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

Parenting Adult Children: Feeling like an outsider when we visit.

On our way home from a recent visit with Uber son--his is a family of five that lives some 350 miles away from us--Paterfamilias and I were in accord: The 2-day visit had been bittersweet.

The sweetness was in the welcome when we arrived; in observing how grand our three Grands are, each in their own way; in seeing the closeness and strength of our son's marriage; in marveling at the way he's built his career and in our daughter-in-law's ability to build a warm home around challenging demands.

We spent almost all of our "Blitzkrieg visit" (in one day; out the next) at indoor soccer games (a Saturday night tournament, no less) and hanging around the house. When the sun shone, we were outside with one or all of our Grands, the wee-est one riding her trike, the biggest heaving a football to his dad or Gramps and the three Grands building a snowman with the remains of an early-Spring snowfall. All of that comes under the general category heading of "Sweet."

So what was bitter? Maybe bitter is too harsh a word. But what had us feeling a good deal less than warm and fuzzy about the visit was the feeling of being excluded--of being on the outside looking in. It was likely not intentional, just the reality of not being part of the in-group of a very tightly knit family.

        A few days after we got home, Uber son posted on his Facebook page a description of a game he and his family had just taken up: Sardines. It's a variation on the theme of hide and seek. They go down into the basement. One person turns off the light and hides. Everyone else tries to find him/her and when they do, they hide with him/her. The last person left still looking is "it" next time. Uber son noted happily that "My three kids ALL love it and how many things can keep an 11 year old and a four year old happy? All of them would choose it right now over a movie pretty much hands down."

It struck me that Sardines was the perfect metaphor for what we experienced. They huddle together and we can't really find a way to be part of them.

We are not alone in feeling this way. I know that--from friends who've experienced similar visits to their grown children and from therapists who offer advice to those parents of grown children who are feeling their way through the unhappiness of exclusion. Dr. Kathleen McCoy, a psychotherapist who blogs on midlife and beyond, noted that some parents complain that they feel they are "on a socially accepted ice floe when it comes to their adult offspring." or that they are "bit players in the lives of their adult offspring."

McCoy suggests that we reframe the feelings of being on the side lines. "Instead of feeling diminished and left out, one can get in tune with the rhythm of life. We can reframe being a "bit player" to "having a front row seat" or "cheering them on."  Letting the pleasure of generativity flow over you as you marvel at the accomplishments of your children and grandchildren can be life-changing."

She admits there may be times when you miss being central to your children's daily lives. "My Aunt Molly used to say that, as you age, 'you're welcome at the party, but the party isn't for you.' " McCoy adds, "participating in the party, minus the burden of being the central focus, can be even more satisfying."

Intellectually I know she's right but it doesn't feel that way when we're in the moment. Her Aunt Molly's line is a zinger that reminds us of our deepest feeling: Most of us don't necessarily want to be the life of the party but we do want to be part of it. And when we feel somehow pushed away--however unintentional it may be--it's bittersweet. And a reminder that we did the same thing to our parents. So much for the pleasures (and guilt trip) of generativity.

 

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Parenting Adult Children: A special anxiety reserved especially for us

There's a special anxiety reserved for those of us with grown children. Since we're no longer in control of their health and safety--as we were when they were young and lived under our roof--when there are "threats" to their well being, we can only worry, fret, second guess, interfere and do assorted other things to help control our anxieties.

Even when we share our good guidance tips with them, it doesn't solve the problem. They're going to make their own decisions and they may or may not factor in anything we say.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. Alpha daughter and her family--one child, one husband, one dog--were here for a weekend visit.

It was a lovely visit--lots of chit chat and talking about big and little things. But this weekend, it turns out, was the one where Superstorm Sandy was due to land late on Sunday or early Monday. I wasn't sure how involved our city would be, but between our home and Alpha Daughter's, chaos would reign. Before I went to bed Saturday night, I checked some online sites--the New York Times among them. And there it was--an announcement that Mayor Bloomberg was likely to close bridges and tunnels in and out of the city as well as the subway system. Airlines were announcing low or no cancellation fees for Sunday flights. Towns along the coast--New Jersey and Delaware beach towns--were being evacuated.

Alpha daughter and family were planning to drive home Sunday afternoon. Oy, as my grandmother might say. My son in law was still awake and working on his laptop. I laid out my concerns. He didn't seem worried. But I was all anxiety now. I sputtered on about how difficult it would to drive through or around the city. I suggested they get up early in the morning and drive straight home. 

He didn't exactly poo-poo my suggestion--he's too polite for that. But he did let me know that he didn't think there was any reason to change their plan yet. My parting shot was, "Just think about it."

Maybe it's because I'm getting older or less able to control actions, but little worries tend to be bigger ones now. I was awake most of the night. Fretting,, worrying, wondering how they could get home safely. And if they didn't leave on Sunday, they were not likely to be able to get out until Wednesday. I got up and did some deep breathing, some Yoga, some meditation. I couldn't force them to get up at the crack of dawn and get going. And that's what I felt they needed to do to get home safely and within a reasonable amount of time.

Alpha daughter's an early riser. When she got up and online, she started packing her bags. The situation was even worse than it had been the night before. As the extent of the proposed evacuations became clear, they decided to take the "long" route home--and not go near New York City but head west to Pennsylvania before heading east to their home in New England.

So one anxiety down--they were leaving early--but a day of nervousness ahead: were they finding their way on the new route, was there a lot of traffic, could they get gas and food at highway stops.

We can drive ourselves crazy thinking about the things that can go wrong. Fortunately, Alpha daughter was kind to her aging mom. She or my son-in-law called every few hours to let us know how well things were going. It took them 11 hours to make what otherwise should have been a 9-hour drive but they got home safely.

Now I could turn to anxieties over personal survival if we lost heat and light--or even part of our roof--from the storm. We were, luckily, on the edge of Superstorm Sandy's fury and just got a glancing blow. Ditto for Alpha Daughter in New England.  Now what else could I find to worry about? Oh yes. The election, which was still more than a week away.

Finally, today, the election is history and I can breathe deeply. For now.

 

 

 

Smother Love, Retiree Style: There's still no excuse for over-helping our adult children

In May, I linked to a post on the educated grandparent blog--a post that talked about the need for those of us who are retiring from our jobs and work-day careers to make sure we develop our own interests and not live our lives through our grown children and grandchildren. No sooner had I read through the post on the issue than I came across this "Ask Amy" column in a newspaper. In the second question in the column, a daughter complains about a mother who is driving her nuts with constant calling, text messaging and emails. "She is retired (in her 60s) and extremely bored," the letter writer notes. "She sits online all day and sends me about 10 emails a day with ideas for my career, endless news articles and forwards."

Yes, just what the educated grandparent blog warned about. And with some hint at what happens when we don't get a grip on our life. The daughter writes that she is becoming "more detached from her [mother] because she is suffocating me with the bombardment of emails, texts and phone calls."

Amy's last word to the daughter is this reminder: Her parent's life is her parent's responsibility.

No one said it would be easy to step back from our children's lives--and especially not when we are no longer engaged in our careers, interacting with friends at work and feeling in control of a busy, active life. It's just that smother love is no answer to one of life's biggest adjustments, which is what retirement is. Our children don't want to be our cause. It may be easy to send emails and text messages--to show our progeny how well we can keep up with their interests and needs. We may think we're showing interest in them but they may take it as a busy-body like bombardment. Some 20 years ago, when we were annoyed at someone's mixing too personally into our business, we would shoot out a popular admonition: "Get a Life." Still holds true today.

 

 

Read more here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2012/05/11/2110916/husband-praises-his-hero-his-wife.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2012/05/11/2110916/husband-praises-his-hero-his-wife.html#storylink=cpy

Great Expectations: The payback--or lack of it--when we help our kids out

When their daughter and son-in-law bought a house, the parents helped out--with advice and counseling (both solicited) on the building plans and by babysitting their grandson, especially on moving day. They also helped paint rooms and gave the young couple furnishings from their own house that they no longer needed.

Their problem, as they expressed it in a letter to Carolyn Hax, is one of feeling left out. The daughter planned a house warming party and didn't invite the parents. When the mom complained, the daughter told her she was "over the top" to be upset.The mom, who signed her letter, "sad and disappointed" expressed her pain this way: "It seems to us that we were good enough to do all the legwork but not good enough to be invited to the celebration."

Ah yes, The left out feeling. No one likes it. Being slighted is one of the least feel-good feelings in the world. And to be excluded by our own children! But as Hax pointed out, "when adult children live near their parents, they're faced with a small but sensitive puzzle: how to lead social lives that are both independent and inclusive."

Hax's advice to the mom, who said this was not the first time she felt like she was the "hired help rather than part of the family," was to look at the situation in a more positive light.Instead of saying "We're the hired help," the mom could tell herself, Hax writes, "We're already a huge part of their lives. I'm glad they'll have this time with friends."

In other words, we are often hurt when we get over-invested in our children's lives--and especially so when we expect them to repay our many "investments" with a coin from another country. We may love our children and they may love us, but we aren't --and shouldn't try to be -- their social life.

Holidays with Grown Children: More on that outsider feeling

Christmas dinner at his daughter's house: Dick was surrounded by his wife, grandchildren, son-in-law, stepsons and their families. What could be warmer and nicer for the holidays? For those of us at a certain age, plenty.

Dick says that as everyone moved from the living room to the dining room for dinner, he sat down on the sofa and brooded. Am I still needed? he asked himself. As a business man (retired but doing volunteer work with a small business advisory group), Dick had been there to advise his son, son-in-law, daughter, and stepsons on their career moves--on getting started, on moving up the corporate or other ladders. Now that they were well on their way, they had reached a point where they knew more about where they were than he did. Never good at small talk, he felt left out of the general chit chat going back and forth between and among his grown children. "I didn't see where I fit in. I wouldn't say I felt irrelevant. I would say I felt almost irrelevant."

To put in perspective the feelings that flooded him that Christmas night, Dick says it has been harder to take than some of the physical diminishments he has experienced as he has gotten older--no longer having the same endurance or strength he had as a 60-year-old man who rode his bike for 50 miles or more on a Sunday outing. Illness and age have taken a toll (20 miles is the new comfort level).  But he says he feels that diminishment of strength less keenly than the loss of his role as the wise head of a many-branched family. As far as he is concerned, the grownchildren have outgrown their need for his advice. "I brought them up to be independent," he says. And now they are.

Who knew success would feel so empty?

Empty Nesting: Life and longing after the Thanksgiving weekend

It is Monday, the day after the Thanksgiving weekend and colleagues at work are chatting about the holiday--who went where, how long the left-overs lasted and, for those of us of a certain age, what it was like to have the grown kids together again under one roof. 

Betty's oldest son traveled home from his first job in another city; the middle son came home from college and the youngest was already in residence--he's still in high school. Here's her take: "It was so great to have everyone under one roof, everyone sleeping in their beds--the normal pattern of life. It's as though all of life we waited to come back to this. I felt like I finally got the right kilter back. I so lamented the break up on Sunday when two of my sons left. They'll probably be back in December for the holidays, but life shouldn't be waiting for these moments."

Kitty had her two children home for the holidays--her daughter home from college; her son back for the weekend from a job on the other coast. Her take: "It was wonderful having them both home--being our little family of four together again. The days are really limited in which we are going to be just the four of us. My son has a girlfriend. I really like her. She's lovely. I bet they'll get married one day. It's what you want for your children. But, from then on it will never be the four of us again."

I also had my family--Uber son, Alpha daughter, their spouses and children--under one roof. Not my roof this time. Uber son's. My take: It was touching to be together, to see my children and their spouses and my Grands reconnect--it has been over a year since we've had everyone together, not only under one roof but in one country.  It was also bittersweet. Late on Wednesday night, when Alpha daughter and family arrived, it was heartwarming to see my children reconnect, to see the good feelings flow and hear questions asked and answered about each other's lives. And so bittersweet for Paterfamilias and myself. We were bystanders--watching the action but not really of it. After all, we'd kept up with each family--made it our business to get to Berlin to visit Alpha daughter and kept up on Skype. And we'd traveled to visit Uber son and his family pretty regularly. So we sat and watched the third leg of that family triangle connect--son, daughter, daughter-in-law, son-in-law. Happy to see it, but no longer at the center of it.

It's what Kitty and Betty are sensing lies ahead: Once the family is no longer the snug little four or five of you, the kilter changes forever.

Hold that Thought: Why we temper the opinions and advice we give our grown children.

You may think you're tiptoeing around--"Walking on Eggshells," as Jane Isay, the author of a book by that name, puts it--but that may not be how we come across. My friend Pat, who describes herself as a person who says what she thinks upfront, says that after a day of babysitting--and reporting on events to her daughter--her daughter told her she shouldn't be so frank about what she's thinking. "What she doesn't know," Pat says, "is how I'm holding my tongue, not saying what I might otherwise say. I have to be very careful what I say around my grown children."

Don't we all. The great fear, I suggest to Pat, is that if we aren't careful with what we say, our grown children--children who now have adult lives and are heads of families of their own--will get so ticked off they won't speak to us again, or there will be a coldness to our relationship and that will break our hearts. She nods in agreement but she also asks, how much of a mute can you be?

In the introduction to her book, Isay recalls swapping notes with a friend about touchy incidents that they had both had with their grown children--how vulnerable they felt and how hard it was to communicate with them. Isay lays the problem to our being pioneering parents. "We're the first generation to have raised our children so permissively." Now, after cultivating the "creative" and encouraging them to express themselves, we're  stuck with the adult version of it. "Often their decisions [as adults] are not what we would have chosen--for ourselves or for them. We're at a loss to communicate our reservations, worries, and concerns, not because we can't put those feelings into words, but because the response we get often isn't pretty....the independence we worked to hard to instill in our children now feels to us like disinterest, and strong-minded youngsters sometimes grow into thoughtless adults."

Cold comfort, but all-in-the-same-boat comfort nonetheless.

 

Losing Control: We're the offstage players now

One of the trickiest parts of parenting adult children is recognizing that we are no longer the center of the family universe, that our grown children are now the sun and stars. We are revolving around them.

In her 2008 book Patriotic Grace, Peggy Noonan wrote about politics and our need to face common challenges together. But she might as well have been talking about parenting adult children when she wrote: "There is even a feeling, a faint sense sometimes that we have been relegated to the role of walk-on in someone else's drama, that as citizens we are crucial and yet somehow...extraneous."

Visiting Privileges: Talking to your grown children when the grandkids are around

A reader writes: "How do you have an adult conversation with your adult children when they are so focused on their children?" When the family is all together--out for a pizza dinner or sitting around in late afternoon--it is hard, he says, to get the conversation away from his grown children's constant monitoring of and chatting with the four- and six-year olds and onto affairs of the world or state. Or just anything that would constitute a grown-up conversation.

Is he being unrealistic? Is this the norm for how the generation of our grown children behaves. When I open the question to friends, most nod knowingly. Yes, their grown children are child-centric; yes, it's difficult to talk about anything that is not relevant to their offspring or of interest to said small children. What do they do about it? Grin and bear it. And wait for the pre-schoolers and kindergartners to grow into school-age children who can be induced to take an interest in the world outside the nursery  (if nursery is still an appropriate word).

"Children should be seen and not heard," is a point one friend made. He was harking back to what he thinks was his back-in-the-day day. But were our parents ready to ignore our presence to the extent that our grown children are not similarly willing? Is that progress? What would a Tiger Mother say? Her children would probably be giving us a large and loud dose of Mozart's Rondo a la Turk on the piano and there would be no room for conversation.

The reader's frustration may also hark back to the reality for our generation: We are no longer central to the family--our grown children are. We play by their rules. And we may not like them.

 

Communications: How it feels when we feel left out of our grown childrens' lives.

"Only connect." That's the famously underlying theme of E. M. Forster's Howards End. It also applies to our relationship with our grown children. We want to stay in touch--not just on a superficial level. We want to know what's happening in their lives, where we can help, where we can offer advice. And there are also those vicarious thrills. After all, our lives are slowing down while their's are picking up speed. And the place where those places interconnect can be uncomfortable. Forster is far from the only writer to look at the frailty of those connections.

Poet Cortney Davis captures the essence of a difficult parent-child moment when she writes of a parent and grown child sitting in an airport cafe:

How's work? I'll ask my son, trying to catch up.
He'll concentrate on his plate. I'll pick up the bill.