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

Leaving a Legacy: Clear out the stuff your kids won't want

 

This is a post I wrote several years ago. It's my simple guide to right-sizing or downsizing or just cleaning and clearing out closets that are jammed too full of stuff.  My motivation for clearing my closets (and attic storage) was a move from a house to an apartment. But another incentive was in play: I didn't want my kids to have to clear my boxes of no-longer-relevant papers and artifacts when I am no longer around.

I learned recently that my approach is in keeping with a Swedish concept called döstädning (literally “death cleaning”) that's been in the news of late. Margareta Magnusson explained it all in her book, "The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning."

For those of you who are moving to smaller quarters or just feeling the heaviness of storing too much stuff in the nooks and crannies of your home or want to "gift" your children clean closets, check out Death cleaning or read my post (reprinted below). If I may pat myself on the back, my old post still offers timeless advice without the downbeat name.

Rightsizing: How I cleared my closets and dumped all the stuff my kids didn't want.

“You are my inspiration,” my friend Eva tells me. She’s not referring to anything creative or ingenious I’ve done. The reference is to the method that helped me downsize/right-size from a sprawling 4-bedroom suburban home (where Paterfamilias and I brought up two children) to a tight, two bedroom urban apartment that’s short on storage space. It's a method that would work for anyone who wants to lighten the storage load in their house, whether or not they are moving out or just tackling the untackleable during the corona quarantine.

My inspirational mantra--You won't need to know Sanskrit to follow it--is this: A bag a day.

Prosaic, perhaps. It's not the full Marie Kondo, but it worked. Every day I would fill a bag (the gold standard: a large black garbage bag) with stuff to either give to our children, gift to charity or toss in the garbage. No matter how tired I was after work, I would head for a closet or a file cabinet or a dark recess of the basement and fill a bag—sometimes it was only the bronze standard of a brown paper lunch bag. Consistency was the point: a bag a day.

Sometimes it was easy. I came across file drawers full of old photographs—from the days when camera shops processed your film and gave you doubles of all your photos.  All duplicates in my file drawer were dumped in a bag, along with both sets of photos of the backs of the heads of my children, or a fuzzy focus, or of people I no longer knew or cared about. Ditto for the negatives. Thumbing through envelope upon envelope of old photos was an emotional trip down memory lane but the save/no-save decisions were mindless.

More mindful was the china, glassware, porcelain figurines, silver-plated candelabras  and other objects we inherited from both sets of parents. When our mothers were young women growing their families and enlarging their households, they both collected the same sorts of things. Though one set of parents was more affluent than the other, both mothers had accumulated sets of silverware—8 places setting for one, 18 for the other. The candelabra was smaller for one than the other, which was not only large but had many Rococo branches. (Whenever there was a storm and our house lost its electricity, the candelabaras and their three candles apiece lit our way through the dark evening.) Both mothers had collected sets of hand-painted tea cups that had been displayed on bookcases and side tables in their homes. Both had porcelain figurines—peasant figures playing the flute or herding one of Bo Peep's lost sheep—that graced their bookshelves or sat on coffee tables and end tables.

I’d had these objects in storage in my basement since we inherited them. Would my children want them? I took out my iPhone, snapped a shot of my mother’s gold-rimmed dinnerware and texted it to my daughter-in-law. “Would you like this?” I asked this mother of three of my Grands. Within a minute her ping came back at me: “I haven’t used my wedding dishes yet.” 

For sentimental reasons, my daughter took a few of the hand-painted tea cups but the porcelain figurines and candelabras met universal resistance. I closed my eyes, held my nose (figuratively speaking) and put it all in bags for charities that, presumably, will sell them to pay some of their bills. My one flirtation with "monetizing" these treasures came when I opened a box filled with fur jackets and stoles my mother had amassed. (My father was a furrier.) I went up on eBay to see what the market was for them. The answer: Not worth my time or effort to sell. They got packed up with the porcelains.

It was guilt-inducing but easier to part with the inherited items. What of the things I had collected or amassed? I had written regularly for the Washingtonian Magazine for a dozen years back in the 70s and 80s. I had every issue of the magazine from that time in my basement. I asked myself, Would my grandchildren read these? Would they even look at them? We all know the answer. I tore out a few articles that represented the variety of stories I had written, promised myself I would digitize them for posterity and recycled the rest of it.  Ditto with other clips from my pre-Internet, freelance years: save a few; dump the rest.

Paterfamilias's boxes of law briefs from big cases he had worked on met the same fate. He had to do a lot of shredding, but he made his way through it slowly and methodically.

We started our purge a few months before we put our house on the market so there was no need to rush. Just a bag a day. That held for serving platters, pots, pans, small appliances. I had to harden my heart, but I was amazed at what I could part with once I set my mind to it. Add it felt good to know I was fulfilling part of my legacy to my grown children: clean closets. That is, when the time came and I was no longer around to do it, they wouldn't have a mess of stuff to clear out.

We moved into our apartment nearly four years ago. I have yet to miss a pot or platter or candlestick holder.  Come Spring, what I miss is my garden. But I saved a few pots for that.

photo: P Lemov

painting: Piecemeal Rhythm by Hilary Pecis

Money Matters: When our heirs get ahead of themselves (and us).

We have an elderly cousin. He never married and lives alone in a Park Avenue apartment where the walls are lined with old paintings that may or may not be worth a small fortune. His closest relatives (besides us and some second cousins) are two nephews. One of them has struggled financially, and our cousin helped his nephew when he was in crisis a decade ago. Now the nephew has called his uncle and asked for help again, only this time he framed his request as "an advance on my inheritance."

Our cousin was shocked, hurt and angry--at the presumption of inheritance and because this was his nephew's first contact with him in more than a year. 

Maybe because this happened within our family, we--the editorial we that is-- weren't surprised to read a similar case of entitlement in a Social Qs. This time, it was a grown-up grandson. The grandmother had invited the family, including the grandson and his wife, on an all-expenses-paid cruise to Alaska. The grandson couldn't make it--he and his wife are expecting a baby soon. But the grandson didn't just send his regrets. He asked his grandmother for a cash gift equal to what she would have spent on him to join the family trip. He suggested she donate the money to the baby's college fund.

"I  am stunned," the grandmother writes to Philip Galanes. "I was happy to help them with wedding expenses and part of the down payment on their first home. But I told him this is not how life works. Was I wrong?"

Before I share Galanes' wise answer to the stunned grandma, I'll let off a little steam. What is it with this sense of entitlement to a parent, grandparent or uncle's "fortune" before they have closed out their lives? If a close family member has a financial emergency, why not make the case for a loan, preferably with a payback schedule? Okay. Steam vented.

Galanes was not sympathetic to the grandson's request."You know it's bad when I'm shocked," he wrote.

"I see two ways of reading your grandson’s nervy request: He may be an entitled young man who has grown too comfortable counting your money as his. Or — and this requires some compassion — freaked out by the pending responsibilities of parenthood, he might have made a silly cash grab.

In either event, you were right to refuse him. Your generous offer to spring for a family vacation does not oblige you to make compensatory payments to those who are unable to attend. I would have a follow-up conversation with your grandson to clear the air.

...Tell him he is not entitled to your money and your invitations do not include an option to collect their cash value instead.

But that's not all Galanes had to say:

Let him know, too, that his behavior was hurtful, and risked making you feel like a walking ATM.

Which is exactly how our cousin felt. And why he's taken his ATM out of service.

painting: Marius van Reymerswaelle

Leaving a Legacy: Passing on the passwords and other digital conundrums

Pity our poor adult children. When they meet the love of their life and decide to commit to each other, they face an ordeal we didn't: Whether to and how to merge digital accounts. If newlyweds decide to save money by using one Spotify account--rather than each having his/her own--will Spotify's algorithms let one person's Latin beats seep into the other's country music vibe?

Well, that's their problem to solve. But we play a role in some of their other digital account mergers. A son may be using our Netflix account while his bride may be using her parents' password. Do we kick him off? Should they elect to leave their home bases and start a new account that's their own?

Hitting even closer to home: Many of us still carry our grown children on our cellphone family plan. Do we kick them off once they marry or are in a committed relationship? Shouldn't they start a cellphone plan of their own? After all, one day they may be putting their own children on a cellphone family plan.

There is one digital issue that affects us more directly: How do we keep passwords to our financial accounts to ourselves and yet make sure, as a matter of estate planning, that our heirs have access to them?

One expert Erin Lowry, put it this way in a Washington Post story, 

"It can be painful to talk about estate planning, ...but if one partner dies, the other will need access to important digital accounts. Adopt some sort of password manager, choose beneficiaries and set up “transfer on death” designations for your primary accounts. Even Facebook has legacy contacts who can access accounts if the holder dies."

Now that I've put that excellent advice into a blog post, how long is it going to take me to act on it? Don't ask!

photo: Maia Lemov

 

Leaving a Legacy: What about those digital assets?

We don't like to think about what life will be like when we're no longer here and whether our grown children will act like adults when divvying up our worldly goods. We may assume we've taken care of that by having an estate plan that sets down rules and guidelines for sharing our legacy. But in this new modern age, there's a piece of that plan that we may have overlooked: our digital assets. That is,  our photos and videos; messages and emails; music and e-books; movies and games; and any cryptocurrencies we may have invested in.  Some have sentimental value; others, monetary. Some we're willing to have our children, family or friends rifle through; others, not so much.

Access to our digital assets is more complicated than leaving a list of user names and passwords.  There may be those annoying but necessary "two-step" verification and security measures, some of which may require an answer to an obscure question--name of first movie? favorite song?--that our kids (or the person we've appointed to handle our estate) may not be able to answer.

A lawyer I talked to noted that the legal framework surrounding fiduciary access to digital assets is still in the early stage of development.  There's a fine line between protecting our privacy (do we want our kids reading all our old emails?) and managing our assets.

As things stand now, we can include in our will special instructions for our digital assets. Here are some suggestions of areas to cover (Excuse the legal jabber and jargon; I tried to modify where possible):  

Give your personal representative, trustee or agent a power of attorney to access the content and manage the digital assets.  

Give the fiduciary instructions to preserve, transfer or destroy information.

Prepare an inventory of digital assets, including usernames and passwords, so the digital assets can be located.  

How you keep that password list up-to-date (how many times and for which sites have you had to click on "forgot password"?) and how you retrace the answers to the "security" questions--well, that's a challenge for another day. Have you or someone you know figured that out? I'd love to have your comments.

Artwork: Self Portrait by Sarah Cain

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

Legacy Planning: How to apportion the non-monetary stuff

Our treasured goods may be stuffed in boxes under our beds, sitting in clear view on our coffee tables or hanging prominently on our walls. Aside from whether or not our kids will want the stuff, the question is how to apportion the bits and pieces that we've accumulated over our lifetimes and, for some of us, the lifetimes of our parents and grandparents as well.  Not just the stuff that has monetary value but the sentimental stuff as well.

If we leave it to chance--that is with, say, a reminder to our children and heirs to share fairly--we won't be around to suffer through a fight over the needlepoint cat pillow or the diamond earrings Poppy gave Nanny. But we shouldn't rest easy over the idea of missing the battle. We don't want our family falling apart just because we're not there physically anymore.

I've written here about how some friends have tackled the issue: making lists of who should get what, of holding "auctions" in the here and now for who gets what later and of tacking labels onto the bottoms of furniture and pictures. Into this morass comes the ever-sensible Philip Galanes and his Social Qs column. He addresses a query on this issue from a reader whose three daughters are squabbling over her two pearl necklaces that she no longer wears. The youngest has asked to borrow a single-strand necklace to wear occasionally; the oldest feels the mother has unfairly given the necklace away to her younger sister. The middle daughter could care less. There is also a triple strand necklace that no one seems interested in. The mother's plea to Galanes: "Help."

His kernals of wisdom, one of which points to the legacy the pearls represent:

Ask the daughters "if they’d like an heirloom pearl necklace. If all three say yes, remake the triple strand into two necklaces. If your middle daughter remains indifferent to pearls, give her first choice on another piece of jewelry to be claimed after you die.

Then let the girls take turns choosing from the remaining items in your jewelry box and keep a list. It may sound macabre, but letting heirs pick from personal property can be a sensible way to allocate it, in advance and without conflict.

painting: Cezanne. Peppermint Bottle

Leaving a Legacy: A push to get our storytelling act together

I have been working on a memoir for several years--writing sections, taking breaks, losing heart, returning to the work.  Anyone who's tried crafting anything personal knows what I'm talking about: So easy to lose confidence and stall out. The memoir is about my career--a legacy for my grandkids so they can know the times and culture we (my generation) worked our way up and through.

This Mother's Day a gift from my daughter is setting me on a parallel legacy path. The gift is called StoryWorth. Naturally, since my daughter is of her generation, it's digital. I receive an email each week with a prompt for something to write about--the prompts chosen or posed by my daughter. After a year, all the essays (or a sentence or whatever I write) and any photos I add are collected into a "book." My daughter sees each "story" after I write it and can comment. 

What an experience. The first question: How did you feel when your first child was born?

I wrote about it this morning and I haven't yet returned from my trip down memory lane. Recalling that day--that moment in my life; the birthing practices of the time--and sharing details I had almost forgotten with my child and her family has left me feeling both weepy and joyful. She says she felt the same way when she read my remembrance--it was her birth, after all.

StoryWorth is only one means to an end. What a gift we give each other when we take the time to dig deep into our memories and share our stories. It's our most meaningful legacy to our children and their children. Why not be here to enjoy it.

painting: Matisse

Leaving a Legacy: Is there ever a good reason for your Will to favor one child over another?

Here's a loaded question: Is it ever right or fair to leave your children unequal portions of your earthly gains and goods.

I've looked at this issue in previous posts. Mostly I've talked about situations where one child has done particularly well financially while the other, having devoted themselves to socially important but unremunerative work, has not. The answer I've come up with is that it's okay to tip the scales so long as you let your children know about the plan in advance--and assure them that money does not equal love, respect or pride in their accomplishments. 

But situations are rarely straightforward. There are always wrinkles. Maybe the wealthier child has grandchildren galore and the "needier" child has none, or vice versa. Maybe one child lives far away and rarely visits, while the other lives close by and is a big and helpful part of a parent's everyday life.

A wrong move can lead to posthumous ill feelings among your children. We may not be there to see or hear it, but it's not something we want to cause. The issue of fair distribution is an age-old one. In the “Nicomachean Ethics,” Aristotle points out that when people who are equal are granted unequal shares — or people who aren’t equal are granted equal shares — “quarrels and complaints arise.” 

How do we square things? How should we parse the issue?

Here are some thinking points raised by Kwame Anthony Appiah, who pens "The Ethicist" column for the NYTimes.

What does equal mean:

The challenge is to decide what, in some relevant sense, makes two people equal. The prospective heirs are equally children of the same parent. Some people think that’s the only relevant kind of equality; they leave their estates in equal shares.

Show me the love. Or not.

“To my beloved child, Jordan, I leave the bulk of my estate, as a reward for the great care shown to me in my declining years.” Isn’t there something unattractive about this? We don’t want to encourage practices that lead people to display care in expectation of a financial benefit. Indeed, one reason money is a troublesome idiom for expressing gratitude here is that it awkwardly suggests a mercenary motive for those years of filial piety.

The Indigence Argument

“To Jordan, I leave the bulk of my estate, in the knowledge that my other children are in no need of further financial assets.” Although this might be embarrassing to Jordan, it’s hard to see a basis of complaint from the other children. ...

Still, an economist might note that there’s an argument for worrying about needs-based inheritance, too. A child who knows that indigence will be compensated for at a parent’s death has less incentive to avoid that state. An economist might also point out that the same share of a parental estate is going to be worth more to the poorer child, in the sense of making a more significant difference to his or her life.

Posthumous parenting

The major considerations that move people to favor equal shares, I suspect, is, first, that equal shares can express the idea that parents have equal care and concern for each of their children; and second, that the practice requires no comparative assessment of their children’s lives, virtues or needs. Notice, though, that this posthumous approach doesn’t match what we think is appropriate in parenting. When we’re parents, loving each child equally entails paying attention to each of them, taking note of their different appetites and aptitudes and responding specifically to them. Our equal love would be evidenced by our giving our tennis-playing son a new racket and our golf-playing daughter a new golf club — not by giving them each a tennis racket.

Bottom line

If the estate were to be divided in a way that favored one child over the other, the parent should make it clear why doing so was consistent with each having an equal claim to the parent’s love.

painting: "Trytich" by Oliver Lee Jackson at the National Gallery

Gifts to a Grown Child's Loved One: Can we take them back when they leave the family?

In the best of all possible worlds, we give our children gifts freely. We attach no strings--unless there's good cause and that, of course, is not the best of all possible worlds. We may be willing to loan/gift our child money to help them keep up on mortgage payments or add an addition to the house. We might specify that is what the money we gift them is to be used for--and not for anything else. Or we can just give them the gift and trust they will use it appropriately.

But what about the valuable sentimental stuff? Let's say we give our future daughter-in-law an heirloom piece of jewelry--a string of pearls our mother used to wear or the diamond from our father's pinkie ring. What a joy to see the jewels out and about with a future member of the family. But then, what do we do if the romance falls apart and the future DIL is the past. Or there's a divorce. Now it's hurtful to see that necklace set off on a sweater of a person who is no longer part of or welcome in the family. Or we want to give it to the next daughter-in-law or a grandchild. Can we attach a post-gift string and ask for the return of a gift?

Philip Galanes dealt with that touchy issue in a recent Social Qs. A woman wrote in to say she gave as a Christmas gift an aquamarine necklace worn by her mother to the girlfriend of her grandson, who had assured her the relationship was serious. The following Christmas she gifted another heirloom piece to the girlfriend. And then the couple broke up. The woman writes: "I asked my grandson to retrieve our family heirlooms, but his ex-girlfriend refused to return them. What can I do?

Not much, although Galanes suggests two possible solutions, neither of them dependent on the grandson.  Here's his full reply:

I’m sorry you mistook a “serious” relationship for one that was permanent (or might yield great-granddaughters). That doesn’t always happen, as you now know. The ex is under no obligation, other than a sympathetic one, to return gifts that were freely given to her. Givers retain no ownership in gifts.

But perhaps a call from you to the ex about the sentimental value of the jewelry may help? When something similar happened in my family, my mother agreed to buy back the heirlooms. (She was furious about it, but she did it.) Is that possible? And next time, think twice before handing over a tiara you intend to take back if circumstances change.

Grown Children, Us and Covid-19: Updating Advanced Directives

                                             Romare Bearden Tomorrow I May Be Far Away

I am no longer a New Yorker but, in this time of coronavirus, I am a regular viewer of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's daily press briefings. When he reports those stress-inducing intubation statistics, he reminds us that 80 percent of patients who are intubated and placed on a ventilator don't have what he calls "a good outcome." He doesn't spell it out but the data shows that those who survive the worst trials of Covid-19 may have continuing, life-altering struggles.

The decisions about what to do  if we were on the cusp of being intubated will fall into the laps of our children, spouses and siblings. A friend of mine's daughter-in-law who is a hospice doctor says she now spends a lot of her time counseling families who have to deal with these very difficult ventilator-related decisions.

Which brings me to this point: We may have left our children general guidance (advanced directives) about how we want to be treated if we can't make decisions for ourselves, but in the Age of Coronavirus they may need an update on what we want done for or not done to us. I  brought up this question briefly in a post that ran a few weeks ago. Since then a NYTimes article has been even more blunt, headlining its story: "Do You Want to Die in an I.C. U.? Pandemic Makes Question All too Real."

The article starts off with what a 69-year-old retired teacher told her son--her health care proxy--about whether or not to put her on a ventilator should she become ill with Covid-19. Her son, who happens to be president of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, said his mother discussed her concerns with him. He was able to understand the pragmatism behind her directive. He knew what she would want him to do it worst came to worst. Beyond the particulars of his own situation, a point he made was this: “It’s the kind of conversation everyone should be having with their loved ones.”

The article also brings up an issue that, even if months or years ago we gave our children general Advanced Directives, there's one point that may not have been covered in that guidance:

When seniors and their families engage in what’s called advance-care planning, they often focus on the D.N.R. question — whether patients would want to be resuscitated after cardiac arrest.

But because Covid-19 is a respiratory disease, the more pressing question will likely be whether a hospitalized patient who’s seriously ill will accept intubation and ventilation.

It's never easy to discuss these kinds of issues with our children--they resist; neither they nor we are keen to deal with our mortality. We figure we'll talk about it 'one of these days.' But with coronavirus cases still on the rise in the U.S. and treatment more complicated and drastic than anyone imagined, that day may be here.