story house their son and his family have rented: Their daughter-in-law was appointed to a prestigious job at an international agency headquartered in Rome and so the family relocated. What that meant for my friends, who have been plagued by health issues these past few years, is that their son is no longer available (as he had been) to help them out when they have a health or house-maintenance problem.  The son, in his turn, is gently insisting that his parents move to Italy--the four-story house has a suite for them and he will be able to take care of them as needs arise.

A week after our friends returned from Rome, we had dinner together. "No way," they said. "We are not moving to Italy." Language issues aside (It's not a minor aside when you don't speak Italian and live in Italy.), they were not, they said "ready" to make such a move, a move that would make them totally dependent on their son and his family. How would they make friends? Have any kind of community life? Be able to talk to anyone outside of the house?

The question that hung in the air: When is one "ready" to pull up roots and move near one's grown children? Italy may throw a slightly romantic cast on such a decision, but whether it's Rome or Miami or Chicago (or wherever a grown child now lives), it's disorienting to leave a "life" behind and start over. Should we do it when we're young enough to join communities and build a new life? Or do we wait until we're deep into our dotage and don't have many good choices left?

Even more to the point: Should it be our children who are telling us (gently insisting) what to do and when to do it? During Covid, when those of us over 65 were told we were at greater risk than everyone else, many of us found our children got bossy: Telling us to stay home and keep ourselves under strict quarantine.  I posted about that phenomenon here and here. 

Within my own family, my children have brought up the "relocation" subject in a less insistent way. Their dad and I are without major health problems. We may no longer be taking bicycling vacations in Brittany, but we're still leading active lives. Our children want to know what we'd want to do if/when the time came that we couldn't manage on our own. Would we want to move to a supportive living facility near them or where we are? So hard to imagine not being able to take care of oneself. But who knows what lies ahead?

My daughter put it this way: "It's hard to imagine this most ordinary thing."

That said, the seed has been planted--by them for us. The issue is not front-of-mind but it's back there somewhere, ready to be addressed when we're "ready."

photo: Maia Lemov

Money Matters: Raising cash to help your kids fix up their house

If I were to survey my friends and their friends, I'm pretty sure I would find that almost all of us who could afford it helped our grown kids buy their first home. As a generational trend, it's kind of what we did and do. For some of us, the help is a loan and we expect to be repaid. For others, whatever chunk of the downpayment we give them is a gift, no strings attached beyond an expectation of a few invites to dinner.

But what happens when we retire and feel less flush--especially today as the financial markets are eating away at our savings. Our kids may already own a house but may need substantial help to update or add on to it--for a growing family or even for a suite for us.

Should we tap our IRA to help them out? Or just say no? For one set of parents whose daughter needed a loan to renovate her house, the answer was yes, and with good reason. Once the renovation was complete, they planned to sell their house and move into their daughter's home. They couldn't sell their house to raise money since their daughter and her family were living with them while the renovation is underway.

So, how to finance the help for a daughter who's very much part of their future living arrangement?  The parents wrote to a Washington Post real estate columnist to ask whether they should tap their IRA for the $300,000 to lend their daughter or if there is a better way to borrow to finance the renovation, which is slated to take about a year. The parents plan to use the proceeds from the eventual sale of their home to boost their retirement account or pay off any loan they may incur.

Using IRA funds may be the simplest way to tap into money--interest-free cash! no closing costs! no bank fees! But it would be the worst of all possible options. Withdrawing such a large amount from an IRA would trigger a huge tax bill.

The columnist suggested other options. Here are the nuts and bolts of two options: A cash-out refinance of the parent's house would raise money but it would incur interest rates (ever-rising) and upfront fees. A home equity line of credit wouldn't raise quite as much money as a refinance could but would probably mean higher interest rates on the loan--though lower fees/closing costs. The interest rates might not be that much of a factor--if the renovation is finished on time and the parents can sell their house quickly to repay the loan.

Which is a long way of saying, our helping hand is a riskier business than ever.

(BTW: If you want to know more details on how the relative costs of the refinance versus home equity line of credit might work out, check this link to the Post story.)

art: Rauschenberg, Third Time

 

 

Covid Seniors: Are our adult kids still trying to be our parents?

Some of us whose adult children are now of sandwich-generation age--meaning their teen- and 20-something kids are becoming independent while their parents are evolving toward ancient--have a "take control" attitude toward their parents. It may be a hangover from the Covad pandemic. Back in those bad old days, a good number of adult kids, seeing their parents as vulnerable, set down rules for us--as though they had become our parents. What I saw among my friends were dictates like these: No shopping even if masked; no outdoor visits with friends (even if masked); no indoor visits with grandkids (only waves from the window).

Now that the pandemic has eased--or at least, the way we live with it has evolved--some of us are finding our kids haven't taken the foot off the controls. Again, I see it among my friends, especially those with health problems. But now I have news of it from afar. Well, as afar as Philip Galanes and his Social Q column

In the Galanes instance, a reader/letterwriter is a middle-aged man who is alarmed because his partner wants to move his 80-year-old parents who live in a distant city into his and his partner's home. The partner wants to remodel the home to accommodate his parents but the reader is looking for another solution--say, offering to contribute to a house or apartment for the parents that's in a nearby neighborhood but not in the reader's home.

Galanes's answer looks at the issue from the parents' point of view. He defends our autonomy and ends with a point we might want to make if we feel our kids are getting too, well, controlling. Here's some of Galanes'reply:

....I’ve been the self-appointed savior of an older parent, too! I know your partner is acting out of love (and fear). But his parents are old — not pieces of furniture to be carted from state to state. Your partner should begin this discussion by asking his parents what they would like if they were to need more help.

They may be part of a vibrant community of friends and neighbors who enrich their daily lives. They may prefer to age in place (with appropriate help) or at an assisted-living facility nearby....And all these options avoid the drastic steps of remodeling homes or buying new ones in a state where their son may be the only person they know.

I don’t minimize the practical or emotional complexities of aging. Your partner’s parents are lucky to have a loving son in their corner. And for all we know, they may want to move — at which point, we can take up your concern. But respecting their autonomy has to be the core of this discussion. They’ve seen a thing or two in their 80-odd years! Let them lead the way for as long as they can.

painting: R Bearden

The Wisdom of our Children: When the balance of giving advice tips in their favor

A funny thing has happened on our way to becoming older parents: We may find that our grown kids have acquired wisdom and good sense. And now, as we age into our more senior adult years, they share their gravitas with us (though some of their over-protective counsel during Covid was a bit overbearing as I posted here.) Many times, though, they become our guides to making difficult decisions. 

I was reminded of this when I bumped into a friend I hadn't seen in years. Now a widow, she was telling me about her son--I had last seen him when he was a toddler--who was now a physician in charge of a major healing center at a hospital across the country.  When her husband became gravely ill and hospital-bound, my friend desperately wanted to bring him home to care for him. She was trying to figure out how to reconfigure their home to make it possible to care for him there.  When her son flew home for a visit, he assessed both his father's condition and the house and told his mother what she didn't want to hear: It couldn't be done. There was no way his father could come home and be cared for safely and comfortably.

Her son's words and advice--"Let's find a really good nursing home for dad"--helped her acknowledge the best course to take for her husband's well-being. He died within a few months, but she was able to oversee her husband's care at the nursing home and spend much of every day with him.

When we face difficult choices, we are fortunate when we can lean on our children for sound advice. At some point in our lives, the good-counsel balance shifts slightly and our children become our valued advisors. We are able to reap what we've sown.

painting: Picasso, Still Life

 

Leaving a Legacy: Is there a fair way to divide our assets?

The two most boring words in a parent's vocabulary: Estate Planning. Within that world, the most volatile words are Unequal Shares.  Whether we have a gargantuan billion-dollar estate to divvy up among our children or just a small savings account to apportion (or somewhere between those two extremes), we may have reasons to deviate from the mean.

The mean, of course, is to divide whatever we have equally among our children. That way we are likely to head off squabbles--and possible litigation--among our heirs. It's true that we're no longer around to witness any ugliness that may ensue but as financial advisors are fond of saying, "Most of us would like to be remembered for who we were, not for what we had." (Backing that up, a 2020 Merrill Lynch study found that two-thirds of us want our family to remember us as the people we were; only 5 percent ticked the box for wanting to be remembered for our accumulated wealth.)

Would a positive memory be besmirched by our kids fighting over what we've left them? Let's go to the research again. An Ameriprise survey found that, after we were no longer around to adjudicate, 70 percent of the fights between and among siblings involved how an inheritance was divided.

“With unequal inheritances, you run the risk of causing sibling animosity,” one estate planner said. “If you go this route you need to manage expectations so you don’t have one sibling blaming another.”

Why go the unequal route? A friend of mine with a disabled daughter has set up a special trust for her care and asked her sons to manage that trust. Most of my friend's assets will go into that trust. Her sons understand why and what their family responsibilities are.

There are families where one child is super successful financially and the other works in a worthy but low-paying field. In some families, one child has remained close to her parents while the other is estranged or one child manages to visit often but the other doesn't, or one has several children and the other doesn't.

As parents we may have all kinds of valid reasons for carving our estate into unequal shares. And a number of us are doing so. In fact, the percentage of parents who left unequal inheritances to their children more than doubled between 1995 and 2010, rising from 16 percent in 1995 to 35 percent in 2010. 

The key to avoiding sibling spats over unequal shares is pre-planning. As I've noted in my posts here  and here , while you're still in good health or of sound mind, it pays to sit down with your child (especially the one with the diminished share) and explain what you're doing and why. Facts alone may not be enough. Their emotional understanding of the unequal share may be helped by our reassurance that their share of our worldly goods is no reflection of how much we love them.  Estate plan aside, it never hurts to remind our children of our unmeasurable love for them. They're never too old for that.

art: Robert Rauschenberg

Observation: Emma Thompson on the ties that bind grandmas, grownkids and the moms in between

During the pandemic, actor and screenwriter Emma Thompson hosted both her 22-year-old daughter and her 89-year-old mother. In The Guardian she wrote about the links between generations, on what we mean to and do for each other and of what she found to be "the miraculous luxury of three generations together."

Here are some of her comments:

My daughter has tattoos. I like them, which surprises me. I understand the urge to mark life’s more seismic events upon your body. ...

My mother’s body bears witness in more traditional ways – watching her navigate its frailty and bentness is a daily learning, a meditation. ...

Living between these bodies is an odd mixture of joy and grief. My daughter thrums. Her life force changes the atmosphere in the room as soon as she enters. We all receive the electrical charge and, once again, we dance....

Or my daughter comes in upset, chaotic, spinning out and sits by my mother and receives a calming nod – no questions, I note – and the chaos subsides.....

But the meeting of these life forces now feels more essential than ever. We are constantly exchanging ever-altering resonances, and balance occurs. Not perfectly – nothing’s perfect – but, consistently, we change and reset one another’s state. So instead of grieving my mother’s ageing, instead of envying my daughter’s youth, I find I am buoyed up and calmed down by turn.

 

Holidays and Adult Children: The seven stages of Thanksgiving traditions

We are on the cusp of setting a totally new tradition for our family's Thanksgiving. It's time. We are no longer young parents. Our kids are middle-aged adults; they have children who are young adults. Extended family members are growing frail and need special attention.

I, who usually embrace change, don't like the changes that are coming our way. Yet, when I look back and see how our family's Thanksgiving holiday traditions have morphed, I take comfort in life's cyclical pattern. Like other families, ours has no stasis; the balanced becomes unbalanced.

We move through our Thanksgiving customs as we move through life--in stages. My family and I have moved through seven of them. Other family's particulars are inevitably different from mine, but for all of us, there are make-overs and take-overs over the years.

Stage 1: Loosey Goosey:  Our children are very young. We have moved to a city 4-hours away from where we grew up and where our parents live.  We keep the holiday simple and small--as small as the little townhouse we are renting. Two pre-school children less than two years apart in age focus our minds on day-to-day needs rather than elaborate holiday meals.

Stage 2: Friends and Family:  When we move to a bigger house and our children are in the prime of their primary school years, we have Thanksgiving dinners with another family. We share the cooking and meal planning, scanning our memory banks to remember which surprising new dish from the previous year our families liked and which should never ever be repeated. Thanksgiving dinner is always at our house: They have dogs; we have allergies.

Stage 3: New Attachments: Our kids leave for college, start independent lives and put down roots in other cities. They form romantic attachments, some of whom appear at Thanksgiving dinner. Attachments became spouses and now Thanksgiving is more than a meal. It is a weekend during which the refrigerator has to be stocked not just for a turkey dinner but for three meals a day and additional guests. The house expands to accommodate bigger beds and pillows as well as more seats at the dining room table.

Stage 4: New Beginnings:  Grandchildren transform our Thanksgiving get-togethers into a wild weekend at our house. Blow-up beds and portable cribs accommodate sleeping babies and toddlers. Those in charge of the kitchen have to keep straight our grandchildren's sipping and eating patterns and what their parents permit them to have and what is verbotten--for one family but not necessarily the other. There are multiple trips to airports to pick up and drop off a son and his family and a daughter and hers. By Sunday, we are as flat on our backs as the now-deflated blow-up beds.

Stage 5: Passing the Baton:  Our children's families grow bigger. It makes more sense for the two of us--the parents/grandparents--to travel to them than to have eight children/grandchildren moving through airports and highways to arrive at our house for Thanksgiving. Our son and daughter-in-law who have the largest family and house take on the mantel of hosting Thanksgiving. Our routine now is: We arrive two days in advance to help--and to avoid the height of airport congestion. We assist in the kitchen, run errands and set tables but we are no longer in charge.

Stage 6: Zoom. The pandemic is a game changer. No one is going anywhere. No hugs. No sneaks into the kitchen to pre-taste a side dish. No idle chit-chat. We make do with Zoom. Our son emcees the family get-together with photos from the past and a fun quiz about what's happening in those photos, i.e. why have the parents (that's us) let their 10-year-old daughter wear a sweater advertising Joe Camel? Fun stuff. But after an hour, we click off and the goodwill of being together online dissipates. Is Zoom or a hybrid mode going to be the future for family get-togethers?

Stage 7: Frailties: We are negotiating Thanksgiving in a post-pandemic world. It is also a world in which time has been marching on. Grandchildren are taking a gap year abroad.  Elderly relatives who live alone in other cities are growing increasingly frail and in need of attention, especially during the holidays. We, the parents/grandparents, are not as spry as we once were. We will make the trip north this year but our three families will split up in order to accommodate the elderly cousin who is alone. It's not just the cousin who's feeling his age. Our children have already raised the question of whether they should come to us. We could, they suggest, rely on store-prepared turkeys and sides instead of cooking a meal for ten or more.

We are on the cusp of something completely different--and not completely welcome.

painting: Norman Rockwell

 

 

We're the Aging Parents Now: How do our grown kids see us?

Another weekend in June, another grandchild is graduating from high school. We are winging our way thither for a pre-ceremony celebration. While we sit on the airplane waiting to land, we wonder: What will we look like to our son and his family? We haven't seen them in person in a long time (thank you, Covid). Will they see how we've aged? We're slower walkers now. Sometimes we forget to stand up straight. Will we look like old people to them?

A vanity, yes. But still. We want to be seen as energetic, as parents who have come to visit, are helpful around the house and are able to play ball with the kids. That's how we see ourselves, even as we know there are limits on how physical we can be. (Kick the soccerball with a granddaughter? Maybe a few touches.)

What we learned on this trip is that everything's relative. Yes, we've aged. Yes, we're slower than we were. Long walks with our son and various family members are no longer three to four miles; more likely to be one or two. On this trip, we arrived on the heels of our daughter-in-law's parents. They had been there for a week and left three hours before we arrived. They too had slowed down a step or two. Fiercely independent and hardy folks, they live a nine- or ten-hour drive away from their only child--and, unlike us, with no easy airline flight back and forth. They had always maintained --not in these words but in words to the effect--that "over my dead body" would they move from their beloved Maine to live near their child. And yet, health issues were threatening their well-being; they, too, are getting older. On this visit when their daughter brought up the subject of their moving to her city, they were receptive to the idea.

My daughter-in-law was part relieved--if they moved she could be on hand when they needed help. But also part alarmed: There was the recognition that her parents were aging and struggling to maintain their independence. It made her sad to realize that change was coming and soon. It made me sad, too. When my mother became frail and ill, I remember feeling that there was a turnaround in our relationship. In effect, I had to become her parent. That's the direction we parents of older grown children are heading--if we're lucky or healthy enough to get there.

photo: Sunset by Maia Lemov