Good parents give their children roots and wings. Roots to know where home is, wings to fly away and exercise what’s been taught them. — Jonas Salk

 When my first child was born a friend gave me a framed print with an inscription based on the Salk quote: Give your children roots and wings. 

 Now three decades later, I realize that giving them roots was the easy part.  Letting go—giving them wings to fly away—seems considerably more difficult.  Many of us baby boomer parents find it hard to completely let go.  Indeed that was the inspiration for mothering 21.com: Parenting never ends but obviously you have to stop holding their hands at some point. Separation issues are nothing new; remember nursery school? Yet some of us still struggle with letting our adult children lead fully independent lives, without our constant advice, opinions and suggestions!

 Some insights were offered in a recent blog post with an academic title, “Parenting after the adolescent becomes adult.”  Dr. Carl Pickhardt, who wrote the post, has impressive credentials.  He is the author of 13  books on parenting and the father of four adult children.  Dr. Pickhardt’s advice on how parents can fully separate from their adult children is not sugar-coated: 

No matter how grown up, how much older they become, these adult offspring forever remain your children just as you forever remain their parent. And the relationship is always challenging because, like the rest of life, parenting demands constant change and accommodation.

 What makes this accommodation hard for parents are several adjustments they must make: to tolerance, to reversal, and to demotion.

Tolerance? Reversal? Demotion?  That felt like a slap in the face with the admonition: Snap out of it parent! What was Dr. Pickhardt thinking?  We phoned him in Austin, Texas where he has a private practice that includes adult children and their parents, and chatted for an hour.  He was empathetic and reassuring.  His message: Parents need to let their adult children assert their independence and to love and accept them as individuals, not as mini-me!

Letting go doesn’t mean that our adult children no longer need us. Parents need to remember their “primal role,” Dr. Pickhardt said.   Just as a little child wants to share every accomplishment, most adult children crave parental attention and approval.  As he wrote in his blog post:

So when parents continue their roles as emotional supporter, as rapt audience, and as tireless cheerleader, what they have to offer their adult children never goes out of style, never loses lasting value.

That makes the separation sound  less depressing.  Still, the words—tolerance, reversal, demotion—needed some explanation and Dr. Pickhardt kindly obliged with so many excellent insights that the post will be in two parts: this week and next.

Why tolerance, reversal and demotion?  Sounds like I just got downsized from my parenting job.

The hardest art of parenting is letting, especially when you worked so hard and invested so much.  Those adjustments of tolerance, reversal and demotion are the different ways parents have to let go to be able to embrace their adult child and accept their independence. 

Let’s start with tolerance.  You make a frightening analogy:  Just as we baby boomers must learn to be tolerant of our own aging parents, our adult children must become tolerant of us.  Are we really that difficult?

 Of course we never think that we can be difficult.  If something is the matter, we believe that we’re okay and the other person is not.  The adult child needs to accept the idea that “I am not going to change my parent and my parent is not going to change me.”  The parent needs to accept that too. For example, a parent may need to accept  that “My adult child has always argued with me, will continue to argue and will probably never not argue.”

 Accepting your child’s argumentative personality is one thing, but what about other choices: work, lifestyle, partner, religious differences, goals in life?

Parents need to let adult children makes their own decisions and accept those decisions. Tolerance means acceptance and the opposite of acceptance is rejection, and that does relationship between parent and adult child no favors. The goal is to learn to love the differences and to see you adult child as a whole person.  As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it:  “to see the other whole against the sky.”

To be continued next week…

What’s a parent to do when an adult child behaves badly?

A number of years ago a colleague was called out of a conference.  He returned, his face ashen, and quickly gathered his belongings: his wife had telephoned that their teenage son had been arrested for drug possession.  He was meeting her and a lawyer at the police station. After he left, another colleague, the father of two lovely daughters in their twenties turned and said, “Your kids will disappoint in a major way at least once. But you and they eventually get over it.”

Imagine the disappointment that Kultida Woods, Tiger’s mother, must have felt as she watched her son apologize for his infidelities on national television last month.  Surely she was embarrassed as he talked about how the values she had taught him were thrown in a heap like dirty clothes. 

In all likelihood, none of us will ever have to watch our child apologize for misdeeds before millions of people (A point astutely raised by New York Times columnist David Carr who wrote that while he understood why an apology was part of the recovery process “I just don’t know what the rest of us were doing there.”

We all fervently hope that our children will never implode in such a devastating manner.  But like my colleague warned, most adult children manage to disappoint at least once in a major way (and we will probably do the same to them).  How is a parent supposed to react beyond wringing hands and whining “Where did I go wrong?” 

 Across the world adult children are spending their money (and sometimes yours) telling their therapists exactly how we went wrong as parents.  Are we supposed to offer a mea culpa? Perhaps we didn’t go wrong, our children did and it’s their problem to fix it.  Suggestions on how to encourage adult children to take “ownership” of their problems has spawned a mini-library of books:

“Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents”

“The Enabler: When Helping Hurts the Ones You Love”

“When Parents Hurt: Compassionate Strategies When You and Your Grown Child Don’t Get Along “

“Walking on Eggshells: Navigating the Delicate Relationship Between Adult Children and Parents”

 The message in yet another book, “When Our Grown Kids Disappoint Us” from psychologist Jane Adams, is “To parents who are still trying to “fix” their adult children — Stop!” The book’s subtitle aptly sums up her approach: Letting Go of Their Problems, Loving Them Anyway, and Getting on with Our Lives

Easier said then done as for some of us separating from our adult children’s problems is like trying to remove Krazy Glue.   Of course, there are distinctions that need to be made:  The “bad things” done by adult children range from disappointing to difficult to devastating; from immature actions to addictions.  In many of those cases a self-help book is not enough and parents may need their own therapists and/or support group like Alanon to find their way through what seems like impossibly trying times.

Age is another distinction: bad behavior at 20 is different from bad behavior at 35.  For parents the hard question is where’s the line ? When it is no longer your responsibility, where you are taking too much on yourself and promoting the very immaturity/lack of self-reliance that may be part of the problem? That’s a question many parents ask themselves as they search out, sometimes over and over, help for an adult child caught in a quagmire of difficulties.

 After the press conference ended, Kultida Woods remained to talk to wire service reporters who asked her what she told her son as she hugged him.  She said she whispered, “I’m so proud of you. Never think you stand alone. Mom will always be there for you, and I love you.”

Isn’t that the message we all want to give to our children?  While we certainly don’t condone certain behavior we are always there for them, no matter what the circumstance.  That was the message of my colleague to his son, who solved his problems and is now a successful professional,  thanks to his own efforts and to the support of his parents.

www.amazon.com/Walking-Eggshells-Navigating-Delicate-Relationship/dp/0767920856/ref=pd_sim_b_5

We probably don’t know the answer, but maybe we can teach our kids to ask themselves the important questions

What’s almost as delicious–and unnerving–as falling in love?

Watching, as your child ventures giddily onto that shaky wire.

Because you know. You know that once they’re in the arms of Eros, they’re toast. If you witness dangerous missteps–like a partner who, your gut tells you, isn’t the best fit–you’ll probably be tuned out, just like you tuned out your parents’ clatter and drone. It takes many years to comprehend that parents, those clueless ancients, just might be women and men with epic love stories/hangovers/joneses all their own. Stories that might’ve saved an inexperienced youth a world of hurt.

“Why didn’t they tell me??” you may have wondered, those many moons ago, scraping your bloody entrails off the floor after evisceration by Mr. or Ms. Wrong. Well, probably they did, but the drumbeat in your heart and loins was much too loud. Or maybe they hailed from the “Hands-Off” School of Parenting Adult Offspring, where one is constrained from offering unsolicited advice. And then there was my parents’ school: harangue so loudly, make predictions so dire, that a stubborn, immature daughter will do just about anything–including hang onto Mr. Wrong–to prove them wrong.

Given that my own parents–bless their ferociously loving hearts–lacked boundaries, I fretted, as a young mother, about how I could possibly deal with… anything. Turns out that a perk of being an “elderly primigravida” (a super-sexy term employed during my amnios) is that you can learn a lot by observing how your peers, several jumps ahead of you in everything from toilet-training to dating rules, are muddling through.

Our first babysitter was a delightful young woman whose parents were unhappy about her choice of boyfriend. With the fascination of an anthropologist studying a newly discovered tribe, I watched how they handled it. Sans haranguing, they explained their concerns, assured her they loved her, that their door was always open and they would be gracious to all who entered. Then they took a step back and quietly let time (and the good sense they’d inculcated in their offspring) do its work.  I was amazed when the romance fizzled in a mere six months, sans the parent-child psychodramas and power struggles I still wince to remember.

It wasn’t that these parents were such skilled acrobats on the tightrope of love. In fact, several years later, their own marriage ended. It was, I think, that they spoke their emotional truth—respectfully–in the context of a parent-child relationship where this was valued and exercised from day one. This resonated for me, as it provided some sort of bridge between the lands of “no comment” and “no boundaries,” neither of which felt right for the family I envisioned.

Something else I observed, early on: parents’ stories (doled out over the years, in age-appropriate soundbytes) are usually more impactful than lectures shouted across the chasm when it’s already too late.

Stories like:

Jogging around Washington Square Park (the one time I, like, actually ever do this), I meet the cute grad student who’s moved into my building. Bill (not his real name) asks me to dinner, we click, and are open about our “intentions.” I say I’m in my late 20s, ready to get serious, eager to have kids. He quickly points out that he’s his early 20s and in no hurry for marriage.

Three years later, when we break up, we’ll confess to having had the identical thought as we locked eyes, that first night: “I really, really like you, and I know you like me – and I’m totally going to change your mind about EVERYTHING.”

Wrong.

Bad timing isn’t the only strike against us. My parents see Bill’s skittishness as a sign of insincerity (which it isn’t), and bitterly castigate me for wasting my time with him.  Bill’s family – top-heavy with high-profile shrinks, and multiple divorces – isn’t keen on me, either. Though they are Jewish, they’ve pegged me (because I’m a daughter of Holocaust survivors) as irreparably scarred and “a mindless slave to archaic tradition.”  Which I’m not.

And so Bill and I persevere for years, determined to fit square peg into round hole, to show everybody.

Until, one day, everything changes.

In his apartment (he’s in the library, studying), I spot a letter addressed to Bill from his grandfather, an imperious analyst with whom he’s had little contact the whole time we’ve been together.

I hesitate only an instant before reading it.

Apparently Bill has reached out to Grandpapa because he doesn’t want to lose me but feels pressured by my ultimatums. Much-married Grandpapa cautions Bill about the family’s track record.  What on earth could you two be thinking, he writes: “As the shoe-seller tries to convince his customers – ‘Go on, buy the hurting shoes, and they will stop hurting!?’”

The metaphor hits its mark like a laser. I literally cannot breathe. Years of murky, wishful thinking become meaningless vapor; I can see for miles. I can’t see my destiny, but I know it’s not Bill. This no longer terrifies me. Because I know now that the stupidest, sorriest fate of all would be “buying” what didn’t fit from the get-go, or believing that marriage magically enables two people  – even caring, well-intentioned people – to generate sufficient light and heat to override their differences. I know now that I will never let this happen.

Brandishing the letter, I run through Washington Square. In the library, Bill and I say our teary, relieved goodbyes.

Four days later I meet the man who will become my husband. There is no forcing of square pegs into round holes.  I see the light, and good Lord, I feel the heat; and the years ahead, while by no means perfect, are pretty darn good. I hear that Bill, too, has done well for himself and his family.

From the time my kids were little, I’ve relayed this story of the hurting shoes, and others, in the hopes that when they’re in a place where they cannot hear my voice, they will still hear the undeniable rush of emotional truth, deep inside their own hearts.

Did a few words of perfectly timed advice ever change your life – or teach you something profound, to pass along?

Vivien Orbach-Smith teaches journalism to undergraduates in NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, and co- authored Soaring Underground: A Young Fugitive’s Life in Nazi Berlin, her father’s memoir of survival.

Home for the Holidays…and Every Other Day

That’s the title of a new report by the Pew Research Center that found ten percent of adults ages 18 to 34 (10%) say the poor economy has forced them to move back home in the past year.

Other findings: 12% say they acquired a roommate; 15% of adults younger than 35 say they have postponed getting married because of the recession, and 14% say they have delayed having a baby.

 Social Etiquette

Intergenerational  issues filled the NY Times Social Q’s column last week. A stepmother  wants to know if it’s okay to borrow money from her wealthy stepdaughters (now there’s a switch).  A daughter-in-law  complains that her husband’s mother scolds her  friends on Facebook. And a mom notes that even her adult children are substituting the phrase “no problem” for “you’re welcome.” To the last problem columnist Philip Galanes replies,

I prefer “you’re welcome” or “my pleasure” — which is even better in its effusive (and mostly fake) courtliness. But I’m afraid, Karen, this is what we in the etiquette business call a high-class problem: Much better that the whippersnappers are doing the right thing that calls for your thanks in the first place, right? So try to focus on that instead.

Toy Safety

Grandparents will be out there storming the malls in pursuit of holiday presents for the grandkiddies.  A lot has changed since our children were tots including safety issues. (Just last week more dropside cribs were recalled.)  Before buying check out the various websites recommended in  seattlepi.com  “Boomer Consumer” column including  Healthystuff.org  and Trouble in Toyland. 

Club Sandwich Generation 

We’ve all heard of the sandwich generation but here’s a new term described in NewJerseynewsroom.com.  The club sandwich is “those in their 50s or 60s, sandwiched between aging parents, adult children and grandchildren.” Hold the mayo, slippery enough already.

What about “the girlfriend”?  That question comes up in a variety of sticky situations for the holidays, vacations, and other family-only events.

The girlfriend question is faced by two friends, both mothers of three children.  Karen is mulling her son’s request to invite his girlfriend to the gift opening on the Christmas morning, usually reserved for the family only.  Another mom, Rina, is debating whether to bring her son’s girlfriend on what was initially planned as a family-only trip to Europe this summer. 

The back story is familiar.   Both women, successful professionals, have worked hard since their children were babies building traditions to capture that elusive “quality” time. Both women happily throw their homes open on other occasions but Christmas morning and a special family vacation put them in a quandary.   Another similarity is both sons, recent college grads,  are the oldest so the change in a cherished family tradition by an outsider impacts younger children too.

Karen says, “On Christmas morning my younger sons rip through presents in their pajamas and act goofy, and I love that. I worry with a stranger sitting there they’ll feel awkward. And suppose we invite her only to have them break up a week later?”

Rina has been working long hours and sees the much-anticipated trip as a way to recapture some family closeness.  She also realizes this vacation is probably the last time she gets everyone coordinated to go on a trip as life takes them in different directions.

“I want one last vacation with just my family together,” she says.

 How much will a newcomer change the situation?  A lot depends on how inclusive the family has been over the years.  Some families routinely vacation with other families and always include friends on trips and other events. Other families prefer parents and children only for certain celebrations.

 It’s a hard call. What’s wrong with a little nostalgia when a mom realizes that decades of intimate events are coming to an end and wants one last family-only time before starting new traditions?  Maybe the answer to that love-struck child: Yes, the girlfriend is (an approving adjective) person and welcome in our home, but this vacation, Christmas morning, or whatever it’s going to be just family. 

 However, other moms welcome the new girlfriend, even if it’s likely to be a limited-run relationship. Debbie, the mother of four sons, aged 23 to 32, never had a problem with them bringing girlfriends to family events.

She says, “The way I view it is that it means my sons a) want to be with us for the  holidays/vacations  and b) want to show these girls what our family  traditions are and are proud.”

 This past summer girlfriends joined the family on a trip to the Caribbean.

 When her oldest son, Sean, wanted to bring his girlfriend to the family Christmas celebration for the first time Debbie and her husband welcomed her even though Sean had barely mentioned the girl’s name previously.  “We felt that even if there was not a wedding coming, she was important to him.  That was all we needed and the way we feel about all of them.”  The happy ending: The couple, now married, and their two small children, will gather with the rest of the clan for Thanksgiving.

 What about the boyfriend? What happens when a daughter wants to include her new beau in small, family gatherings?   Interesting, no one has complained about that.  In fact, just the opposite.  Two young women, who were both in years-long relationships, broke up with their boyfriends only to have their parents continue to invite them to family events.  That dilemma is for next week’s blog.

The conversational  closeness that we shared with our little children can return with our adult children

 New York Times reporter Michael Winerip writes an excellent column called GenerationB (as in Baby Boomer) for the New York Times.  He often strikes a chord that resonates with the parents of adult children.  Earlier this fall his column “Life’s Travels for a Father and a Son” centered on his oldest son’s departure for senior year in college.  The column considered much more than the hurried goodbye:  memories, plans, hopes, the father-son connection.

 One line particularly resonated with me.  Winerip recounted a dinner that he and his son shared, just the two of them, where the conversation swirled around many subjects. Winerip writes:

 It was wonderful and surprising how quickly that feeling of closeness — present daily until they become teenagers — came flooding back.

 The teenage years and the great silence.  That’s hard to adjust to after the nursery and grammar school years when many (not all) children tell you everything, when their thoughts tumble out spontaneously.  That feeling of closeness does disappear during the teenage years, depending upon the child and his or her personality. 

 When does that conversational closeness come back, if ever? Of course we don’t expect our adult children to tell us everything (as if they ever did).  But the easy conversations, the bantering back and forth, even the friendly disagreements are part of the fabric of the family.  Sometimes in our 24/7 world it seems that every conversation, every text, every email has to have a point, something to be checked off from to-do list, even in our dealings with our grown children. 

 Perhaps we have to build in some “hanging out” time with our adult children: time to just sit around in the backyard, at the beach, around a leisurely dinner, watching a game, rocking a newborn and just chatting.  It’s during those random, unplanned times that the feeling of closeness can creep in and envelope us like the fog on little cat feet.

The “kids”  have moved out so why still keep the family house?

While my daughter was home from college on an October weekend break, we ran into a neighbor out for a walk with her new twin grandchildren.  We couldn’t linger because I was driving my daughter to the airport to fly back to school or “home” as she said.  The neighbor stopped in her tracks and said sternly, “Don’t ever call college ‘home.’ This is your home right here,” pointing to our house.

 I’ll admit that hearing my daughter call college “home” did sting.  She’s the youngest of three and the only one who really can call our house of three decades her “home.” Her one older brother is married and lives with his wife; her other brother has an apartment in the city.  My daughter is the only one with a bedroom with all her “stuff” and clothes (as well as clothes in the closets in her brothers’ former room).  She loves all the creature comforts of our house.

 I am not ready to turn her room in a guest room or home office, nor her brothers’ room for that matter, which is filled with memorabilia from high school and college.  Even though their beds are barely ever used,   I still switch the comforters from lightweight for  summer to down for winter. I am not moving anytime soon and I don’t need an extra room for any other purpose so why not keep it as a shrine of sorts.  And, I think my “boys,” both busy with demanding careers, like the idea that their childhood can be revisited on occasion, sort of like a museum.  Of course, they would never admit that to me!

 I might be overly sentimental but I like to think of our house as a place that the “children” can truly consider their perpetual home. A place where they  can open the fridge without asking,  where there are clean towels after a jog, where they can unwind on a Sunday afternoon with the big screen TV before going off to slay dragons at work, where they can  sit in the backyard and read a book or snooze in the hammock. A refuge in the storm of life in the 21st century.

 I plan to stay in my house, I hope, for about another decade.  By that time my daughter will be approaching thirty and my sons their 40s.  Maybe then I will be able to give up the family home and have tired of changing those comforters with the seasons.

 But for now, not yet. Indeed with the first grandchild on the way this fall we bought a crib and put it in one of the spare bedrooms.  Feels like we are starting over, and that’s a good thing!