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

Graduation Day: Traditions in the time of Covid

Middle- and High School graduations are in high season. Some schools are providing zoom-only events--grandparents can watch from the comfort of their home screens. But with the weather warmed up and the outdoors deemed safe by the CDC, the in-person event is also happening. And we're allowed to attend.

School rules vary but last weekend our granddaughter graduated from a school that was able to hold an in-person outdoor ceremony. Not that it fit all the traditional markers. Each graduate could have six people sit in their pod--six chairs huddled together and set at least six feet from other pods.

The pods were well spaced not only from each other but from the "podium" and from where the graduating seniors were seated in chairs six feet apart. Everything was spread out for health-spacing purposes, which meant that our pods were far from the action. (The equivalent of the nose-bleed section.) Still, we were there. When the graduates walked in (traditional Pomp and Circumstances on speaker system) it was hard to tell one student from the other--the gowns, the caps, the distance. 

A pre-ceremony email set out the rules of attendance:  Masks on the way in; masks on the way out. No socializing with other families before or after: Deliver your child, listen to speeches, watch your child receive their diploma and then take them home.

The sun was shining. It was a hot and beautiful day where the breeze was just enough to ensure covid-safety, especially with everyone masked and most guests and graduates vaccinated. Socializing happened. How could it not? Of course, we were from out of town so we knew no one to socialize with. We could watch as our daughter and her family met her child's friends and their families. How pleasant it was for them. How joyful. A major stepping stone in their child's (and our grandchild's)  life: Achieved.

To be honest, there were moments when we the grandparents felt like hangers-on--a bit left out. Was it the recognition that we are no longer center stage. Our children and their children have the starring roles now. As they should. But it wasn't that. A year of no in-person visiting had left us in an information vacuum.  We hadn't been around to pick up the small details about friendships made and the small triumphs and disappointments of our grandchild's year. The things too minor to mention in a zoom call but in the air when you visit in person. That's why at a celebratory dinner with our daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter we had trouble following the conversation about our grandchild's various friends and what they would be doing this summer, about the funny challenges of the senior year, about the underlying meaning of the valedictory's speech.

Was it worth the trip? You bet. We are so fortunate to be around and healthy enough to make the trip. It's what we do. We wouldn't have missed it. Especially when, as we were walking back from a morning-after shot of coffee, my daughter said, "It meant so much to all of us that you were here."

We're the audience that takes notice. We're a necessary part of the on-going play.

photo: graduation day, June 5, 2021

Post-Vaccine Adventures: Grammie and PopPop get their hugs

There is some confusion about what we can and can't do unmasked, how we should or shouldn't behave in close-together spaces. That confusion gets mixed in with social anxiety. As we inch toward the full opening of a post-pandemic world, a lot of us are nervous about how we'll navigate our former social lives. Going unmasked to a neighbor's outdoor barbecue party may be allowed (if you're vaccinated) but many of us are no longer used to socializing in groups larger than two people.

What it means is that a lot of us are tiptoeing into the re-opening world. But there's one place where we're jumping right in: We are visiting our children in person and getting hugs from our grown kids and grandkids. The Instagram and media photos I've seen of parents reuniting with children or grandchildren exude the simple pleasure of a warm hug.

For those of us who live far from our grown kids and grandkids, the hugs have been slower to arrive  but they're coming. We're going to get them. A lot has changed since I wrote this post in March when public health experts warned against air travel.

Paterfamilias and I take off on an airplane in a few weeks. We're vaccinated so we're no longer worried about the perils of catching Covid on the flight or at the airport. Our destination: Our daughter's house. Our expectation: XOXOXO non-stop plus the joy of watching a granddaughter graduate from high school--outdoors with distanced seating in pods. (We're not totally back-to-normal yet.)

All hail vaccinations. It's making what seemed impossible last summer (and even two months ago) possible and probable.

How do we "old folks" feel about these hugfests? The consensus was captured in this reporting from a Washington Post story:

Among the many who have endured long separations, the first highly anticipated reunions are finally taking place. For grandparents in particular, the need to guard against covid-19 has been weighed against the yearning to be close to children and grandchildren, and an acute awareness of the time being lost. But now, with the arrival of vaccines, dates are circled on calendars, flights are booked, plans are made.

After picking up his young children from an overnight visit with their grandmother--a visit delayed by a year due to Covid--a father told the reporter:

“It was like old times — they didn’t want to come home. Things are starting to feel really different from how it’s been, finally, and I’m really happy about that.”

Hug on.

 

Supporting Adult Children: We've shifted with the times

Who says we're stuck in the old ways of doing things? Our roles as grandparents have been keeping step with the times. There's a study with lots of data to show how we've shifted the way we help our grown children and the impact that's had on our grandkids.

Teresa Cooney, who analyzed data from a parent survey, compared parental support for their adult children in the 1980s-90s to more recent times. Thirty or 40 years ago parents were more likely to help out married children as opposed to adult children who lived with their partners without being married or were single parents. What that says is that, along with the culture, we've become more accepting of the many configurations that make up our notions of what a family is.

If we're tilting our resources towards our adult children who are single parents it's not surprising. They tend to have fewer resources than married‐couple families. At the same time, we tend to have more resources--not just the financial means but the time to help out; that is, to make our presence a positive factor in our children's and grandchildren's lives.

Here's Cooney's bottom line:

Grandparental support appears responsive to the needs of their adult children. Nontraditional families no longer receive less extended‐family support. Grandparents today appear to play an important support role for their children's families.

Can't put a price on the return on that investment.

painting: William Chase, A Friendly Visit

Grandparenting: Play is more than play when we play with our grandkids

For years one of my granddaughters and I had a favorite game: I would be the "doctor," her stuffed animals the patients. One by one she would bring them to me, tell me what was wrong with them and assist while I treated them for, say, a broken leg or a tummy ache. I loved the game. Not only was it precious time together, but I hoped to gain insight via stuffed-animal aches and pains into the little things she worried about as she grew from toddler to pre-schooler to a kindergartner.  I'm not sure we ever reached the insight stage, but we had our little game and we loved playing it together.

One of the many advantages of being a Nana or PopPop is that we are free to play with our grandkids, often to the exclusion of the things we had to do as parents--overseeing their homework, driving them to soccer practice or imposing discipline. While play is responsibility-free, there's more to it than that, according to this article in Grand, an online magazine. We're enhancing our grandchildren's lives as well as our own plus we're forced to keep ourselves current.

Here's author Judith Van Hoorn's take on that:

Another characteristic of play is the age difference between the players. When we think of preschoolers, school-aged children, or teenagers playing, we often imagine them playing with friends their age. The most common exception is playing within families where we see people of different ages playing together. And, with grandparent and grandchild play, the age difference is usually the greatest.

What might that mean for grandparents in terms of what we play and how we play? To begin with, we have to adapt our play styles to one another. For example, we need to update our repertoire of songs, stories, books, and movie plotlines, and definitely update the names of popular superheroes and princesses.

Here's looking at you WandaVision.

 

 

Covid, Kids and the Comfort of a Hug: Is it safe to travel to see our kids and grandkids?

The headlines have been reassuring: "Grandparents are getting to hug their grandkids for the first time after getting vaccinated."

Well, that's fine for grandparents who live near their grandkids or within driving distance. Those of us who have to fly--well, that's another story. In the best of all possible worlds, we should hold off on airplane travel unless it's absolutely necessary.  Does a hug qualify? Our public health gurus tell us, Don't do it unless you must, even if you're fully vaccinated. Maybe by summer when even more people are vaccinated (and a fourth wave either doesn't rise or is under control)  it might be safer to go.

We're making plans to see both our grown kids and their kids later this spring and again this summer. We'll fly, as we did last fall.  This article spells out what we can expect if we take to the air.  Here's what I learned from it and from others:

It will be more crowded and busier than it was in September 2020 when we took our "see the kids" trip. Planes will be fuller. Delta is still blocking middle seats but that's only through April and may change for May and beyond. Other airlines are filling all seats on their flights. So we may be sitting cheek-and-jowl again. Here we go, back to normal but in way that we wish would be back better.  word.

Airlines required (but didn't enforce) masks when we flew in the fall.  The current Transportation Security Administration has mandated masks at airports and on airplanes through May 11; airlines have become stricter about enforcing their own mask-up rules. A T.S.A. spokesperson said it was too soon to say what will happen after the May date but given airline mask requirements, the rise of a fourth wave and the variants that are around, face coverings are likely to be required for the seeable future. Given concerns about that fourth surge and President Biden's plea to wear masks, we''ll probably double mask while traveling.  Just to be sure.

At the height of the pandemic, most airlines stopped food and drink service. They may start again--at least with beverages and snacks. What happens to our masks when and if the airlines roll those drink carts down the aisles? Can't eat or sip a soda with a mask on, so what do we do if we're thirsty or hungry? We may have to mask between bites.

Most food concessions remain closed at many airports--though that may loosen up as vaccination totals climb. When we flew in September, there were one or two concessions available to buy food. We ate our lunch while we waited to board the plane. The airport was eerily empty so we had plenty of space to ourselves. If more passengers show up at airports, concessions may begin to reopen and socially distanced space may be harder to find.

When we get to our destination there's the question of whether, even though we're vaccinated, we can carry and spread the virus to our loved ones. The research so far is unclear, though it leans toward non-spread.  Some of us may luck out in that our grown children may be vaccinated by the time we travel--and therefore immune from anything we pick up during our travels. Our New York State kids already have appointments for jabs. If we put off our trip till their second shots take root, we can visit with them in their home with fewer precautions--and more hugs. 

painting: Renoir, Oarsmen at Chatou

 

 

New Grandparents: Do we have babynaming rights?

Many of us have been proactive when it comes to our handles as grandparents. We feel free to tell our kids--the parents of our grandbabies--what we would like to be called.  Whether it's PopPop or Nana or something we make up--I've chosen PenPen--it doesn't feel intrusive or controlling to choose our name.

But the naming ends there. Where we need to tread more cautiously is when it comes to choosing the baby's name. We can make suggestions; perhaps, pass on to our children reminders of family traditions. But we are at our peril if we persist in trying to sway our children in their choice.

“Names are all about identity. The name the parents choose is central to who the child is and will be, and grandparents feel very invested in that,”  said Pamela Redmond, chief executive of  Nameberry  and co-author of books on baby names. Although we may hope to see a family name carried on, or would like one that reaches into our family's culture, our children may have other ideas. When they act on those ideas, we may feel that “the link to their ancestry is broken,” Redmond said, in an article by Paula Span in the NYTimes.

Some of the points covered in Span's article:

Discomfort with the "new" names:

We have our own notions of appropriateness and a probably misguided sense that our grandchildren’s names reflect on us. So when our children creatively come up with Nevaeh (it’s “heaven,” backward) or use the city where the baby was conceived (like Nashua), we bridle.

“If you’re the conservative who named your kids Tom and Emily, and they’re naming their daughter Miles and their son Freedom, it’s like showing up at the country club with blue hair and tattoos,” Ms. Redmond said.

The new normal:

Young parents face a vastly wider assortment of choices than older generations ever considered. New parents may gravitate toward gender-neutral names, for instance. Older generations’ notions about playground taunts have become outdated when kids have such diverse names that a plain vanilla Linda or a mundane Mike may yearn for something more distinctive.

Standing down:

“This is the first stage in grandparents’ realizing that this is not their kid and they don’t have control. They have to step back, and some are good at that and some are terrible.”--Sally Tannen, who has directed parenting and grandparenting workshops at the 92nd Street Y in NYC.

Worst-case scenario:

Clashes over names can backfire, Ms. Tannen pointed out, if they make new parents angry enough to withdraw. Parents serve as the gatekeepers to their children and, as I learned from my conversations, they remember feeling pummeled, even decades later.

Get over it:

“As soon as you’re pregnant, everyone has an opinion” about names, Ms. Tannen has observed. “Once there’s a baby, it would be pretty silly to hold onto that.”

Span writes of one grandfather who was so angry about his children's choice of name for his first grandson that he swore he would never utter the name. "It’s taken a while but, he told me," Span writes, " 'I’m happy to call him whatever he wants to be called.' ”

painting: Mary Cassatt

Report on Virtual Thanksgivings: Zoomsgiving fun.

My friend Jo planned her virtual Thanksgiving with her three children, who live in three different time zones, around cocktails. She offered each child a time slot--5:00 their time zone on one of the days of the Thanksgiving weekend. She did not aim to bring everyone together--not with one child in Copenhagen, one near her on the east coast and another in San Francisco. Her aim was to ease the alone time of the holiday and add a few hours of family joy with a mock/cocktail hour with each of her children (and any spouses and grandchildren in residence).

How did that go? Her report:

I pulled off being the "host" on a zoom mock/cocktail party by going to "zoom school" a week before my "test." I set up my son's family in San Francisco (all of whom are technically savvy, so I wanted to "shine") for 5 pm their time, 8 pm my time. I sent them a box of snacks; they furnished their own drinks.  There's a 40 minute limit on zoom meetings if you're doing it for free. My grandchildren could tolerate that amount of time.

My daughter and granddaughter live in Denmark and usually host a Thanksgiving meal for their friends and assorted Americans they know, but not this year. Demark isn't playing around with the Pandemic. So no partying for them. We talk once a week on Facetime, and - as Thanksgiving isn't a holiday in Denmark - it wasn't anything special. 

For my son who lives near me, we Facetimed at an agreed on time for dessert on Thanksgiving day, including my son's family's two college-age daughters who were home for Thanksgiving, me in my apartment and my son's father (my ex) and his wife in Cambridge. Oh, and their dogs! It went well.

My family zoomed its way through an elaborate day.  Here's how it went for three households living in three different cities but--lucky us--all in the same time zone.

I had spent the week obsessing about having a memorable holiday and that obsession meant pre-planning. It was worth the time and effort, especially since others picked up on the cues and added their own magic. We started with a noon-time 3-kitchen zoom where each kitchen (cooks and advisers) baked together, muting our mics when running the mixer, asking for advice on unexpected problems (I cut my apples too soon; granddaughter advised cinammon to keep them from turning brown) and showing each other our pre-baked efforts. Easy to pull off if everyone is on board and has recipe and ingredients on hand. It was more fun than you might think.

The best part of our zoomsgiving, though, was the late afternoon, pre-dinner get together for a family quiz based on photos of family members when they were younger than they are today. I had photo-texted a dozen to my son, my daughter sent a few and my son found some. He put together a slide show of the photos and posed "challenging" questions designed to encourage everyone to come up with over-the-top answers--the more outrageous the better. We laughed a lot and, key to it all, everyone participated. The chat function got a workout. I'm still giggling over some of the answers.

We turned off the zoom, took a break and ate our dinners without screentime or being together.

Later in the evening we zoomed again to eat the desserts we had baked together. We were all pretty tired by then. One of us (he shall be unnamed) dozed off on his living room floor. I rate the dessert-zoom as modified bliss. Maybe one event too many. But overall the three-way Thanksgiving "visit" was upbeat, comforting and memorable.

With the Christmas-New Years holidays ahead--and no clear sign that the pandemic will allow for safe travel and visits before the end of the year--I wanted to share what worked at Thanksgiving so we can build on that if we're still stuck in the same pandemic rut.

Love to hear from you about your Thanksgiving accommodations to the current realities.

painting: Cezanne

photo: Maia Lemov

Pandemic Fallout: Where did the family get-togethers go?

Thanksgiving is only one of the family get-togethers upended by the coronavirus. Summer vacations, family reunions, birthday celebrations, Father's Day, Mother's Day, even funerals--lots of us have been unable to celebrate or observe any of these in person with our children (and their families) since the coronavirus barged into our lives.

How are we coping with these losses? Some of us are more philosophical than others. Many of us are taking it one holiday at a time or thinking up innovative ways to use technology to shrink the distance.

Here's how one couple is dealing with the loss of an annual Father's Day reunion with their four grown children. The full interview ran in the New York Times. Here are pertinent highlights.

The situation: 

Every Father’s Day weekend, the four adult children travel from New York and Chicago to Las Vegas to visit their father, Mort, 82, and stepmother, Marla, 65, bringing with them grandchildren ranging in age from 7 to 20 years old. The annual ritual was postponed this year until August. And then, as the virus continued to rage, it was canceled.

How the parents are coping:

Mort I happen to like my family. But I’m not insane enough to risk death. The coronavirus is unfortunately dictating our schedule. You recognize what is possible and what is not possible.

Marla We tell them, ‘Well, maybe you’ll drive out here.’ But the truth is, as much as we’d love to see them, they have too much contact with too many people.

 

Mort I’m not going to rend my garments and cover up the mirrors because I can’t see my children. I’m lucky to be in sufficiently good health. ...

Marla I worry that the young ones are too young to have formed memories of him. And the ones in college — who knows how much longer they’ll want to come along on these visits?

Mort My grandchildren are in very good hands.

Marla We’re lucky, we have each other. But it feels like we’ve given up a tremendous amount during this time.

 

Marla He might come off as ‘it is what it is,’ but would he love to see them? Nothing would make him happier. [One of his children] said, ‘When am I going to see you?’ I said, ‘When there’s a vaccine.’

Marla And when will that be? I don’t know. I don’t know, and there are days I handle it much better than others.

painting: Van Gogh

The Good, Bad and Wondrous: Our grown kids are sheltering with us during the pandemic. Is multigeneration housing the future?

Friends spent the first five months of the pandemic housing their daughter, her husband and three-year-old Lucas. The young family had been living in Manhattan when New York City became the hot zone for the coronavirus. They felt unsafe and moved in with her parents in suburban Maryland for what everyone assumed would be a few weeks. It was months, and in the interim--while Lucas ran through the sprinkler in granny and poppy's backyard and all four adults worked remotely--the daughter and SIL sold their New York apartment and bought a home in a New York suburb. They moved a few weeks ago. Despite our friends' irritation at their daughter's parenting style (no discipline!), the exhaustion of keeping the refrigerator full and the inconvenience of an overextended bandwidth, my friends miss the happy noise of a full house, the warmth of a 3-year-old's afternoon snuggles and the deepened bond with their grown child.

I was reminded of their experience by a moving op-ed  Timothy Egan wrote about the few months his daughter, her husband and their 1-year-old twins sheltered from the pandemic with him and his wife, a time he described as "exhausting, kinetic, cramped, and one of the few consistent joys in this awful time." Egan's daughter and her family needed a safe place to hunker down in between a move from one city to another. 

Now that his daughter has moved her family 1,000 miles away, Egan writes of missing her and the toddlers "who have no sense of gravity, and would as soon walk off the deck into thin air as eat a dirt clod." The multigenerational experience has Egan believing the future points to parents and grown kids  bunking in together once again. He notes housing trends that were already underway: For the first time in 160 years the average number of people in the American household went up instead of down. Pew found that the number of Americans living in multigeneratinal households has increased by almost 70 percent since 1980. He sees the pandemic accelerating the trend.  A Zillow analysis found a 10 percent year-over-year spike in April in the number of young adults living with their parents.

We don't know what the economy will look like on the other side of the current crisis, but I wonder:  if there are hard times ahead, will that encourage more of us to live with our children?

As to Egan, he lamented the loss of intimacy when his daughter and her family moved away. "Our house is still and aimless," he wrote, "three generations back to one, and we are left to wonder how so many of us can live like this."

Grandparenting: The "Thank You Note" rears its head. With consequences.

A reader has been in touch about the "thank you" note issue, especially as it pertains to grandchildren and more especially to older grandchildren who may be gifted with a check on a birthday or during the Holidays. It is not surprising that the issue would rear its head again since, in these days of covid-19 shelterings, it is less likely that gifts will be presented to our Grands in person where they can thank us directly and in the moment.

The reader wants to make clear that an acknowledgement counts. She is not hung up on form--at least to a certain extent. She'll accept email or a text or a personal phone call. (A handwritten note? That's a wish too far. but see Gold Standard above from Grand still young enough to pen a note.)  What the reader is against is the lack of any response or of receiving only a background shout out when she is on the phone with other adults in the household. That is, she has been on the phone with her grown child when a teenage grandchild in the background will shout out, "Thanks for the check, Grandma." 

She does not consider a shout-out an acceptable form of acknowledgment, and this grandmother has taken action to support her belief. She has warned her grown child and her grandchildren that there is a price to pay for the lack of a thank you that shows some thought and appreciation. She told them she would reduce the amount of the gift if acknowledgements weren't forthcoming. She has been as good as her word. She has sent checks in smaller and smaller amounts as a teenage grandchild fails to make even a feeble attempt at a personal thank you.

Kudos to her for not making empty threats. And for taking a stand on what's important to her: an acknowledgement that neither she nor her gift should be taken for granted. It's a life lesson as well: When people help you out or are especially kind--be it a co-worker, friend or a server in a restaurant--a bona fide "thank you" goes a long way.