It's a wonderful feeling to be able to be financially generous to our adult children--to support them if an unexpected need arises or to indulge them so that they can do or buy something they've always wanted. If we've got that bit of extra to spare, there's a deep pleasure in seeing our children enjoy it now rather than later--when we're no longer around.
And our kids are grateful. Why shouldn't they be? We've offered them support out of love for them and respect for their ability to handle the resource well. But sometimes, there's a little less of a heartfelt thank you. There can even be resentment, especially if there are strings attached. This letter that appeared in an advice column in a local Colorado newspaper spells out the dangers of attaching those strings--even if we do so indirectly:
When I met my wife five years ago, I had no idea of her financial status. I knew that her parents had a nice home and spent a lot of time traveling but she lived frugally and worked hard. When we got married, I learned about the extent of her family's substantial resources. Admittedly, they have been very generous — helping us with the down payment on our house, taking us on family vacations and starting college funds for our kids. The issue is that they've increasingly put pressure on us to raise the kids in specific ways, build our schedules and vacations around their needs and spend money according to their values. We, and my wife in particular, have been struggling to say no because of everything they continue to give us.
The letter was signed: Locked In Golden Handcuffs
The couples coach who answered the plea from "Locked" talked about the "aging" parents and their need to feel relevant. They also focused on what was triggering the son-in-law's negative response, such as feeling a loss of empowerment, freedom or authenticity or a sense of emasculation.
Whatever it is, it's not something I would want to visit on my son or daughter or their spouses. To give is to give freely. It's their lives to live. We are not in the driver's seat--even if we bought them the car.
There is something heartwarmingly inclusive about vacationing with grown kids and their kids, especially when they don't live near you. After weeks or months between weekend visits, Poof! you are an immediate part of their family life. It is family life at its best--on vacation and free from the scheduling pressures of soccer practice, math homework and piano lessons, to say nothing of parental work schedules, obligations and deadlines.
For the past several summers, our family has met up in Vermont, cooled by the mountain air and refreshed by the green countryside. This year our daughter and her family couldn't make it (they spent the summer on the West Coast), and Paterfamilias faced personal vacation difficulties. A back problem was affecting his usual mobility. We would not bring our bicycles, as we usually did. The tennis racquets were lugged along but the reality of their use was iffy. Hiking would clearly be a challenge. Without these usual activities, what, we asked each other, would we do in Vermont?
We learned to do nothing and enjoy it. With condos rented in the same complex, the grand kids and our grown kids to say nothing of PF and myself could wander back and forth to visit each other. We wandered down to the swimming pool to watch them swim and splash around ourselves, we watched them play fast and furious games of soccer tennis on the resort's tennis courts and we wander down to the mountain brook to skim rocks and cool our feet in the cold water. We played board games and did crossword puzzles at their place; they brought their books to read at ours. PF and I felt bathed in the warmth of familial affection, of being incorporated into the day-to-day functioning of our son's family.
Therein lies the heart of this particular tale. It's so easy for that bubble of warmth to pop--and not because of anything we did or said (though there is always the potential for that). This time it was a disagreement between our son and daughter-in-law over whether their 16-year-old son and his friend, who had come to Vermont for a two-day visit, should be allowed to jump from the top of a waterfall into a rock encased, fresh-water swimming hole. (See above)
We were not in attendance--we were sitting it out at our condo because of PF's back limitations. But we had hiked down to this particular spot in past years and had been there when three teen-age boys climbed the rocks and jumped off that waterfall into the dark, pooled water. It was heart-stopping to watch--and pretty scary for the boys, too. It seemed to be a rite of passage of some kind.
This year, when the two 16-year-olds--our Grand and his friend--wanted to jump, our DIL was against it, arguing that not only was it risky for her son but she was responsible for returning the friend to his parents unharmed. Our son was on the "rite of passage" side. The boys jumped. All returned home safely but our DIL was deeply angry at her son's father.
We stayed out of the dispute--because we weren't there and because we shouldn't butt in, but the family discord cast its pall.
For us as parents, there is nothing pleasant about bearing witness to an argument between your child and his or her spouse, especially a dispute that runs deep, has right and wrong on both sides and stakes that are higher than they appear. It drained the warmth out of the last day of our vacation together.
It was also a reminder of how parenting teens is such a rocky experience. It brought back memories of tensions between PF and me during our kids' adolescence. The details and subject matter of the fights are hazy but I recall clearly the desperation of the moments: I felt like we were fighting over the future of our children.
I also remember this: When our kids went off to college and the house was eerily empty, the fighting stopped. Our kids were launched. PF and I no longer had anything to argue about.
Our son and his family are home now and back to their routines. The Grands--two teens and a 9-year-old--are heading back to school. Soccer practice is in play, so are parental deadlines. I haven't asked but I am sure my son and DIL have moved on from the waterfall fight. I feel I should tell them that there will be more and possibly worse battles to come--and then the kids will be grown up and parental angst will melt into pleasure.
Are all things equal? We love our Grands: We may like some of them more than we like others but we love them all. Those of us who have step-grands love them too. Even if we don't, we learn from the step-parents who are our adult children, that the step Grands will be treated equally--at the risk of a family breach.
Friends of ours, whose daughter has two tween step kids as well as toddler twins of her own, figured this out recently. They invited the daughter, her husband and the twins to celebrate their 40th anniversary with them at a resort in the Caribbean. They did not initially invite the step kids since the Steps spent most of their time living at their mother's house. Our friends knew those kids only fleetingly. But it was spring break and their daughter "asked" her parents, who were picking up the tab for the trip, to include the two step kids as well. This was not something their daughter could afford to pay for. Our friends agreed to do it, but out of earshot of their daughter, they groused at the additional expense (two more air fares and a larger townhouse) and at the intrusion of two kids they didn't know well into the family mix. (Their son and his family were also coming, also on the grandparent tab.) But their daughter made it clear that the step kids were her kids, even if they only lived under her roof on alternative weekends, and that her parents should not think otherwise.
I'm reminded of that extravaganza (it turned out to be a lovely vacation and a delightful 40th anniversary celebration) by advice in a recent Carolyn Hax column.
The writer, who says she loves her son's young teen children as well as the new wife and her two tween kids, wants guidance on birthday gift giving. Her query, "If I give everyone the same amount or same gift, I feel the “grans” will feel slighted because I am THEIR grandmother. If I give the “step-grans” a lesser gift, I feel they will feel slighted. Any suggestions would be helpful.
Carolyn Hax's answer reflects the ultimate decision our friends, despite the grousing, came to: "Kids are kids and grandparents are grandparents. Love is love. Equal gifts for all."
It can get corny fast--those ads about what's "priceless." But that's partly the point financial adviser-writer Carl Richards is making in a column that has special meaning for those of us who have grown children who are willing and able to, well, do things with us.
Of course, there's always a price tag attached. Paterfamilias had lunch with a friend who was bemoaning the $100,000 he spent on a two week travel vacation with his six grands, two grown kids and their spouses. Two weeks was too long and exhausting, he said. And whoa! That was a lot of money for a two-week vacation. But his wife--the mother and grandmother of the brood--planned it and was exhilerated by it. She's planning another full-family trip this coming year.
That's one variation on the vacation-with-kids spectrum. But it got PF and me to thinking about trips we've done with our kids. Much shorter and less expensive ones to be sure--like a long weekend in London with Alpha daughter and her family when she was living in Berlin for a year. Here's what we reminisce about: The joy on our granddaughter's face when we took her to see Wicked. Her delight in our luxury hotel abode--a converted railroad terminus at Kings Crossing.
When Uber son and family were in London on a three-month business trip, we met the five of them in Brussels for a few adventurous days--gobbling down Belgian waffles from street vendors, taking a train to Brugge to site-see the Medieval city. One of my vivid memories: When we walked about the main square, eyeing the plethora of chocolate shops lining the streets, our 6-year-old granddaughter was captivated by a chunk of chocolate shaped like a an electric drill, set amidst chocolate hammers and nails. We had to buy it. What happy times. How lucky we were to share them with our children and their children.
The Carl Richards column addressed the value of those experiences and how whatever we spent for them was as important a return on our capital than if we had squirreled that money away in an investment account. There are many points to factor along the spend vs. save continuum. Lots of financial advisers hammer home the priority of saving for retirement. If we're having trouble meeting mortgage payments or have nothing in the till for our retirement years, we would do well to opt for the saving side. But if we have the money and the choice is spend or relentlessly save, we should ease back and invest in experiences that provide memories of time spent with the people we love.
Without experiences to relive in our retirement, we may not have invested our available money wisely. As Richards puts (and punctuates) it,
"Life experiences give you an incalculable return on investment. Every. Single. Time.
and
Do you have something you want to do with someone you love, and the money to pay for it, and the only reason you’re not doing it is that you have this nagging feeling that you should be saving the money for some vague goal beyond the basic ones you have already articulated for yourself? Spend the money! Then, do it again. And again. And the next time? Spend the money!
A dad writes about his three grown sons--ages 26 to 32. Every year he invites them to vacation with him and his wife, all expenses paid. They always accept, except this year, one of the sons declined. He made plans to go away with friends to pursue one of his hobbies. The dad understood. What he didn't understand was the son's complaint that the dad was not paying for the trip with his friends when he was covering the costs of his brothers' vacation. "Are we being unfair?" the dad wanted to know.
Galanes does not suggest that paying for an adult child's portion of a family vacation is somehow wrong, that it's or spoiling or infantizing a grown child. After all, if we can afford it, it's more of a self-indulgence than a child-indulgence. But let me let Galanes sum it up:
Spoiled brat at Departure Gate 39! Your son is an adult. ...The implicit bargain of vacations like yours is that parents cover the costs of their adult children’s travel to facilitate more time together. It is not a voucher to parts unknown.
As to what the dad could possibly say to his son, Galanes offers this bit of tact:
We hope that you know the purpose of these trips is bringing us all together. We'd be delighted to pay for you, if you want to come along."
Just in time for the Holidays, here's a way to think about the gifts you'll be giving friends and family--especially your grown kids and their kids. It comes via the Sketch Guy, a financial columnist and blogger for the New York Times.
In a recent column the Sketch Guy (aka Carl Richards) raised this provocative question: Is your spending aligned with your values? The Sketch Guy's point: It pays to look at the things we spend money on (invest in, in his terms) and see if the spending furthers our values or if there is a better way to invest (spend) on that value. (His example: Two men meet for lunch once a month; it costs them $40 each. What they really value is getting together to talk, not eating a lavish meal. They've switched to taking a hike together once a month.)
Does value spending apply to how we handle gifts for our grown kids, their kids and our disposable income?
You bet. The first friend I asked about it told me this story.
Two years ago, when the oldest of her daughter's daughters was having a Bat Mitzvah, she and the GrandPops went up to her daughter's home in Connecticut a few days early. Her son-in-law asked her to take the Bat Mitzvah girl and her younger sister to a particular beauty salon to get their hair styled for the big event. The bill: $140--not something my friend couldn't afford but she resented it. She did not see the value in spending that much money on hair cuts for young girls. So this year when the younger daughter was having her Bat Mitzvah, she and the GrandPops once again went up to Connecticut for a few days. This time when her son-in-law asked her to take the girls to the beauty salon, she asked him for the cash to pay for it. She wasn't going to spend money on something she didn't value.
That was a lesson she started to apply to gift-giving. When one of her granddaughters wanted a GoPro video camera for her birthday, my friend thought about it carefully. She was wary at first. GoPro is not inexpensive (around $200 for a simple one) and it seemed like a fad but that didn't drive her decision. "She's interested in photography and film-making. It was something that furthered her interests." my friend says. "I didn't mind buying it for her." When the younger daughter wanted a floppy, fuzzy floor chair for her birthday, my friend applied her value reasoning. "It wasn't something I would chose, but she loves books and I could see this as a cozy place for her to read."
Another friend says she and her husband applied the value-spend test to a family vacation to celebrate their 50th Anniversary. Where some of their friends have taken their families to luxury resorts to celebrate, they took a different tack, As scientists who've supported a host of environmental causes, they booked a trip for ten--their two adult sons, their wives and four preteen and young teen Grands--to the Galapagos Islands for a week. They saw it as a chance to introduce their grandchildren to the natural wonders of the world. Expensive? Very. But a worthwhile investment: Who know where the exposure to natural habitats and Darwinian change might lead. To say nothing of an introduction to blue-footed Booby birds.
Paterfamilias and I are not quite as rigorous as some of our friends. We have been known to indulge American Girl Doll requests (Value? Her interest in a particular point in history was piqued) and a Lego car racing set (Value? Putting it together is problem solving). But we have drawn a personal spending-value line: Jimmy Choo shoes, no; soccer boots, always.
Every family vacation has its theme, inside joke or something that becomes a means to remember the time spent together. On one Vermont vacation, we couldn't eat enough country-made peach pies. They were the treat--every evening and some afternoons. One year our Grands put on a magic show that was, well, magic and memorable, down to the finale of all them running around the lawns of our condo with sparklers. Last year was the year of Pride and Prejudice --the full BBC version. We would watch an hour or two every night--everyone rushed through dinner to take their seats in front of the TV for the next episode or two--and that included the 7 year old, the teenagers and the adults.
This year, unlike our previous family vacations in Vermont, our daughter and her family were not with us. Sigh. They had obligations elsewhere so this was the family summer vacation with just one set of adult kids and Grands.
It was also the vacation I fell into a pattern of reading the New York Times on the porch of my condo every morning and then wandering over to Uber son's unit armed with a scintillating article to share. The idea of a news bite from PenPen did not necessarily bring cheers from my Grands, ages 8, 13 and 15. I could almost hear groans. But once I read key parts or summarized the issue, they sat up and took notice--well, they paid some attention.
One day the story was about the attempt to do unto This Land is Your Land, Woody Guthrie's anthem, what had been done to Happy Birthday. That is, lift the copy right and make the song available to anyone who wanted to use it. My Grands of course knew the song--they sang a line or two before we got back to the facts--and even the 8-year-old knew what "copyright" was (her dad has written several books. Must have been a word that came up from time to time.)
Another story that drew interest: A recent dig in Hungary where anthropologists were hoping to unearth the "heart of gold" of Suleiman the Magnificent, an Ottoman warrior and leader, that was buried in a small village in Hungary when he died on the eve of battle. What's not intriguing about a dig into the past--a 16th century battlefield bunker--and a story about a warrior leaving his heart buried in a casket of gold?
Another day it was the news report that French President Francois Hollande had spent $10,000 a month on haircuts. Shocking to all (hashtag #CoiffeurGate) and lots of jokes by my Grands on hairstylist spending--especially by une homme with not that much hair on his head.
Bottom line: It didn't matter if my arrival with news story in hand became a running joke. Actually, it never dawned on me that my Grands wouldn't enjoy my news clips--nor did I care if they didn't. They could always walk away or return to whatever it was they were doing. It was more important to me that the news stories led to lively conversations--about why Arlo Guthries' heirs wouldn't want to give away the copyright (It wasn't the money; they didn't want politicians with whom they disagreed to use the song for their own purposes.) and why copyrights are important to artists. We also theorized about Turkish Suleiman the Magnificent and what he was doing so far afield in Hungary and why his entourage left the great warrior's heart behind.
The vacation of the New York Times stories might not have been as tasty as the peach pie vacation or addictive as Pride and Prejudice but it was a reminder--to me at any rate--that Grands like being part of a grown-up discussion. It is also reminder that we leave a legacy with our Grands, not just in the material things that may come their way but in little discussions, bits of advice, sharing of memories.
Who knows if my Grands will remember the summer of news story discussions or look to newspapers like the New York Times for the wide range of stories they have to tell. But they might. The daily news briefings this summer undoubtedly meant more to me than to my Grands. Newspapers are my passion. How else would we begin to understand other cultures. I can only hope they picked up a little of my enthusiasm and stay curious.
There's nothing quite like an upbeat ending to a family vacation to make you smile whenever you think about the time together.
You never know where those moments are going to come from, but we stumbled into one--and almost let it get away--on a three-day mini-vacay with our grown daughter and her daughter.
Weeks before we convened for a planned get-together in Williamstown, Mass., I had spotted an ad for the Pirates of Penzance at a theater in nearby Pittsfield. Pateramilias and I are Gilbert and Sullivan enthusiasts. During our hands-on-parenting days we had converted our daughter to an appreciation of their pointed silliness. The hope was to pass the baton to the next generation, specifically to an almost 14-year-old currently enthralled with the score and lyrics for Hamilton. (Can I note here--yes I can, it's my blog--that there is a similarity in the cleverness of the rhymes of both lyricists.) For all I knew, though, this show in Pittsfield would be an amateur production that might be more of a turn off than a turn on.
That was one of the reasons I did not advance-purchase the tickets. Another was that there's many a slip 'tween the cup (vacation plans) and the lip (actual arrival of all parties at a given place and time). In our case, our daughter and her family would be getting back from a business/pleasure trip in Europe two days before our scheduled get-together. Would they be too jet-lagged to drive the nearly three hours from their home to Williamstown?
I may have put off the purchase, but theater was very much on my mind. Our Grand has an interest in it and what better place to be than Williamstown, which has a first-rate summer theater. So when daughter and Grand showed up as scheduled on a Tuesday, I bought tickets to a show at the Williamstown theater. We weren't terrifically interested in the play (The Chinese Room)--Paterfamilias went so far as to refuse to have a ticket purchased for him--but on Tuesday nights, the director and cast stay around after the show to talk to the audience about the production. I thought my Grand would love a glimpse of the inside story.
No doubt she would have, except that by 6:00 p.m., as we picked our way through a pre-theater dinner, it was clear neither mother nor daughter would be able to stay awake for the show. Jet lag was upon them.
I tried to turn the tickets in for a refund but that was a no-go. After some polite pleading and the addition of a $3 a ticket fee, the theater let me exchange the tickets for the next night--upping my investment in seeing this show to nearly $200 for three of us. But Wednesday night would be our last one together--we had to make our separate ways home on Thursday. There would be no time to see Pirates, which both PF and our daughter expressed a great preference in seeing.
What to do? I knew when to fold 'em. I am usually very conservative when it comes to parsing out my entertainment dollars. But the $200 for The Chinese Room was spent whether we saw it or not. Wednesday morning I called the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield and snagged four of the last tickets for Pirates available that night. We were double booked, so to speak.
What a great decision that was. This Pirates of Penzance was like a bubbly tonic. The director and cast milked it for every bit of nonsense in it--even some that was not. (The NYTimes reviewed it a few days later and called it "exhilarating.") But more than that, it made PF and I deliriously happy: we were all together; our daughter laughed out loud all the way through it and so did our Grand, who , even as she enters her teen years, retains "a capacity for innocent enjoyment." We came away from the show feeling light of heart and exhilarated.
We talked about nothing else on the ride back to Williamstown and through breakfast the next morning. By the time we parted for our separate journeys home, we had gone over almost every bit of scenery, choreography and song we could remember. Since then, PF and I have clicked on YouTube and heard many another version of the songs. Every time we hear the trumpet's martial sound (Tarantula, Tarantula) we smile at the remembrance of the show and how much fun we had together--even though the three-days of togetherness had its ups and downs.
Is my Grand a new G&S fan? The music, she allowed, was not to her taste but she found the show "really funny." She was delighted with the policeman's lot, despite it being "not a happy one," and with the swaggering of the Pirate King. "It is, it is a glorious thing"--not only to be the Pirate King but to end a vacation on such a high note.
On vacation in Vermont with paterfamilias plus one grown child and his family, I take a yoga class. The yogi (a woman who also teaches paddleboard yoga--yoga on a board that's bobbing in a lake. I'm just saying....) starts class with thoughtful time. She talks about the integration of inner independence with outer-world dependence, about how feeling the quiet of the inner self connects us to others.
It's a lot to take in before a round of Vinyasas, but her words come back to me that afternoon. I was at the swimming pool observing my three Grands and their parents at play in the water. The teen-aged boy (15) likes testing his dad--who can throw the pool-drenched tennis ball harder, dive deeper for a stone, make a bigger splash. The two girls (13 and 8) are young enough to spend inordinate amounts of time practicing their underwater handstands and challenging each other to one silly game after another. Then while everyone's attention was at maximum outer-dependence, the 8 year old was in water just beyond her swim abilities. Thinking she was in trouble, her brother rushed over and whisked her up. She hadn't been floundering, she insisted, and there was much ado about who did what to whom against their will. Family relationships can be as shaky as yoga on a paddleboard.
These mundane bits and pieces of their day-to-day lives are for us--their grandparents who live far from them--a rare moment of pleasure. Sitting still and enjoying the simple act of watching, we see how the parents (our grown kids) and kids (our grandkids) push and pull toward and against each other. Lucky us to b part of these moments of integrated inner independence and outer dependence that keep them (and us) connected.
It's more than a decade ago, but I remember with an almost tearful fondness a weekend spa vacation I took with Alpha Daughter. She was living on the west coast; I was on the east. We met somewhere in the west-middle. She was six months pregnant; I was excited about the granddaughter-to-be. It wasn't necessarily The Best Vacation Ever--the spa food was okay; the exercise classes so-so; the hikes either too challenging or not challenging enough--but it was a precious time. I already had an inkling how rare time alone with a grown child would be. Once they have a career, a Significant Other, children or a home in another city or country, such times are prized because they are so rare.
Nostalgia for that trip kicked in when a friend came back from a weekend in New York City with her 30-something-and-single daughter. Her daughter used Airbnb to book an efficiency apartment on the lower tip of Manhattan for the two of them. Mother and daughter took in the High Line, waited two hours in line for discount tickets to a Broadway show, met up with an aunt and niece for dinner and walked from the tip of Manhattan to mid town. The camaraderie, the unpressured time for exchanges of confidences, the insights into how her daughter feels about her plans for the future (she's shipping out to Zambia for a two-year assignment in a few months) gave my friend some solace over the geographic distance that will make weekend get-aways together improbable for a while.
Not that it always works out. A dad I know, divorced from his grown daughter's mother, took his daughter for what was planned to be an extravagant weekend in New York--except that she was hostile and generally uncooperative about going anywhere or doing anything. If the underlying relationship is dysfunctional, the together-time may be as well.
As we get older and our children have children that are reaching their teens, many of us are taking our Grands on getaways. Those trips can be bonding, insightful and altogether delightful--but they aren't a substitute for time alone with a grown son or daughter.
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