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

Observation: Trust your adult kids to make the right love-life decisions

          Steve Almond                                                                      Cheryl Strayed

 Steve Almond and Cheryl Strayed, authors of books and books that have been turned into movies, are co-advisers on a love and life podcast/column, Dear Sugars.

A recent call for their help came from a mom who worried that her daughter wanted marriage and children while the boyfriend of five years was making decisions that moved the young couple away from that goal. Was the relationship one-sided? Were her daughter's wishes being subsumed by the boyfriend? The mom's question: "Should I share my concerns with my daughter or stay out of it. What are the boundaries with adult children?"

 Here are two nuggets from their fuller discussion that hold for any parent of grown children.

Cheryl: The best thing you can do is to stop seeing yourself as someone who should intervene in your daughter’s romantic life, but rather as the person who will support her and be there for her when she needs a sounding board as she navigates this relationship.

 

Steve: It’s important to remember that your daughter is an adult. You have to trust her capacity to make wise decisions, and to survive her less wise ones. Just as crucially, you have to trust yourself and the work you’ve already done as a mom in helping your daughter develop the wherewithal to stand up for herself.

 

 

 

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Observations: A Stanford Dean on the effect of helicopter parenting on college students

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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Observation: Anne Lamott on curbing the urge to help grown children live their lives.

In a TED talk she gave recently, Annie Lamott served up some advice for parents of grown children. I wish I could capture the plaintive quality of her voice--and the slyness of her humor--when she recited her "12 Truths I Learned from Life and Writing." You can listen here but I'm stuck with delivering the words I transcribed as she spoke.

This is what Lamott, the author most famously of Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year and Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life , had to say about hovering over our adult children and trying to help them--or anyone we hold dear--find their way:

There is almost  nothing outside of you that will help in any kind of lasting way unless you're way inside an organ. You can't buy, achieve or date serenity or peace of mind. This is the most horrible truth and I still resent it. Faith is an inside job. We can't arrange peace or lasting improvement for those we love most in the world. They have to find their own way, their own answers. You can't run alongside your grown children with sun screen and chap stick on their hero's journey. You have to release them. It's disrespectful not to.

And if it's someone else's problem you probably don't have the answer anyway. Our help is not very helpful. It's often toxic. Help is the sunny side of control. Stop helping so much.  Don't get your helping business all over everybody.

 That was rule number 3. Rule number 2 was more succinct but also lands a punch:

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes. Including you.

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Observation: Hanya Yanagihara ("A Little Life") on parental expectations

 

What do we expect of our grown children: That they'll return our affection; that they'll want to spend time with us; that they'll be there for us in our dotage? Hanya Yanagihara, the New York-based grown child of parents who live in Honolulu (as well as the new editor of the New York Times Style Magazine, "T"), says her parents don't see things that way. Here's what she writes about their attitude toward the duty of children.

 Last July, I went to Honolulu ...to spend the summer with my parents. My parents and I have a warm relationship, even though, or perhaps because, I don’t speak to or visit them frequently; until my most recent trip there, the previous July, I hadn’t seen them in six years. I live in New York, and they live in Hawaii, and while it’s true that traveling to the islands requires a certain commitment of time, the real reason I stayed away is that there were other places I wanted to go and other things I wanted to see. Of all the gifts and advantages my parents have given me, one of the greatest is their understanding of this desire, their conviction that it is the duty of children to leave and do what they want, and the duty of parents to not just accept this but to encourage it. When I was 14 and first leaving my parents — then living in East Texas — to attend high school in Honolulu, my father told me that any parent who expected anything from his child (he was speaking of money and accomplishment, but he also meant love, devotion and caretaking) was bound to be disappointed, because it was foolish and selfish to raise children in the hope that they might someday repay the debt of their existence; he has maintained this ever since. It is, in a culture that cherishes familial proximity, a radical way of thinking by people who otherwise pride themselves on their conventionality (though, lovably, their idea of the conventional tends to not actually be so at all).

 

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All happy families resemble one another;

each unhappy family is unhappy

in its own way. 

Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina

 

At the heart of the more difficult parental negotiations with our grown children--real-world advice, necessary but unpleasant suggestions, harsh critiques--lies a universal anxiety: when push comes to shove, we don't want to push or shove so hard that our children become estranged from us. That is, they will no longer want to talk to us or be an integral part of the family; that they'll cut off all communication--they won't answer our phone calls, tweets or email; they'll unfriend us their Facebook page.

We may go through difficult and challenging times with some or all of our adult children, but most of us find that we--and our kids--cycle through the down times and eventually reach a better place. But not always and that is the subject Sheri McGregor covers in her book, Done with the Crying: Help and Healing for Mothers of Estranged Adult Children.

McGregor starts her book by telling us that one of her five children rejected her and when he did, she felt loss, anger, disbelief and embarrassment. "At first, I was shamed into silence," she writes. She went through an initial period where she blamed herself "for the tiniest mistake I'd mined with a fine-tooth comb from memories of my son's childhood. I'd seize on any infraction and blow it out of proportion as I struggled to find some answer to my echoing question: Why?"

When her  life with the rest of her family started to suffer from the pressure of her misery, she realized she had to move on when she lit on this fact of life: While the experts "tell us never to give up, or to do whatever it takes to reconcile," the truth is "reuniting isn't within our control....We can make our hopes known, but we can't control what our adult children do."

So this is not a book on how to "fix" the relationship with an estranged child. It is advice, suggestions and even mental exercises to help parents whose children have, in effect, divorced them, move on with their lives and get beyond the devastating loss and pain.

The style is direct and simple. McGregor fills her book with anecdotes and tales from other families suffering through the shock of their child rejecting them. Then she offers exercises to help a parent move forward. The first exercise, for instance, is for the parent to simply observe what times of the day, week or year are more difficult to deal with the loss and then to consider how to use that time differently. By chapter four, the exercise is keyed to having a parent wish their estranged child well, despite his choices or whether or not his path leads back his parents. By doing so, McGregor writes, "you set the stage to let go of worry, anger, pride, or expectation. You set yourself free to embrace the present."

In the final chapters, McGregor deals with long-term issues: from estate planning (making decisions about such questions as, Will you provide for the estranged child's children?) to thinking through whether you want your estranged child notified when your end is near.

This is not a book that holds out the hope or a path to reconciliation. It is about acceptance and acknowledging that all you can control is you. Something that's true for all of us.

(Note: The publisher of this book sent me a review copy.)

Refilled Nests: The angst when a grown child moves back home again

Her younger son was the better athlete, the more gifted musician, the smarter of her two sons. Where the older son--through trial, error and diligent study--is now on a successful career path, her younger son has failed to launch. So far. After a post-college year of living at home and delivering pizza, he went off to Europe for a one-year graduate school program. But now he's back and once again, living at home and delivering pizza. He won't take his mother's advice about job hunting--at least that is the face he shows his mother. In fact, he won't talk to her about it at all. When he applied for and won an internship at a prestigious non-profit, she hoped it would be an intellectual trigger for possible careers or a  jumping off place for a more remunerative job. She was wrong. He quit after a month--he found the chores he was asked to do distasteful, low-tech and stodgy.

So now my friend C sits at lunch and says she is "finished" with him. She says she is going  to leave it to her husband to deal with his son and the son's uncertain path forward.

This of course is how she sees it--her son is secretive and unwilling to share what is going on his life.

For all she knows, however, he may be diligently networking and checking out every lead he comes across--not necessarily her leads but those of his peers and mentors. Who knows what's really going on.

I am not unsympathetic to her plight and point of view. It is very hard on us moms and dads when we have to sit and watch our children struggle to find a footing in the grown-up world of careers and work. I tell C to have faith, that her son is smart and talented; she instilled good values when he was growing up. He will find his way. Her problem, I suggest, is that she sees too much.

My children are older than hers---launched by now into careers, growing families and home-ownership. But back in the day when they were recent college graduates, they headed out for points unknown--she went to California; he went to New England. They were seeking respite from the stress of competitive college courses and wondering what they would do with their lives. Their way forward was far from clear. They had their trials and many errors, some of which we learned about--from a distance. And that's the point I was trying to make to C: We didn't live through their  day to day decisions, distractions and disillusion. We didn't, in fact, see too much, the way we would have had they lived at home.

When grown-up children are trying to figure out where they fit into the adult world of work and career, watching it up close and personally is anxiety provoking. Why aren't they going down this road rather than that one? Why do they make decisions that seem wrong-headed and counter productive?. And what kind of help or advice do we have that is relevant and meaningful in today's online, social media world--a world in which we may not be literate?

For C, the situation is too fraught to think much about the larger questions. She says--but doesn't quite mean--that she's "throwing up her hands" and giving up on Son #2. If only her son bunked in with friends--was out of sight and less on her mind-- things would be a lot easier on her and on him. He'll get there, but the sausage-making is unnerving.

 

 

 

 

 

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Observation: Philip Galanes on the limits of our control over our adult children's choices

A mother is concerned that her 18-year-old, college-bound daughter is having a baby, fathered by an unstable man who is out of the picture--but his parents aren't. How should she handle the situation?

Galanes offers a specific answer to the issue at hand, but it applies in general to many of the sticky situations that involve us and our adult children.

If your daughter’s accidental pregnancy (along with her decisions to carry to term and raise the baby) were not enough to convince you that you are not in the driver’s seat here, I’m not sure what more I can say to hit you over the head with the fact. I get your worry and lurking disappointment. Children having children is heartbreaking. But that ship has sailed. Now is the time for maximizing communication and support for your daughter.....

Remember: You don’t control this new path you’re on, but with openhearted cooperation, you may all find great joy on it. There will be a baby!

"

Observation: Ruth Nemzoff on life and longing in our relationships with our adult children

In an interview with Vision about her book,  Ruth Nemzoff, talked about what we yearn for in our relationships with our adult children and about the pressures we are under to ease out of their lives.

The ideal relationship between parent and grown child: "My book is written for parents who basically have good relationships with their adult children. What they yearn for is more intimacy. They don’t want to live their children’s lives; they don’t want to be involved in every petty decision—or even every major decision. But they would like to at least feel a part of it. They don’t want to read in the newspaper that their child got a job promotion. Or perhaps the adult child might say, “Hi, I was offered this new job; these are the pros, these are the cons, this is what I’ve decided.” The parents would love it if their child asked, “What’s your opinion? I’m not necessarily going to follow it, but input would be valuable.” That would be the ideal."

Letting go:  The task is not to let go but to constantly use incremental learning to bring them to new ways of staying connected. .... As we get older, how do we live perfectly independent lives yet remain able to share the joys and the sorrows—the frustrations of life? For example, if your child gets a promotion, you all might want to celebrate together. Or if your child experiences a failure, it’s nice to have people who care that you failed. Most of the world just goes on, right? They don’t care whether I wrote my article today or not. But it’s wonderful to have a child who says, “How’s the article going, Mom?”

 

 

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Observation: Pema Chodron on setting goals for our grown children

 

"Set no expectations for others." That's the gist of what Pema Chodron, the American Buddhist nun with a gift for expressing Buddhist teachings simply, says about our desires -- and natural inclination -- to set goals for others. In my little Pocket Pema Chodron (ideal for a quick thought-provoker before meditating) she writes about her experience working with a drug addict. After weeks of progress, he relapsed and went on a binge. Chodron was angry at him and frustrated.  Her teacher, Trongpa Rinpoche, set her on on a different path. That path, it seems to me, applies to our dealings with our goals for our grown children.

"You should never have expectations for other people," he told her. "Just be kind to them." Rather than have big goals for someone, invite them for dinner, give them little gifts, and do anything to bring a little happiness into their lives.

Rinpoche told her that setting goals for others can be aggressive--really wanting a success story for ourselves. When we do this to others, we are asking them to live up to our ideals. Instead, we should just be kind.

Could this be any more relevant to our relationship with our grown children, especially when they choose a path that's different from the one we envisioned for them--whether its in their life goals and career or just the way they choose to dress.

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Observation: Cartoonist William Hamilton on parenting grown children

                                                                  

He did it in a cartoon. But his observation of our adjustment to dealing with grown children is the equivalent of a thousand-worder.  The late, great William Hamilton, the New Yorker cartoonist who skewered the oblivious among us, drew a cartoon with mom and dad and two adult children sitting around a restaurant table having cocktails. The tag line spoken by one of the parents: "It’s so much easier now that the children are our age."

 

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