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

Money Matters: Is your gift giving in line with your values?

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.

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Leaving a Legacy: Letting your Grands know what matters to you

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.

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Vacationing with Grown Kids: Doubling down on the Pirates of Penzance and the performing arts

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.

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A Lesson from Yoga: How we see our grownchildren and our Grands.

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.  

Vacationing with Grown Kids: The magic behind a parent-child weekend away

 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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Vacationing with Grown Children: A universal truth from Oaxaca

Paterfamilias and I have fled the February chill of the northeast for a week in Oaxaca, Mexico. It's deliciously warm here but it's dry--and that takes a toll on nails. Which is a long way of saying I found myself sitting in a little salon in the shadow of the Santo Domingo church having my fingernails shaped by a pleasant señora who used the slimmest and smallest of emery boards and a small wooden stick to shape my nails.

Nearby sat a fellow-American woman who answered to the name Lisa and whose feet were submerged in a pink plastic tub of soapy water. Her complaint: she had been traveling around Mexico for a month now and the dry weather had cracked the skin on her feet. There was hardly room for another customer until Linda walked into this teeny, old-world nail shop. She sat down and submerged her feet in a similar plastic bowl of soapy water. She too was suffering from cracked skin on her heels.

Three female gringas gathered in the intimate comfort of a manicure-pedicure shop--without massage chairs or other high end, techno-accoutrements of an ultra-modern salon---are bound to start talking, strangers though we were.

Lisa spoke of the weariness of traveling for a month and how she had another month to go before she could return home--she had rented out her house in Puerto Vallarta for two months. Three of those remaining weeks would be in Oaxaca where she was taking language and cooking classes. But the last one would be in Colorado, visiting her grown children. At this point in her travels, the last week would be the cherry to top the end of her wanderings.

Linda had been in Oaxaca for a week--with her adult children as visitors. The pedicure, in effect, was marking the beginning of her vacation: the children had headed home that morning. "What a relief!" she said and sighed loudly. She and her husband had rented a house for a month. It was big enough to accommodate her guests, but the day-to-day planning, the constant company, the responsibilities to make sure food and beverages were in supply, that the daughter was getting along with the son, and their spouses were getting along as well were stressful.

It's always like that when kids come to visit but it's double the stress, Linda said, when you're on vacation in unfamiliar surroundings (she was from Canada) and where you speak the language rudimentarily or not at all. She stretched her legs out, wriggled her toes in the water, and let out another sigh. We love our grown children, she seemed to say on behalf of all of us. We treasure the time we spend with them. But we also reach a point where, oh what a relief it is to not to have them and their energy around.

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Paying Attention: A grandparent's treasure to use or lose

 

My friend Ann and I are having coffee, catching up on the state of our semi-retirements, vacations and grandchildren. Hers live near her; she sees them all the time. Mine are far away; vacations with them and their families are my only chance to see them up close and personally for more than a day or two.

I mention a big change in our family vacation dynamic. Last year when we were all in Vermont at our usual vacation retreat, our then-13-year-old grandson would pop by our condo at odd times. He'd walk or bike over, plop down, talk soccer or baseball with his BaPa, do a crossword puzzle with me and finish off the peaches in the bowl on the kitchen counter. This year, he was 14. He dropped by our condo only on request--a text message, say, to ask him to bring us something from his parent's condo. He'd chat when he arrived but he didn't linger or even look around for peaches. When we stopped by his condo, we were barely acknowledged. Instead, he'd have his iPhone in hand, thumbs tapping away while, presumably, he stayed in touch with friends.

Don't take it personally, Ann says. She, too, has a 14-year old grandson. His grandfather (Ann's husband) has been driving his grandson to soccer practice for eight years now--to fields all over the county and some beyond. They'd  talk soccer (the grandson is a gifted player) in the car, tell each other jokes and sometimes muse about math homework (grandpa tutors him to make sure he keeps up). That was then. Now that he's 14, his thumbs do the talking. He's much less communicado even when the texting stops. If they're giving a fellow player a ride, grandpa is not usually included in the conversation.

Ann finds her grandson similarly withdrawn from her. Like mine, he's a nice child and polite. She doesn't take the behavior personally. She assumes it mirrors her son's behavior when he was young and living in her house. "I should have paid more attention," she says. What she means is that when her kids were growing up, her life was so full--what with being a wife and mother, pursuing a career, keeping house, driving kids to various activities. For most of us, our kids grow up so fast we don't necessarily notice all the little changes along the way. Our kids evolve--there's no Aha! moment; we just absorb the way they are at any given moment. Whereas, as grandparents, we have the time to step back and take notice and note. 

In our family, since we see our grandchildren for a weekend every few months or, on vacation, for a week, it's no wonder that we're on super-alert: paying attention to everything at every minute. Changes don't slowly evolve; suddenly they are here and now.

 In a recent column financial planner Carl Richards asked, What Is Our Attention Really Worth? He'd been thinking, he wrote, that attention is a currency that we choose how to spend "just like we spend our time, energy and money. Unlike money, however, there’s no way to store attention for later use. It’s a bit like time in that way; we use it or lose it."

His point is that we can spend time on something--or someone-- and still not pay attention to it or them. Attention "might be the most in-demand asset we have to offer....So given the value of our attention, shouldn’t we pay more attention to how we spend it?...We think of certain things as being free, but if it requires our attention, we’re paying a price of sorts."

For most of us, we spend our attention on our Grands when our Grands are available, and on their various steps in growing up--much more than we were able to when they were youngsters and we saw them every day and they were at the heart of our busy, everyday lives. We now have what is euphemistically called "perspective" and the golden opportunity of time to pay attention--and share our insights about (not criticisms of!) our Grands with their parents (our grown kids).  The parents seem to enjoy hearing how their kids are or are not like they were when they were that age--even if we couldn't pay much attention back then and if, by necessity, our observations are in a pre-texting context.

 

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Vacations with the Family: Finding the entertainment sweet spot for all the generations

 

We've been spending summer vacations in Vermont with our grown children and their families for about ten years now. Every year seems to have a theme or a high point that defines the vacation. One year it was the magic show our Grands put on for us and their parents--not just the show itself but the hours they spent practicing their tricks and helping each other. And then there was the year of the farm stand peach pies. We couldn't eat enough of them.

This year was marked by binge watching--in three nights--all five hours of a DVD. Who would admit to binge watching on vacation? Sounds awful. Besides, what would keep a 14-year-old boy, one seven and two 12-year old girls intrigued--plus the parents and grandparents --and asking all day when the viewing of the next episodes would begin?

 We watched the PBS version of Pride and Prejudice--the one with Colin Firth as a dreamy Mr Darcy and Jennifer Ehle as the spirited Elizabeth Bennet. We had to take occasional breaks in the action--wee pauses to explain some details, such as what an entailed estate entailed and for those among us who were romance-challenged, why some of the characters did or did not pine for others. But everyone loved the tale of the Bennet sisters, their sensible father, their hysterical mother and the balls and dancing of the era, plus the lushness of the scenes--horses riding across meadows, characters walking through wooded estates or into town on rutted roads. We were all intrigued with the way life was lived some 200 years ago--at least as re-created by the producers of the program.

The evening binges led to daytime discussions--on the lot of women at that time and now, on the importance of live music and muscianship, how mail was delivered, on how people traveled to visit friends and relatives in other towns and cities, the role of servants.

And then we followed it up with peach pie--some traditions live on from one vacation to the next.

 

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Vacations with Grown Kids and Grands: Update on easing the stress of too much togetherness

Vacations with Grown Kids and Grands: Update on easing the stress of too much togetherness

 

We look forward to it all year long and then, suddenly, there we are: three generations of family packed into one vacation spot.

Last year, I shared six tips on how to ease the tensions that sometimes intrude on the joys of togetherness. This year those tips are part of a vacation package pulled together by NextAve, the PBS website for those of us over 50. You can check out the whole shebang here

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Parenting Adult Children: Who rules the dinner-table talk now?

On vacation this summer, we are invited by Uber son and family to join them at their condo for dinner. They've spent their day doing things they love to do--skipping rocks down at the creek, picking wild berries from bushes and swimming in the pool. Paterfamilias and I, ensconsed in a nearby hotel, had walked a hiking trail and been to town to check out the crafts scene.

This particular evening, my daughter-in-law and my grandson had just gotten back from a 3-hour mountain bike ride on trails in the foothills of the mountain. It had been a challenging, adrenalin-rush ride; they were both exhilarated by the adventure.

It was all we talked about at dinner: the rocks, tree roots, sudden twists in the trail, sharp uphills, scraped elbows. Tales of other rides by other mountain-biking members of the family were relived and remembered--including some parental falls and pratfalls into or on top of bushes.

Paterfamilias and I don't mountain-bike ride. We are road bicyclists. We tried to connect our experiences with theirs (the closeness of a fast-moving truck versus the challenge of knee-high tree roots) but that flopped. So did our attempts after a while to change the subject.

That's when one of the realities of parenting adult children hit home: We are no longer in charge. Not even close. Of course, when our kids were young and growing up in our house or going on vacation with us, we ran the dinner-table conversation. Now when we're on their turf, our grown kids own the flow of conversation, and we don't necessarily know what it is or how it works. It isn't as though we're cut out of the conversation. We're welcome to join in, but it's sometimes hard to figure out how. PF and I often remind each other, 'We're no longer center stage; we're bit players now in our children's lives.' It's one thing to say it. It's another to feel it at the dinner table.

On her blog, psychotherapist Kathy McCoy talks about re-framing the feelings of being on the side lines: Instead of feeling we are a bit player, we could see ourselves as having a front row seat. McCoy likes to quote her Aunt Molly on the changing family dynamic as we age: "We're welcome at the party, but the party isn't for us."

Nor is leading the dinner conversation. If the table talk isn't to our liking or interest, tough luck. Feign interest. Try to connect. Listen for nuggets of insight. It's their turn.

To be fair, the table talk isn't always devoted to mountain biking or its equivalent. One of Uber son's delights is in presenting complex math questions that take a healthy dose of logic to solve. The conversations that revolve around solving the questions are profound. I'm often stumped by them (lazy mind refusing to go to work) but I relish hearing how the two older Grands (5th and 7th graders) work their way toward an answer.

The conversation on this particular vacation evening finally broadened out, thanks to our youngest Grand who does not yet ride a pedaling bike, no less forge through mountain trails. As we finished our chicken and corn and brought the farm-market peach pie to the table, she piped up: "Can't we talk about something else, like skiing?"

We weren't the only ones having trouble connecting.

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