When an Adult Child Cuts Off a Parent

I wish I had a more chipper post for Election Day folks; this is just plain sad.

Therapists for years have listened to patients blame parents for their problems. What about the suffering of parents who are estranged from their adult children?

Joshua Coleman, a San Francisco psychologist who is an expert on parental estrangement, says that parents often report that a once-close relationship has deteriorated after a conflict over money, a boyfriend or built-up resentments about a parent's divorce or remarriage.

''We live in a culture that assumes if there is an estrangement, the parents must have done something really terrible,'' said Dr. Coleman, whose book ''When Parents Hurt'' (William Morrow, 2007) focuses on estrangement. ''But this is not a story of adult children cutting off parents who made egregious mistakes. It's about parents who were good parents, who made mistakes that were certainly within normal limits.''

Dr. Coleman himself experienced several years of estrangement with his adult daughter, with whom he has reconciled. Mending the relationship took time and a persistent effort by Dr. Coleman to stay in contact. It also meant listening to his daughter's complaints and accepting responsibility for his mistakes. ''I tried to really get what her feelings were and tried to make amends and repair,'' he said. ''Over the course of several years, it came back slowly.''

(A Singer: there is no simple answer or quick fix here. Coleman correctly states that persistence is the key)

Source: Tara Parker-Pope, NY Times

Summoned Self or Well-Planned Life...which are you?

A recent column by David Brooks is a real thought stimulator. He illuminates two ways of thinking about your life, that are described by Clayton Christensen who is a professor at the Harvard Business School.

The first is what you might call the Well-Planned Life. Once you have come up with an overall purpose, you have to make decisions about allocating your time, energy and talent. Christensen notes that people with a high need for achievement commonly misallocate their resources. If they have a spare half-hour, they devote it to things that will yield tangible and near-term accomplishments. These almost invariably involve something at work — closing a sale, finishing a paper.

“In contrast,” he adds, “investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. ... It’s not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, ‘I raised a good son or a good daughter.’ ” As a result, the things that are most important often get short shrift.

The second way of thinking about your life might be called the Summoned Life. This mode of thinking starts from an entirely different perspective. Life isn’t a project to be completed; it is an unknowable landscape to be explored. A 24-year-old can’t sit down and define the purpose of life in the manner of a school exercise because she is not yet deep enough into the landscape to know herself or her purpose. That young person — or any person — can’t see into the future to know what wars, loves, diseases and chances may loom. She may know concepts, like parenthood or old age, but she doesn’t really understand their meanings until she is engaged in them.

The most important features of the human landscape are commitments that precede choice — commitments to family, nation, faith or some cause. These commitments defy the logic of cost and benefit, investment and return. The person leading the Well-Planned Life emphasizes individual agency, and asks, “What should I do?” The person leading the Summoned Life emphasizes the context, and asks, “What are my circumstances asking me to do?”

AMS: Just some food for thought as we contemplate our lives and roles as parents and spouses.

Today is Family Day - A Day to Eat Dinner with Your Children

The Power of Parenting

Whether you’re cooking a gourmet meal, ordering food from your favorite take-out place or eating on the go, rest assured that what your children really want during dinnertime is YOU! Family meals are the perfect time to talk to your children and to listen to what’s on their mind. The more often children eat dinner with their families, the less likely they are to smoke, drink or use drugs.

Please click here to learn more about dinner tonight.

No Silver Lining in Gores' Separation

Heard of the "third age"? Neither did I until I read some of the op-eds on the Gores' separation. Forty years of marriage and now they should explore their freedom and pursue someone new and exciting? This Op-Ed really got my blood boiling.

Here is my monthly parenting column from the Home News Tribune:

When a high-profile couple like Al and Tipper Gore separate from each other, we feel sadness that a 40 year marriage has failed. After 32 years in family therapy, nothing shocks me, but I, too, was saddened by this separation.

However, Dierdre Bair's column in the New York Times on this subject quickly brought my blood to a boil. She authored a book on late-life divorces and described a term that I was not aware of … "the third age,'' which refers to life after divorce. Bair described the "courage'' that these divorcing couples showed as they left the supposed security of marriage. "To them,'' she writes, "divorce meant not failure and shame, but opportunity.''

Bair describes that most of the couples she interviewed did not divorce "impulsively". They mentioned freedom and control for themselves for the rest of their lives. In the true tradition of our consumer-oriented society, these longtime married couples now want "someone new and exciting.''

She alludes to the idea that we leave the "it's-all-about-me'' phase of our youth to get married and raise children. Then, when our adult children leave the nest, we should seek that all-about-me time again. "Women and men alike wanted time to find out who they were.'' Many of her interviews ended with, "It's my time, and if I don't take it now I never will.'' She concluded her column but saying, "So let us not feel shocked or sad about the end of Al and Tipper Gore's marriage. Let us, instead, wish them well and hope that they might enjoy their third age.''

In response to Bair's column, John W. Curtis observed, "There is no mention of the effect on the children, albeit adult. One wonders if the children are in fact happy to see their parents pursuing their third age. And there is the clear implication that those who remain married for life are benighted, craven losers without the guts to pursue their Zen, rather than those whose love and devotion deserve our respect.'' In Bair's all-about-me world, there is also no consideration for the many stakeholders in each marriage: parents, children, and even grandchildren. Their lives, in my view, will never be the same when the patriarch and matriarch divorce.

Another respondent to Bair's column, Susan Stern explained, "The assumption here is that one comes to self-discovery in something approaching a vacuum; free of responsibility, we finally managed to understand ourselves. There are sound reasons for ending a marriage at any time of life, but those Ms. Bair acknowledges, seem both misguided and shallow.''

Now that I understand the third age, it baffles and nauseates me as much another term that has been popularized in recent years, the starter marriage. That's when you give marriage a try and hope for the best, similar to a starter house which presumably you will quickly outgrow. When marrying, couples stand before their family, friends, and God to pledge a commitment. We all need to take steps to assure that our marital commitment doesn't simply fade like the furniture.

Tara Parker-Pope said it well: "If there is a lesson from the Gore break-up, it's that with marriage, you're never done working on it.''

Be Counted columnist Dr. Alan Singer is a marriage therapist in Highland Park. Respond to this column via his website www.FamilyThinking.com

Middle Class Getting Socked; Divore Rate Dipping?

The Great Recession, as they now call it, continues to bash the middle class and adversely affect family well being. A recent piece by Judith Warner in the NY Times, is as usual, excellent. Some of the highlights:

"Economists may assert that we’re in the early stages of a recovery, but surveys continue to show that the impact of the Great Recession on American families is deep, widespread and grim. A Pew Research poll published last month indicated that more than half of all adults in the U.S. labor force had experienced some “work-related hardship” — a period of unemployment, a pay cut, a reduction in work hours or an involuntary move to part-time employment — since the recession began in December 2007."

"The poor are getting poorer, and the rich, despite stock-market setbacks, are still comparatively rich. The most devastating losses in household wealth over the past two years have been suffered by the middle class. And families are fraying at the seams. The Pew poll showed nearly half of people who had been unemployed for more than six months saying their family relationships had become strained, and a New York Times/CBS poll of unemployed adults last winter found about 40 percent saying they believed their joblessness was causing behavioral change in their children."

"Parents who have jobs are working longer hours than ever. Mothers are taking shorter maternity leaves. The birth rate is on the decline. The divorce rate is declining, too — it’s too expensive for people to break up their households — but that’s not necessarily a family-friendly thing, as a report from the Council on Contemporary Families noted in April: “We know from the experience of the Great Depression of the 1930s that divorce rates can fall while family conflict and domestic violence rates rise.”

Endnote: Our President has much on his plate. I hope (and pray) that he keeps the astronomical unemployment rate at the very top of his domestic agenda until this nightmare is in our rear-view mirror.