Like
many parents of young adults, March 2020 found us scrambling to create space
for our twenty-two-year old son. Due to the coronavirus, his university
abruptly sent everyone home. He was joining the 26.6 million 18- to 29-year-old
Americans now living with their parents. That’s 52% of young adults, a
percentage that surpasses the previous 48% peak at the end of the Great
Depression. According to a Pew
research study,
that’s an increase in 2.6 million from February.
We
drove from the Hudson Valley to Connecticut to help him pack up the first house
in which he’d ever lived independently. It was a somber affair, rife with
anxiety and a new type of grief – of lost opportunity, narrowing options.
Luckily,
as a senior, he’d been able to enjoy most of his college experience, losing
only the last three months of a four-year stint. But there would be no on-site
commencement, no late nights with friends, no long goodbyes. Instead came zoom
classes, Facetime chats, a clunky, fitful online graduation “ceremony,” and a
degree in the mail.
Also,
fortunate, of course, is that none of us was ill – the new yardstick
measurement for what “OK” means – and we were able to give him space in our
1910 Victorian house in Phoenicia. It soon occurred to all of us that this
house was, in fact, designed for a multigenerational family.
Wilfred
Farquharson IV, PhD, Director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Outpatient Clinic at Stony Brook Medicine, advises
parents to do just what we did: give space, both physical and emotional. He
also stresses flexibility, and, above all else, communication about the
boundaries of that space.
Farquharson
notes that while a young adult needs elbow room, they and their parents/housemates
also need to be clear regarding expectations. Getting to these understandings
requires engagement. In other words, parents must re-adjust to “walking the
line,” as they did during their child’s teen years, and be prepared to pivot,
to make mistakes, to apologize for not knocking, and to move on due to
inevitable infractions and misunderstandings.
Not
surprisingly, Dr. Farquharson strongly advises against helicopter parenting.
For some, that’s a hard habit to break, especially in the era of Covid-19, when
the desire to protect one’s child is intensified.
While
I knock wood, I can speak from experience and say that, seven months in, our
unexpectedly multigenerational home has been mostly harmonious. All things
considered that is no small thing at all. The challenge is in appreciating it.
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