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

Helicopter Parents: Forgetting where the line is between them and us

A lawyer friend is a high-powered, type-A attorney who's a very effective attack dog for his clients. The problem is, he sometimes applies that take-no-prisoners approach to his children's lives. Case in point: When his grown daughter had a big report due to the president of her company, he told her she should stop accepting invitations to various outings--she should be isolating herself in her office to get the big job done properly. It's exactly the way he would handle the pressure of an important brief or memo to a client.

Interfering in our children's lives: It's what we do--we can't help it. Sometimes it's egregious; sometimes it's just annoying or a little anecdote our grown children tell their friends about their mom or dad.

Why do we do it? Is it simply helicopter-parenting taken to the next level of our children's maturity? Are we simply being protective of our children? Do we want to ease the way with the benefit of lessons we learned the hard way? Whatever it is, we're on dangerous ground here. We lead our own lives--and just our own. Sometimes we get so invested in our children and their burgeoning careers that we may cross a line and forget who's in charge here. Whose life is it anyway?

On a blog that Theresa Froehlich writes, she notes the real danger of overdoing the pressure on the control button. "Every time I react with the compulsion to rescue my child, I am sending her the message that I don’t think she is capable."

 

 

Parenting grown children: Keep helpful housekeeping hints to yourself.

One of my "notes to self" [see list to the left] is about housekeeping--a euphemism for putting our imprint on our grown child's home or for acting on "advice" by assuming it's wanted and warranted. This goes for dads as well as moms: No fixing things, no rearranging messy closets; no relining kitchen shelves--unless asked.

As Deborah Tannen points out in her book, "You're Wearing THAT?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation," some of our housekeeping suggestions stem from concerns for their health and safety." Tannen describes a daughter's discomfort--a feeling that her mother was criticizing her husband--when the mother would come to visit and remind her daughter and son-in-law that "he should cut down the dying elm tree in the yard lest it fall and hurt somebody (it did eventually fall though no one was hurt), and replace the rotting step lest someone trip (it never was and no one ever did). Anyone would find these constant reminders annoying."But Tannen doesn't take the nagging parents to task. She addresses the grown children in saying, "Imagine the worry [the mother] endured each time she saw these threats to her loved ones' safety--and her frustration that they didn't undertake the simple repairs to eliminate the danger."

Point well taken. But, as Tannen points out, not all our observations, helpful hints and concerned commentary are so obviously linked to an urgent safety or health issue. Tannen describes a daughter who "cringed when her mother peered at the stove in her kitchen, lifting the protective pan under the grill to check to see whether the crumbs had been cleaned from beneath the pain--which, of course, they hadn't."

I may be overly sensitive on this point--I had such a mother; the grill pan was the least of it--but Tannen has given me a slightly different perspective on my reaction [grrrrr!) to my mother's good housekeeping exchanges. Rearranging my kitchen cabinets, re-doing my closets is not necessarily the criticism I took it to be. It's a problem of indirect communication. It can make an innocent remark or action come across as criticism. And indirectness. Tannen warns that the areas for setting off our grown child with an "innocent" comment are "the Big Three of appearance: hair, clothes, weight."

Made me feel fortunate that my mother stuck to the housekeeping.

 

Emerging Adulthood: Finding something illegal in your grown child's possession.

A friend's college-sophomore son came home for Spring break. Rule of the house: do your own laundry. But morning of day he was to leave and return to school, his room was piled high with dirty laundry. The mom was holding her ground on the rule when the dad asked his son to help him out at a soccer game he was coaching. The mom, liking the idea of father and son coaching together, decided she'd "help out" by doing her son's laundry. When she was dumping the first load from washer to dryer, she discovered she'd washed his wallet--it had been in the pocket of a dirty pair of pants. I'll let her words take the story from here:

"So i took everything out of the wallet to let things dry. And I found a fake ID [a driver's license form another state, giving his age as 21]. I was very upset about it. It's illegal to have such a thing and when our son was home at Christmas break, he'd gotten drunk with a friend and caused a commotion in our backyard that caused a neighbor to call the police. I didn't want to confront him with the fake ID so when everything was dry, I put it all back in the wallet --except the fake ID. I kept it.

"When he came home, I told him about washing the wallet by mistake. Later, as he was getting ready to leave for the airport, he went through it. And he asked, Wwhere's my ID?' I said, 'Your ID [his real license] is in your wallet.' Well, he got really angry and we were shouting at each other. I said the fake ID was illegal and that given the drinking problems last Christmas, this was no way to win back his parents trust. He said he didn't use it to buy liquor. He used it to get into concerts. The shouting went on. It got so bad I refused to drive him to the airport.

"He hasn't spoken to me since. I wrote him an email explaining why I did what I did and how I felt about fake IDs. He sent back a reply that was just short of saying f--- you."

What an issue! You find something illegal in your 20-year-old's possession, something that could, in the long run, bring him harm. But you found it going through his wallet--even though you didn't mean to be going through his personal items.

My friend says her friend with a son her son's age says, "all the kids have fake IDs. Forget about it." She doesn't buy that would-you-jump-off-the-cliff argument.

I asked a friend who has a 24-year-old son what he would have done. "It depends on what was going on in the household. Were the parents letting their son have parties in the home where his friends were allowed to drink? If so, they don't have much to stand on about using the fake ID to buy liquor. I would have taken the ID but talked to my son directly about it--about my concerns about under-age drinking. I wouldn't have waited for him to discover it was gone."

Paterfamilias, a lawyer when he's not a sounding-board dad, saw the situation differently. He was not primarily troubled by the illegal document but by the mom's actions. By his lights, she should not have looked in the wallet--should not have taken stuff out to dry. And if she did and found the fake ID, she should have tucked it back into the wallet. If there was an issue about drinking and his buying liquor with a fake ID, she should address that separately--not connect it to the fake ID. Going through his wallet, however inadvertent, and then using what she found there to confront her son, "breaks a bond of trust."

Another friend, whose youngest is 33, makes light of the "illegal" act. She had a fake ID when she was growing up in Brooklyn. All her friends did. LIke me, this friend had an intrusive mother. So she reacted as I did: "I would have tucked it back in and never said a word about it."

For some of us, a fake ID is not a big crime. But what if the item she found was worse--illegal drugs, say, or evidence of an interset in child pornography? Does that change the way a parent would react? It's a slippery slope between inadvertently finding damaging evidence and behaving like an intrusive snoop.

 

Boundary Lines: Asking too much of our grown children.

When our kids were young and living under our wing, parenting had a lot to do with setting boundaries. No, you may not go outside without me. Yes, you can have the car but you must be home by 10.

Now that they're grown up and living under their own powers, parenting still has a lot to do with setting boundaries--but this time it's all about our respecting those boundaries. An example of a worst-case scenario is in a recent column by Carolyn Hax. A woman in her mid-20s who lives in her own apartment and supports herself, complains that her parents "insist they are entitled to know my every move because they are my parents." If she doesn't respond to a phone message within 24 hours, they threaten to call the police. If she tries to withhold details of her Saturday night, "they become very angry and claim I'm disrespecting them."

If it sounds overboard and overly intrusive, it is. And yet, Hax assures the writer, "yours aren't the first parents to have boundary issues."

That's some of us she's talking about. The solution Hax suggests is for the daughter to employ a non-confrontational approach. She should answer general questions about how she is but if demands are made for "a transcript of Saturday night," the daughter can tell her parents that she's "not going to answer questions about tracking my movements." Another way to handle it, Hax says, is for the daughter to answer the question she wishes her parents had asked, as in "I'm doing great, thanks. How's work, Dad?"

When we find our kids evading our questions with that time-honored ploy, it may be a heads up that we're asking stuff that's over the boundary line. Hopefully, they'll tell all we need to know when they're ready.