Category Archives: Parenting

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Coping with COVID-19: Developing Healthy Relationships at Home

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For many of us, being asked to stay at home is stretching our abilities to cope with life. Every human has a limited bandwidth to deal with life’s challenges. Being cooped up at home for a month, to help flatten the curve, raises the floor of our personal bandwidth. Our ability to cope with the challenges of COVID-19 shrinks. New additional challenges emerge: new schedules or lack thereof, loss of income, being around the same people 24/7 or being totally isolated, fear of illness or the potential loss of a loved one, wondering when and if we will get back to normal, just to name a few. How can we deal with these new challenges when we have even less emotional and intellectual energy? Fuses are shorter. Frustrations grow. How do we cope?

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For Parents with Young Adult Children Living at Home

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Sometimes it’s the unexpected things that are the hardest to handle.

Most parents expect that once their children have been raised and are young adults, the family will smoothly transition into the “empty nest” stage. The kids will be living on their own — away at college, working, living with roommates, eventually getting married and starting families of their own — and the parents will enjoy some well-earned freedom, and everyone will live happily ever after.

Reality can come as a bit of a surprise.

The truth is that most families don’t move seamlessly from their youngest child’s graduation from high school straight into the empty nest. A recent analysis by the Pew Research Center found that in 2014, 32% of adults aged 18-32 were living in their parents’ home.

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I Matter, You Matter

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This week one of my friends buried her dad. Our friendship group, lovingly called the beach house girls, decided to take that dear one out for tea so she could tell us all about the service, her memories of her dad, and how she felt about the whole life transition. Since most of us could not make the out-of-town service, that was our way of saying to her, “You matter to us.”

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