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

Helicopter Parenting: Does it end when our kids are adults?

Does helicopter parenting end when our kids graduate from high school or enter the work force? Don't bet on it. But don't indulge in it either. Barnard College's  Natalie Friedman can bear eyewitness account of the dangers to our children's welfare of over-parenting or having a bulldozer or snowplow parent--or even a lawnmower. So many words for those of us who can't stop intervening in our children's lives--even though they are adults and living independently.

Friedman fields call every day from "interveners." That's how she sees the damage done to a child's growth and ability to advocate for themselves. Although her words of wisdom are aimed at how to help your college kids grow up without your "interventionist" support  they also have relevancy to the post-graduate years--those years when our kids are setting out on their own, starting jobs that can support them (or come close) and are trying to figure out where they want to head in this world.

Here are some bits of her advice about helping kids advocate for themselves in college, though the tips below are relevant beyond the school years. (Words in parenthesis are mine, not Friedman"s.) The full article, which ran in the NYTimes, is here

--Help them write “scripts.” If your student is scared to talk to a professor or feels intimidated by a dean (or if they're in a workplace and are anxious about talking to a manager), help write a “script” for the occasion. Chances are you’ve had experience talking to your boss or manager, so tell your student what words to use. ... Ask your student to write down your suggestions in a notebook or type them into a phone, somewhere your student won’t forget to look right before stepping into a professor’s (or manager's) office.

Encourage them to follow up. Sometimes a student will work up the courage to find a professor, only to hear something disappointing: They are failing the course, or the next exam will count as their final grade.(Or a manager may tell them they're not performing well.) ...Some students will take this disappointing news and turn it inward, feeling terrible and using negative self-talk. ....Help to reframe the disappointment as a learning opportunity: Your student should follow up with an email or another visit to the professor with specific questions like, “What can I do to be better prepared for the next exam?”

Remind them to talk to more than one person. A professor, a friend or a teaching assistant might have one answer to a question, but others on campus (or in a business organization) might have advice of a different kind. Encourage your student to get to know other adults on campus who might be able to help navigate a less-than-ideal situation. Getting lots of information and input can help them make better decisions. Remind them that learning to live with disappointment is a facet of self-advocacy. Even students who are great at asking for what they need may not get the response they want. Remind them that this is O.K.: Rejection is a part of life.

Friedman ppoints out that too many parents have a “don’t-take-no-for-an-answer” mind-set, and their children adopt the same attitude. "This approach rarely works for self-advocacy," she writes. "Remember that every conversation is a give-and-take, and coming off as angry or inflexible is only going to create tension with the very people who are in a position to help." 

Friedman's bottom line for us and our children: "Learn when to accept “no” as the final answer and when it is appropriate to push back or ask more questions."

 

On-The-Job Advice: Helicopter parenting and your adult child's work place.

photo: Maia Lemov

Once our kids graduate--be it from college, graduate school or a specialized program--we're pleased when they land their first "career" job. They're launched. It's more than pleasing. It's thrilling.

But some of us have a hard time letting go and recognizing they are now on their own as professionals. I've written about parents who contacted their child's boss when they didn't like the way the company was treating their child. I think we can all agree that is a major overstep. I've taken note of other over-steps in the job search and work place here and here

How about this one? A parent wrote to the New York Times' Work Friend columnist, Megan Greenwell, that her daughter asked her for advice on a workplace issue and now she was asking the columnist to weigh in.

My 24-year-old daughter works for a small nonprofit. She has recently started to see a therapist one day a week, so she arrives an hour later than normal and stays an extra hour that day. She puts her arrival time into the organization’s calendar, which is the protocol if you have a doctor’s appointment, but since this is a weekly appointment, she wasn’t sure if she needs to explain where she is to the executive director. My initial response is that her therapy appointments are none of the director’s business, but now I wonder if I am just being old-fashioned. What do you recommend for her?

Megan Greenwell wasn't treating this as a "tell" or "not-tell" issue. She took it as a deeper incursion into the daughter's independence and autonomy. Here, in part, is what she wrote the mother about her daughter:

I’d recommend that she draw sharper boundaries with her mom. Asking family members for advice is entirely reasonable, but your outsourcing the question crosses the line into helicopter parenting. A 24-year-old is more than capable of navigating her own office politics.

"Over-parenting" can be a fine line. Is asking advice about the advice to give an adult child who has asked for advice crossing into the dreaded territory of helicopter parenting? Does it suggest we're making too much of the issue, of over-reacting to our adult child's situation?

Got an opinion on this? Please share.

(P.S. Here's how Greenwell came down on the actual issue of whether or not to tell:)

It sounds as though her boss has already agreed to her schedule change one day a week, so I don’t see a need for any further discussion about why. If arriving an hour late isn’t causing any problems, she can just keep filling out the calendar. She absolutely shouldn’t feel any shame for going to therapy — everyone should try it! — but she doesn’t need to go out of her way to make sure everyone knows, either.

Parenting Grown Children: Mistakes we make steering our kids through the job search

You may find this hard to believe-- I did. But there are those among us who are taking a few dubious extra steps in helping our kids find a job. Where we used to assist by fine tuning a resume or buying them  interview clothes, a few of us are now marching to the job interview with our kids or even sitting in on that interview.

No wonder Alison Green says that some of us "intervene shamelessly in our children's professional lives." Green, who runs a website called Ask a Manager and Slate's Direct Report,usually sticks to general workplace advice aimed at work-seekers and workers. But she's also had some things to say about the "shameless" stuff.

When it comes to advice, the most common type of parent misstep falls under the umbrella of gumption. It’s the idea that to get a job, you need to impress an employer with your persistence and resourcefulness, often by doing things that in other contexts would be considered aggressive or even creepy.

Green's real-life example: A parent advising a recent college grad to make the rounds of offices and drop off a resume--or even insist on seeing the hiring manager.

Green points out how totally out of date that idea is:

For the record, while the idea of getting a job by “pounding the pavement” remains deeply popular among parents of twenty- and thirty- somethings, it doesn’t work in most fields these days, where employers generally want candidates to apply online and not show up with a résumé without an appointment for an interview.

Green also points to a whole category of bad parental advice "rooted in the sweet but misguided faith that employers will surely be blown away by how impressive their children are." A college adviser told Green that a father, who accompanied his daughter to the meeting with the adviser, accused the adviser of sabotaging his daughter's job search. He thought entry-level positions were beneath his daughter--even though she was 21 with no work or volunteer experience at all--and insisted the daughter apply for mid-level positions because “that shows initiative and drive.”

To Green, the most troubling issue is that some parents haven’t accepted that their adult children can--and should--manage their professional lives themselves. Even when their child lands a job, some parents, she reports, call an employer and ask why their child was not given a promotion or raise or singled out for praise.

These parents are doing their kids no favors. Not every employer will bother to ask, “Does your kid know that you’re calling us?” and instead will assume that the kid knows about and has condoned the parent’s interference … which will get them tagged as immature and out of touch with professional norms at best and difficult at worst.

Green's advice to children caught up in these forms of helicopter-parent advice is to limit how much information they give their parents so that the parents will have fewer opportunities to interfere.

Not exactly what we're aiming for when our kids are going through the grueling job of finding a job.

 

Helicopter Parents: Hovering at home, college and even the office

Many of us raised our children to be independent. Once they were adults, we wanted them to come to us for our advice, good counsel and, yes, the occasional handout. But in college, they would be on their own in dealing with professors and deans. In finding a job, we might prep them on how to put their best foot forward, but they would be on their own. Once on the job, they would figure out how to perform and to stand up for their rights and benefits. So I thought.

I was misled. In a trend that's been picking up momentum, adult-child parenting is heading to a new and higher hover level. Parents are jumping in to complain to colleges about their child's grades or dorm situation and continuing that oversight into the work years.

Let me trace some of this for you. Five years ago, NextAve ran this headline to a story:

When Parents Go Too Far to Help Their Kids Land Jobs: Helicoptering has reached the workplace, with some moms and dads even going to their kids' interviews.

Five years later, the hovering has moved from helping a child land a job to dealing with the nitty gritty of the work place. By way of example, a recent NYTimes article reports the findings of a former Stanford freshmen dean, Julie Lythcott-Haims, author of “How to Raise an Adult.”

[O]fficials at Teach for America have been mystified in recent years by the volume of parents who intervene on behalf of their adult children, whom the group employs as teachers.

A Teach for America administrator told Ms. Lythcott-Haims that parents had called him with complaints about such issues as their child’s being disciplined by a principal or having a run-in with a fellow teacher, as though the adult child were still a student.

It isn't just Teach for America. Workplace blogger, Lee Caraher, wrote this recently about parental interplay with their adult child's job:

What does this look like? Millennials’ parents joining their adult children at interviews; parents calling managers to lobby for better reviews or higher raises. Or parents actually doing the work for their adult children – which all unravels when the employee doesn’t have the luxury of time to participate or complete a task.

 When I mention this phenomenon to a friend who, as a parent, is a generation or two behind me, he tells me he knows such parents. He has friends, he says, "who seem to think they're still responsible. They don't feel the least bit guilty about intervening. We tell them, 'we think you're out of your  mind.'"

Now comes this word. Companies are recognizing the phenomenon and accommodating it. Some are setting up newsletters so that parents can learn more about their child's workplace. A growing number of companies are hosting "Bring in your parents to work" days. Count LinkedIn and Google in that number as well as a number of small companies.

 Call me (and my friend) old-fashioned or out of touch with the current culture, but this doesn't seem like the road to independence--for our kids or us.

 

 

 

 

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Supporting Grown Children: There is such a thing as a "brat allowance." Benefactors beware.

"Parenting has changed to obsessive paternalism over time. Well-meaning parents are taking over the financial lives of young adults....The adult child needs to be weaned away. Lines need to be drawn."

This sad state of affairs and the heartfelt advice that accompanies it comes not from the mouth of a financial advisor or self-help columnist here in the U.S.  I came across this paean to the fostering of the financial independence of adult children in The Economic Times of India.

Uma Shashikant was exhorting her readers to save for retirement and reminding them that the greatest hindrance to building a nest egg is a soft-spot for indulging adult children financially, particularly children who have jobs and are earning money. She goes on to describe three forms this indulgence takes: a subsistence allowance, a cushioning allowance and a brat allowance.

India is not so far removed from us that the three categories don't apply here. In the spirit of sharing ideas from other cultures, here are Uma's descriptions of the ways in which Indian parents rationalize their financial support of adult children and the ramifications of doing so.   

Parenting has changed to obsessive paternalism over time. Wellmeaning parents are taking over the financial lives of young adults.

Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/52265402.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Parenting has changed to obsessive paternalism over time. Wellmeaning parents are taking over the financial lives of young adults.

Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/52265402.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

The subsistence allowance: We would call this the return to the empty nest. Parents provide a place to live, food to eat and a means of getting around. While Shashikant admits that this form of assistance can help a young, working adult build assets, she also notes that "these sheltered young adults will not know how to manage within their own incomes. ...Persistence of this subsidy can lead to a situation where young adults see even core expenses as burdens."

The cushioning allowance: Parents pay insurance premiums, fund their children's share of holiday and celebration expenses and chip in for or take on large expenses. "When the financial status of well-placed parents is better than that of the young adults, these expenses are either willing subsidies or a result of emotional blackmail," Shashikant writes. "Parents effectively bear the  decisions made by young adults, dangerously separating action and consequence. Not an advisable practice."

The brat allowance. If subsistence and cushioning are bad ideas, the brat is worse. This is when parents pay off their child's debts (loans, credit card bills) and, in Shashikant's words, "also fund the adult children's demands for upgrading to better cars, gadgets and homes." If their adult child's income is not up to their lifestyle, the brat allowance provides cash to meet life style expenses. We don't need Shashikant to point out the flaws here, though she sums them up this way: "The brat allowance clearly encourages the young adult to live beyond their means, assuming that the parents' assets are theirs to access and use as they wish."

Reading this piece reminds me how universal are the issues of parents, money and adult children. For Shashikant (and for most of us) there's an unpleasantness about a defined allowance--certainly of a brat allowance and its sense of entitlement. Where to draw the line? Here's Shashikant's advice: "When help comes without asking, the sense of entitlement increases. Parents should wait for the children to seek, ask, request financial accommodation, before jumping in to bail them out."

My take-away: An occasional helping hand, yes. Open-ended allowance, never.

 

 

 

 

 

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Social Media Etiquette: How much texting is too much texting when our kids have grown and flown?

They've left the building--our building, that is to say their childhood home and the comforts of their bedroom, our company and the family pets. They're off to college or to their own apartment. From day to day contact--and pretty constant text or email updates on whereabouts and what-they are doing--they are living a more independent life.

We have an empty nest. We're no longer in control of daily decisions--what did you eat for lunch? Curfew is midnight. Who's driving you home? But we still have access to a possible 'control' button--the icons on our cell phones that let us tap out a text message or a Facebook comment.

So, how often should we use social media to stay in touch, and do we abuse it if we use it to make us feel our empty nest is still filled?

This is a question raised in a NYTimes story. Henry Alford interviewed several recently emptied-nest parents to explore where on the continuum of keeping in touch we should land--a continuum that flows from being a hands-on, controlling parent to an advisory counsel.

Actress Alfre Woodward, whose younger son, Duncan, left for college in 2012, had this advice:

“You have got to leave your kids alone. The only time you text is if you have something really slammin’ to say. Something you know they’re really into. Like, Duncan is a big golfer, so I’ll text, ‘Oh, no, Rory didn’t!’ That’s all I’ll say. What you don’t want to write is ‘Your room is so warm!’ Or ‘Have you eaten?’ Or ‘Do you have any friends?’ ‘Are you drunk?’”

Karen Coburn, the senior consultant in residence at the office of the vice chancellor for students at Washington University in St. Louis, had this observation of college kids and warning to their parents:

"Some students say that no way do they want their parents on social media. Others say they like it because it means they don’t have to communicate with their folks as much because the parents get an idea of what the kids are up to. But one of the worst things a parent can do is to ‘friend’ one of their kid’s friends. One of my students told me, ‘Another student came up to me and said, ‘This old woman friended me on Facebook, I think it might be your mom or grandmother.’ The ‘old woman’ was probably 45.”

 As for Alford, he ends with this sage piece of advice that covers not just the etiquette and wisdom of being part of a social media presence in our children's lives but our overall relationship with them once they've left the building:

"The greatest lesson for many empty nesters may be learning to be their child’s coach or inspiration rather than a child’s concierge or critic."

 

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Helicopter Parenting: Is hovering over adult kids a big problem or a bad rap?

 

 Despite the anecdotal data--the stories about parents setting up job interviews for their grown kids or, worse, accompanying them to the interview; of parents calling their kid's college professor and making a case for a higher grade--we are not as overly involved as we're made out to be.

Writing in Salon a few months back, Alfie Kohn went beyond the tales of outrageous helicoptering to see what the research says. It shows that, yes, we're in touch with our kids at a higher rate than the pre-cell phone, pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook era. But communicating--even at a "hovering" rate--isn’t the same as intervening, which, it turns out, is fairly rare (but makes great blog posts). Kohn points to the National Survey of Student Engagement, which asked some 9,000 college students about parental intervention issues. Only 13 percent of college freshmen and 8 percent of seniors said a parent had frequently intervened to help them solve problems.

As to the workplace, Michigan State University researchers found that 77 percent of the 725 employers they surveyed “hardly ever witnessed a parent while hiring a college senior.”  But the Michigan study had this interesting aside:

Several employers could not resist adding comments on their experiences with involved parents. One employer had advice for parents submitting resumes, “Please tell your student that you have submitted a resume to a company. We have called a student from our resume pool only to find they did not know anything about our company and were not interested in a position with us.” Another talked of a lengthy discussion with a mother on why the company could not arrange a special interview for her son who could not make the scheduled on-campus interview. Employers acknowledged that they were more likely to see mothers collecting company information and making arrangements for interviews, company visits, and other contacts with the company. Fathers usually appeared during negotiations, when the hiring decision did not favor their child.

No one said there's a sudden moment when we go from controlling parent to advisory parent, from being in charge to letting go, but the gradual easing of the reins does eventually take place--though not necessarily the many ways of keeping in close and almost constant touch.

 

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Helicopter Parenting: There comes a time for our grown kids to keep us at a distance.

"What a b---- he turned out to be." The b---- my friend Cate is talking about is her first-born, 25-year-old son. He got his MBA last June and finally landed a career job this fall. But when Cate and the proud papa emailed him with a request to stop by to see him at his office--they would be in the neighborhood--he sent this email: "I appreciate the gesture, but i think it's time for you to stop visiting me at my workplace."

A few months ago, when he had been a summer intern at a high profile government agency, she had asked to stop by--she wanted to see what the department looked like inside. "All I got to see was the lobby and the cafeteria, where I bought him lunch." Now she was feeling put out about not being welcome in his latest workplace--or this latest phase of his life.

"It's part of growing up," I tell her, "He's setting adult boundaries."

"He's pushing us away," she says.

Comes to the same thing, no? Helicopter parenting has a sell-by date. Our kids are no longer singing in the chorus of the school play or playing for the local soccer team. When it comes to their career, there's no seat in the cheerleading section for us.

Not that I don't sympathize with Cate. It's hard to let go of that desire to experience up close and personally the bits and pieces of our grown kids' lives--the way we did when they were little kids and living under our roof. Our very own Uber son dis-invited us to his adult soccer league games. There were some hurt feelings on the parental side, but the only ones watching the game are a handful of girlfriends and wives. Having mummy or daddy there would probably make him feel, well, like a little boy. An office workplace has even higher stakes.

No one said letting go was easy. It's hard sometimes for us to believe there are boundaries between us and our children. But there are and should be. At least Cate's son was polite about laying down his mark. 

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I have just come from having dinner with a woman involved in an academic program for health technicians. She has just finished telling me how stunned she is when parents drop by to complain about or protest the grade or other assessment their grown child has received. My dinner companion is a woman who also makes some hiring decisions and recommendations for them. When presented with a helicoptering incident, she says she makes a mental black mark that here is a student who may lack the independence to function in the workplace.

She isn't saying the helicoptering behavior is pervasive--just that she sees an increasing amount of it. Having heard of even worse interventions--parents sitting in the waiting room while a child is interviewed for a job; going into the interview with their child--I am not all that surprised.

I was more surprised when I awoke the next morning to a story on a Washington Post blog that questioned whether the hyped stories about overprotective helicoptering parents match the reality. There followed a blog post by Alfie Kohn (www.alfiekohn.org), whose most recent book is The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting.

Wherever you fall in the debate over overly protective parents, here are some excerpts from Kohn's post--with links to his research--that apply to the parenting of grown children.

On intervening during the college years:

--"Yes, most parents are in touch with their college-age children on a regular basis. But communicating isn’t the same thing as intervening on a child’s behalf, and the latter seems to be fairly rare. The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), which reached out to more than 9,000 students at 24 colleges and universities, found that only 13 percent of college freshmen and 8 percent of seniors said a parent had frequently intervened to help them solve problems."

On intervening in the workplace:

--"Michigan State University researchers found that 77 percent of the 725 employers they surveyed 'hardly ever witnessed a parent while hiring a college senior.' "

On intervening in a grown child's life outside of college and the workplace

--"The only study on the topic I could find, published in 2012, reported that just one in five or six parents seemed to be intensely involved in their children’s lives."

The effects of helicopter parenting [HP] on adult children

--"Three small studies have raised concerns about the more extreme versions of HP, connecting it to anxiety or a lower sense of well-being. ... the items on these questionnaires were mostly tapping how controlling the parents were. If the problem is control rather than indulgence, that forces us to rethink the “coddled kids” narrative offered by many critics of HP."

--"It’s not clear that HP caused the problems with which it was associated. The researchers in one study acknowledged that unhappy students “may view their parents as more intrusive.” Those in another admitted that “when parents perceive their child as depressed, they may be more likely to ‘hover.’” In other words, pre-existing unhappiness may have drawn the parents in, or it may have led the students to interpret their parents’ actions as excessive. 

--Other research makes the "case in favor of parents’ being actively connected and involved with their young-adult children. The NSSE survey didn’t find a lot of HP going on, but students who did have such parents reported 'higher levels of [academic] engagement and more frequent use of deep learning activities.' In fact, children of helicopter parents were more satisfied with every aspect of their college experience."

--"Support (not limited to money) from one’s parents may be helpful, if not critical, when students graduate with a crushing load of debt."

-- "Most developmental psychologists have concluded that the quality of relationships, including those with one’s parents, continues to matter even past childhood. Good parenting is less about pushing one’s offspring to be independent at a certain age than being responsive to what a particular child needs.

--"Independence is closely connected to an individualistic worldview that is far from universal. Some cultures are more likely to emphasize the value of interdependence.   And the cultural bias that seems to fuel condemnations of HP has a very real impact on students’ well-being. A fascinating series of studies published in 2012 by a multi-university research team revealed that “predominantly middle-class cultural norms of independence” are particularly ill-suited for young adults who are the first in their families to attend college."

 

 

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Re-framing our role in the lives of our grown children

They've graduated college, are living independently, may even have acquired a spouse--or spouse-to-be. If we are no longer the central player in their lives--and we're not or shouldn't be--then what is our role? Re-framing how we function as Mom or Dad is the ongoing challenge of parenting adult children. It's one many have tried to define.

    Robin Marantz Henig, a science journalist and co-author, with her daughter Samantha Henig, of Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck?, has noted that "many Baby Boomers have adopted the role of concierge, and at a luxury hotel!" For herself, Henig  tries "to think of myself as a consultant to my two daughters, but who knows—every now and then the concierge (aka Jewish mother) in me inevitably peeks out."

In her book, Linda Herman gives parents of grown children the "right"--or peace of mind--to let go. "Over the course of our children’s lives, we need to make the transition through the “three Cs of parenting," from choreographers to coaches on sidelines to consultants referred to for expert advice.

    My own take is that we stumble and bumble our way from being the benign dictators that we were when we reared our young children to recognizing that, now that those kids are adults, we’ve been forced out of office. Finding a graceful way to come to grips with the coup d’etat may sound simple but is hard and harder to do as life's joys and blows come along.

 

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