“85% of college graduates returning home!,”  a statistic that struck fear into many parental hearts when it resonated through the media echo chamber recently  turns out to be the invention of a now-defunct consulting firm named TwentySomething, according to Politi-fact.com, which tracked the story to its source after HuffPo, Time and CNN  picked it up without checking its provenance.    According to the real  numbers reported recently by a more reliable source, the  U.S. Census Bureau,  it’s not the class of 2012  parents should be worried about, it’s their older siblings; last year nearly 30% of 25-34 year-olds – about 5.9 million adults – co-resided with their parents, a 26% increase from 2007. And while the economy certainly has something to do with it, it’s not by any means the only reason.

The number of young adults between 18 and 25 who boomeranged home or never left nearly doubled between 1980 and 2008, long before the current recession, accepted and even welcomed by baby boom parents who enabled their extended adolescence and underwrote their search for identity for five to ten years longer than their own parents did.  And most of today’s graduates consider the family homestead more of a short-stay hotel than a long-term plan or default position; although they’ll be back and forth between jobs, travel, grad school, roommates or romances for a few years, by the time they’re 25, they expect to have moved on, out, and up.  Many will, but if the Census Bureau projections are accurate, others will linger a lot longer than that, and even the most tolerant and loving parents are beginning to wonder what that bodes for their own future as well as their kids’.

Having adult children as long-term roommates is emblematic of how the baby boomers are redefining the family life cycle, changing the traditional meaning of independence, and ushering in a new life stage located somewhere between middle and old age – Permanent Parenthood. And while this may be the most visible aspect of the dramatically different relationship they have with their grown kids than they had with their own parents, it’s hardly the only one, and it has less to do with money than multiple other factors.

I first heard harbingers of this when I began interviewing baby boomers in the mid-nineties for the first of three books on parents and their adult children. “I want to be kind of parent whose adult kids would want me in their life even if we weren’t related” is what many said:  “I want an honest, open, authentic relationship with my grown kids,” said others, contrasting it with the more distant and less satisfying ones they had with their own parents, especially those they said “didn’t care if I was happy as long as I could support myself.”

There’s little if any research on this new family configuration – in fact, the relationship between parents and emerging adults has barely been studied, as Dr. Jeffrey Arnett, a leading researcher on young adulthood, points out. But its beginnings can be traced back to the 80’s, when parenting was “professionalized” by those whose careers, already impacted by the glass ceiling, had become less compelling as the management of their now child-centered families became more so. Says writer Ann Huilbert, “the summons to recognize parenthood–motherhood and fatherhood-as a high-status profession had never been issued with more urgency.”

Technology has enabled parents to stay tethered even to their grown kids in ways that previous generations couldn’t have imagined; most baby boomers, eager for independence, spent their young adulthood largely out of sight and reach of their own parents. A recent commercial for a wireless carrier promoting a family plan has a 20-something moving out on her own reassuring her anxious mother that they’ll never be out of touch. The high rate of divorce, which peaked in the mid-eighties when more than a third of American children lived in a single-parent home, contributed to narrowing the generation gap, breaking down many of the boundaries between the generations.  “We were much closer than most mothers and daughters, because we were all we had,” said one woman, echoing many of her peers. “In a way, we grew up together.”  Even a cursory look at many of the web sites devoted to women over 40 indicates that many mothers both married and single consider their adult children to be their best friends. And the youth-centered zeitgeist encourages further boundary burring; from music to fashion to cultural touchstones, the generations are closer together than ever; to feel part of their adult kids’ lives, say many parents, keeps them young, too.  As writer Katherine Newman, author of The Accordion Family, puts it, the upside of delayed launching is that they don’t lose the role of an active parent. “In that sense they are sociologically younger than past generations; they retain the pleasures of being a parent and lose the downside.  The relationship becomes more egalitarian and less vertical.”

In many cultures and ethnicities, living at home until and even after marriage is normative. But in this country, the empty nest has traditionally marked the end of the family life cycle, defined by sociologists as the time when children depart for independent lives and families of their own. And it’s worth noting that independence has a different meaning for today’s young adults than it did for their parents – it’s more about making their own choices than it is about making their own way or even their own living. The never-empty or re-filled nest may mark the beginning of a new stage in the evolution of the family cycle.  But in middle class America, whose graying “post-parents” couldn’t wait to leave home, there’s a growing concern about whether their kids ever will.

I can’t love Hannah. I can’t even like her.  She’s not only charmless, she’s aimless, which isn’t surprising, given the leisurely pace at which many of her peers make their way toward adulthood, searching for their identity. And like many of them – especially educated, privileged twenty-somethings – she is entitled.  In the first episode, she’s stunned when her  parents inform her they’re no longer going to subsidize that leisurely pace, despite the fact that  Hannah is willing to downscale the life they’ve been supporting her in since college and try to get by on $1100  a month  for a couple more years while she finishes her  novel(which  thus far seems to amount to a title page and paragraph.)  In the second show, she’s equally surprised when her boss at a publishing company isn’t willing to turn her lengthy unpaid internship into a real job, much less read what she plans to show him as soon as it’s a bit further along. In the third episode, she lets her nice but creepy boss feel her up; I confess to wondering if this is a set-up for later in the series, when she blames her parents for insisting that she get a job, even one that requires her to submit to  sexual harrassment.   And in the fourth (which will be my final  show even if it’s not hers), she exhibits a degree of ignorance about sexually transmitted diseases that’s not only frightening but astounding in an educated 23 year old woman in 2012 – and to which, in re-runs and public statements, HBO should append a retraction.

What’s most appalling, though, is the way Hannah allows herself to be used and abused sexually and emotionally by her wretched boyfriend, how desperate she is for something she doesn’t even  appear to be enjoying (hardly surprising given the awkward, unerotic couplings portrayed thus far) with someone who doesn’t seem to care a whit about her.  He is as charmless as Hannah, and seems to suffer from the same symptoms of borderline personality she exhibits, especially the combination of hubris and self-hatred, grandiosity and insecurity.

Hannah and her creator have been widely hailed as the voice of her generation. As a mother, grandmother and feminist,  I certainly hope not.

The first time I was aware of cell phones they were called car phones, but I confused them with CB radios. The only person I knew who had one of those was my brother-in-law, and since I didn’t want to sit in my car and talk to him, why bother? Besides, everyone I actually wanted to talk to could call my home phone (which is what we called it then), and leave a message on my answering service (which is what we had then ) if I didn’t pick up.

I finally got a cell phone when I began to live part of the year in New York, about the time the last working pay phone in Manhattan expired, in the late 90’s. I’ve only had one replacement since then, and it’s the second dumbest phone extant – all it does besides make and receive calls is do texting, but on a tiny qwerty keyboard it’s not exactly a time-saver.

I neither envy nor admire the digiterati, whose fingers skip nimbly over their smart phones, conjuring up the nearest sushi bar, social messaging like crazy, checking in at 4-Square and talking to a sweet-voiced entity named after Tom Cruise’s daughter (and what’s up with THAT?) But I’ve been toying with the idea of upgrading to a slightly smarter cell phone since a friend’s cell phone’s built-in GPS helped us find our way when we were (truly) lost in the woods.

I’ve even been thinking about giving up my land line and depending solely on my cell phone to keep me connected to the world. Frankly, I haven’t been satisfied with my home telephone service since there was only one company supplying it. But first I had to choose a phone and a plan, which I finally did.

My new phone has arrived, and my new plan, with enough bytes to keep me from getting lost, let me check my e-mail, and play Words With Friends (but only if Tina Fey will play with me) went “live” as soon as I activated it. In order to justify the expense of this vastly more superior (or at least newer, which in the tech world is usually the same thing) instrument, I have to let go of what I’ve come to think of as my life line – my land line. The prospect gives me a galloping case of separation anxiety. Irrational, I know –i’s not my identity I’m giving up, just that thing that always works, even when the power fails. It’s not even the phone number I’ve had for three decades, the same number in two houses and four different apartments; within days those digits by which my oldest, nearest and dearest reach me were magically teleported to my smart new cell phone. I’m not sure yet whether the telemarketers, phone spammers or political phone bankers will come, too – that remains to be heard.

Giving up my land line is scary. What if I lose my cell phone? What if I forget to charge it and I miss the call I’ve been waiting for? What if someone really needs to reach me but can’t find my number because it’s not in the white pages any longer? What if there’s some kind of terrorist attack that wipes out all the cell phone towers or networks? What if my phone falls into the wrong hands and anyone can do anything with it, especially all the things I don’t know how to do yet and probably never will?

(I think now I really understand why advertisers aren’t interested in selling to people my age.)

We worry about them almost as intensely as we did when they were younger; a recent University of Florida study reports that   while the focus of adult children’s worries overwhelmingly centers on their parents’ health, parents have many diverse worries – their children’s health, finances, relationship issues and problems in balancing work and family.

Most of us did our final stretch of growing up out of sight, if not mind, of our own parents. But today, even if we don’t co-reside with our grown kids and/or their families (which a growing number of us do) we’re much more involved with them than we were at the same age with our own parents, who were generally content with carefully edited reports of only what we wanted them to know about our lives. And current research as well as contemporary practice indicates that adult children want, need and welcome parental support– financial, logistical, and emotional.  Kids between 20 and 35 are more dependent on their parents for a longer time than ever: a child’s third decade will cost its parents a third of the total they spent on the first two. Yet as the MacArthur  Foundation Network recently confirmed,  the relationship between emerging adults and their parents remains uncharted territory; virtually nothing is known about how it’s renegotiated as they become adults, especially during a longer, more complicated passage to maturity in a competitive, high-stakes world.

Today it’s tough to know when the parenting years are over, because the meaning of both parent and adulthood has changed.  The prevailing opinion is that the faltering economy and the growth of co-generational living is the reason, but the condition I call “Permanent Parenthood” © is much more multidetermined.  We want honest, authentic, intimate relationships unlike those we had with our own parents (at least, we think we do).  Technology – the availability of 24/7 electronic communication – has tightened the ties that bind us together.   So have demographics – over half of first wave boomers were single parents during part or all of their kids’ childhood, which changes and intensifies the parent/child dyad.  The desire for inclusiveness – to be part of the dominant culture – is different from the wish to maintain our youth, and as we age and grow ever more socially invisible, it becomes even stronger. And for many of us, whether divorced or widowed, the most intimate relationship we have is with a grown child.

Worrying about our kids is partly habit, but at this stage of our lives it reflects our investment in the relationship. Both generations feel positively about their relationships when the other party worries about them and conveys their concerns, but when we express ours, we need to do so in a way that doesn’t undermine their autonomy or make them feel that we perceive them as incapable of managing their own affairs. And the more often we repeat and discuss our fears with them, the more negatively they view the relationship.

One of the things I miss most since my mother died is the emotional sustenance I used to draw from the knowledge that someone, somewhere in the world, was thinking about me and wondering if I was okay.  I used to tell her not to worry about me  so much – after all, I was a grown up. And when my own grown-up kids tell me the same thing, I reply just the way she always did: “Why else do you think none of the things I worry about have happened to you?”

To  Connect with the Coach, contact her at janeadamsphd@gmail.com

The timetable of adulthood has changed and your midlife clients need help dealing with extended parenthood and manage their grown kids’ continued emotional, financial, and logistical dependence.  Dr. Jane Adams, author of Boundary Issues, When Our Grown Kids Disappoint Us,  I’m Still Your Mother, pioneered Post-Parent Coaching to help her clients establish their own limits and boundaries and redefine their parental responsibilities, goals and dreams instead of letting their familiar roles as caretakers, their kids’ circumstances or guilt over their failure to thrive in adulthood guide their behavior. She’ll teach you how to support clients in creating adaptive, mutual relationships that foster their kids’ independence so they can get on with their own lives – and attract new clients, too!

MORNING SESSION— A CULTURAL OVERVIEW; WHAT BOOMER PARENTS NEED NOW AND WHY

Basic concepts of post-parent coaching .  Brief coaching: the 3-month commitment .  Typical client issues, stresses and complaints, including re-housing grown kids .  Overcoming the gap between their expectations and kids’ reality .  Effects of delayed departure and adulthood on parents’ personal and professional goals .  Whose problems, whose ownership, whose solutions ?   Coaching detachment .  The limits of parental identification, rescue and intervention .  The ADD of the 20’s—addiction, depression, dependence

AFTERNOON SESSION—COGNITIVE AND EXPERIENTIAL STRATEGIES & TECHNIQUES OF POST-PARENT COACHING

Restructuring clients behavior, perspective and understanding through the Six R’s—reframing, releasing, reflecting, reality checking,  reinforcing and remodeling .  Tools for clients—Wonder Woman bracelets, the mortar and pestle solution, burden baskets and other techniques that work .  Homework, resources and support .  Using the coaching journal, agenda reminders, and feedback .  Coaching via e-mail, phone and Skype .  Role play, case presentations .  Using the 6 R’s in your practice and marketing it to new and current clients

THE TAKE-AWAY- SKILLS & STRATEGIES TO BUILD YOUR PRACTICE NOW!

Thursday 9/22/11, 10-4 PM .  TARRYTOWN NEW YORK .   $350

Registration: Elaine Dreyer, 914-241-8579, elainebdreyer@gmail.com or         Jane Adams, 206-849-0601, info@www.janeadams.com

. Clarify whether you can or should continue as business partners after the divorce.

. Devise an exit strategy if you can’t.

. Continue to participate actively in the business but in different spheres, divisions or territories.

. Keep professional relationships intact when your personal life’s falling apart. .

. Split up clients, accounts, patients or key people when you both go it alone.

. Live with pre-nups, non-competes, and other agreements you made when you never thought this would happen. Or living without them.

. Get over having to share the wealth you created yourself.

. Deal with grown kids and their present or future role in the business.

. Transform conflict into cooperation so the lawyers aren’t the only ones who win.

. Know when your personal life is the public’s business and when it’s not.

. Understand why even the best-run business gets the Divorce Dwindles and what you can do about it. For a personal assessment, contact  Jane Adams Ph.D

The article offers a close-up look at a residential facility for the psychiatric treatment of post-adolescent ADD - addiction, depression, and dependence – as well as more severe mental illnesses common in this age group  such as schizophrenia and bipolar diseases. The goal of treatment is variously described as watching the behavior unfold, helping them meet the demands of imminent independence, helping to empower their agency, and coping with the challenges of this life stage without coddling or rescue. It costs $21,000 a month to encourage kids to separate from their parents – or, as they call it, teaching them how to know when to stand alone and when to accept help.

Of course,  most of us watch the behavior unfold without paying experts to do it for us, and we judge those who do  with envy or scorn according to our own life experience. We all know kids who’ve tripped and fallen, detoured or even  dead-ended on the way to independence. Some of them are ours. But most of us are holding our breath, wondering, worrying and hoping. It’s our new life stage, too  -  Postparenthood.