INTRODUCTION
Grown and Flown
Life gave them to me. I’m preparing myself, as best I can, to give them back to life.
—CHARLES M. BLOW
We had a little bit of Mom Swagger going on. We had overparented each of our oldest sons straight into college, and our younger kids seemed to be making progress through high school. We had started a website that focused on the Grown and Flown years of parenting—the period when our offspring are moving through ages fifteen to twenty-five—and our roles as parents are changing. We had gathered other writers whose work we admired and published them on the site. We had cultivated a small audience, established an online community, and just for a moment, we thought we knew what we were doing.
Then came the email.
The writer of the email, Janet, said she had been following us on social media, reading our site, and had gleaned a few useful things along the way. Flattery is a powerful force. Given that this was our first fan letter, Swagger might have just tilted over into Smugness, but we read on.
My daughter Kate is starting college in September and my husband was just diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Financially, thankfully, we should be okay. My concern is my daughter and getting her off to a good and mentally sound start. I couldn’t find anything online—then I thought of you.
I want her to go and be excited and happy about her new start, without having to worry about her father. Pipe dream, I know, but I’m hoping to get her as close to that as possible. My first thought is to reach out to the college to find a person—the person—to be a contact. I don’t want to have to call and explain everything five times before I can get her some support.
Any advice, suggestions, or resources you could provide would be most welcome.
To say that we had not one useful piece of advice to offer our first fan would be an understatement. We, who had effortlessly poured ourselves onto the digital page up to this point, were at a loss for words. We could not, dared not, fob her off with some sort of parenting platitude that would make us sound knowledgeable. We offered our sorrow and our support and told her we were thinking about her.
And then we did what parents have always done, something that would help us to become better parents and hopefully help the millions of readers who would later find Grown and Flown to become better parents. We admitted that we had absolutely no idea what to do. We fessed up to having little insight to give her.
Instead, we offered the one thing we could and said we would ask other parents, our larger community, what they would do in her situation. We acknowledged to her and our readers that with only five data points—the kids in our two families—we didn’t know much outside of our own experiences. Alongside her, we had much to learn from others.
We reached out through social media to our readers, some of whom might have walked in her shoes and some of whom, we hoped, had helped in situations similar to this in their professional work with teens or college students. It was all that we had to give.
The response was overwhelming and heartening. After posting Janet’s question anonymously, we stepped back and let the community lift and guide her. And we turned a crucial page in our outlook toward parenting. Experts are essential, and they draw from their experience as they show us what science and research have to offer us. But a parent community can be an invaluable asset, offering support, insight, and all the lessons they have learned while raising their kids. This we could provide.
This reader, our reader, gave Grown and Flown purpose. We would no longer just chitchat about being parents and share our latest off-the-cuff idea or weekly story from our families, hoping it might resonate with our readers. We had to do more.
Beyond the tragedy unfolding in Janet’s life, her problems in finding guidance to help her daughter were manifold. She had reached that stage of parenthood where our experts abandon us. When our children reach their late teen years, we no longer go in to see the pediatrician with them. Rarely do we interact with their teachers, and we are not supposed to talk to their coaches or advisers. That is up to them to do.
Our community disbands as well. Long gone are pickups and drop-offs of teens, who have now learned to drive. There is no more lingering at the door of a friend’s house while we catch up with fellow parents. No more parking-lot or bus-stop chats as we ferry our kids to school.
When our parenting challenges were toilet training or quelling tantrums, it was easy to discuss them with a friend or neighbor. With the appearance of teen anxiety or depression, and our children bearing ever more of a resemblance to adults, their privacy becomes paramount. Their issues are not so easily discussed when we run into friends in the grocery store. And even when we are happy to divulge their stories in the name of finding some real help, we might not know someone whose kid had been cited for academic dishonesty or a DUI. In the tiny orbit of people we know in real life, it becomes harder, or even impossible, to find someone who has experienced the same pain or joy we are living through.
Finally, this stage of parenting often feels as though it goes unnoticed. The internet is full of smart, funny, insightful, inspiring websites dedicated to raising kids until they are teens. But then the high school years seem to be overlooked. And there is barely a word written about being the parent of a college student. It is as if our kids turn thirteen and someone says, “You got this,” leaving us to apply the lessons we have learned in the first dozen years to the next couple of easy, glide-path years preceding launch. You’ve done the hard work, you’ve created and then shaped a human being, and now your work is largely done.
Only that is entirely wrong.
We founded Grown and Flown without a clear idea of what it would become. We had only the notion that, with each of our youngest being fifteen years old and our oldest sons ages nineteen and twenty, we were in the midst of the most confusing, challenging, and consequential years of parenting—and we were doing it with less community, fewer experts, and no help online.
So Lisa called Mary Dell one day and said she thought we needed a blog. We needed a website and maybe a Facebook page where we could ignite a conversation among parents of teens. We needed a digital watercooler, a place where parents would linger and chat while giving each other the support that was often missing in our real lives. At the time, the Motherlode column in The New York Times would occasionally have wonderful writing about being the parent of a high school student. But if you searched around beyond that, there wasn’t much more.
Mary Dell said yes before even hearing half of the half-baked idea. She was immediately on board with starting a new site, trialing a new concept, and establishing a new business, while readily acknowledging that neither Mary Dell nor Lisa had any idea what that would entail, or even what it would look like. Mary Dell had confidence, even though it was not clear there was anything to have confidence in.
Here was the plan to start: We would write about how lost and challenged we felt as parents of teens and twentysomethings. We would examine what had worked and where we had failed. We would talk to other parents about how raising a son and a daughter (Mary Dell) or three sons (Lisa) left us feeling out of our depth every day. But who would we talk to? We couldn’t say. What would we tell them? More questions. Would anyone even be interested? Time, as it usually does, would tell. But we felt certain that if we could gather others around for the conversation, we would all emerge better parents.
Our understanding of the internet and its possibilities was so limited that we thought we would just use our first names, no photos of ourselves or our families, and that no one would know, or care, who the women were behind the website. We wanted to be out in the world igniting a big important conversation about the challenges and joys of raising teens. We wanted to help parents rethink the paradigm of how our families would alter over the years as our kids left home. But we were so internet-shy that we wanted to remain entirely anonymous.
Having our kids in the nineties was just an utter stroke of genius for the tech support we would need twenty years hence. So, one of Lisa’s sons sat us down on a cold, bright January morning in her kitchen. He hovered his hands over the keyboard and said, “I am going back to school tomorrow, give me a name and a domain, and you will be online before I get back to campus. If you don’t tell me now, I will be back in May.” After years of pushing our kids, one of them was pushing us.
We were paralyzed. It was like naming a baby, and we felt compelled to examine every option we could imagine. Lisa’s son reminded us that unlike our newborns, we could effortlessly rename a website if we got it wrong, and the ethos in any tech business was to move quickly. Still, we stalled. We wanted the site to touch on the painful frustrating moments of raising teens. We wanted it to capture the love and closeness in our families that we were desperate to retain. We wanted it to encapsulate the pride we feel as parents when our kids go off to college or work or the military knowing that they are ready for this next step. And, we wanted it to say all of that in four words or less.
After many poorly conceived starts, we came upon Grown and Flown. Grown and Flown is what British parents call their kids who have left home. Lisa had lived in England for a dozen years and had always liked, if dreaded, the term. When we googled “Grown and Flown,” the hits were all about a Christina Rossetti poem of lost love. And we were certainly feeling lost love, but not the kind of which the pre-Raphaelite spoke.
From the start, we had misjudged the content of the site entirely. We thought parents of high school and college kids would want to read and talk about what their lives would be like as their families dispersed, about a time when parenting would matter less. It turns out that time never comes. We have since learned from our own lives and by listening to tens of thousands of parents that parenting never ends. What parents want to know boils down to this: How does my family stay close as we move apart? How do we hold on to the essence of the life we have had? How do we maintain one of the most important relationships any of us will ever have while simultaneously nourishing our kid’s independence?
Grown and Flown started slowly and then built up steam. We would love nothing more than to take total credit for the site’s growing popularity, but we had the wind in our sails. First, we were talking to parents about the one thing they cared about more than anything else, so it wasn’t hard to get their attention. Second, as we soon found out, we had discovered a bit of white space on the internet, and had surprisingly little competition around this topic. Third, we were just entering the era of the digital parent. These were parents whose children had been born in the twenty-first century. While not technically digital natives, this generation of parents had sought out digital resources in raising their kids from the start, and they would seek us out now that their house was full of teens. Finally, there has been a seismic change in some of the most important aspects in the relationship between parents and their teens and young adults. This has left many parents feeling bewildered and unable to look to their own teen years as a guide to raising their kids. We saw it, heard about it, and were living it every day, but now we were going to explore it with our readers, our community, and in this book.
At the beginning, Lisa wrote and wrote, mining her only marginally interesting life for content. Mary Dell wrote, edited, and published. Lisa managed the tech, with frantic calls to her offspring, and Mary Dell figured out ways to make some money so that we could pay others to write for the site as well. It soon became clear that the tales of five teenage kids in suburban New York were simply not enough material and didn’t speak to a broad enough slice of the panorama of parenting to capture everything we hoped to say. So we gathered other writers who could speak from professional expertise or from experience and cover the many aspects of parenting that were unknown to us. We shared their writing and our own on any form of social media we felt able to tackle (Snapchat was simply a bridge too far). Most important, we started a Facebook group to continue the discussion.
Our expectations for this Facebook group—Grown and Flown Parents—were modest. We assumed it would be the two of us talking a few times a week with our writers and friends we knew in real life. We knew that parenting teens and college kids was changing in some very fundamental ways, and we wanted to understand this better for our readers and ourselves. To our amazement, the group has become a destination for more than one hundred thousand parents, the majority of whom visit and interact daily. It is the place where we learn what parents hold most dear and what keeps them up at night. We know what questions they have, from where to buy the most durable twin XL sheets to how to find a therapist for their college teen. It is the place where parents who come from all corners of this country and every political perspective can discuss and share ideas about the thing that matters the most to them—their children and the earnest desire to be a better parent. This group has become the heartbeat of Grown and Flown.
In early 2013, the AARP published a survey that shed a blinding light on the paradigm shift in parenting we were hearing about from readers daily. They asked young adults and their parents how they felt about each other and compared that to how those same parents remember feeling about their parents when they were in their early twenties. What the survey found echoed what we were seeing all around us. Our kids’ generation communicates with us more. The survey showed that 62 percent of today’s young adults communicated with their parents at least once a day, compared to 41 percent of their parents when they were the same age. Sure, it is cheaper to call than it was thirty years ago, but the rest of the survey suggested that new technology and reduced calling rates were not what caused this shift in behavior. A 2019 survey for The New York Times showed that parents at every income level were involved in their adult children’s daily lives, with fully 80 percent saying they were “always” or “often” in text message communication. The AARP survey found that our kids socialize with us more: 60 percent of the twentysomethings saw their parents socially once a week versus 42 percent of their parents who had seen their parents at that age. And perhaps even more important, our young adults are also more comfortable discussing their career, financial life, and social life with us. When we were young adults, daughters were more likely to talk openly with their parents, but in our kids’ generation this difference between genders has disappeared, and sons are equally comfortable discussing these personal matters with their parents. Marry this with the fact that we have a tool for constant contact always in the palm of our hands, and it becomes clear that our relationship with our teens and young adults is closer, more connected, and a bigger part of both of our lives.
The Grown and Flown years begin the day your oldest secures a driving permit and end when your youngest moves into their first real apartment. Not that grungy place they moved into with a gang of college sophomores, with a bathroom so filthy that you swear you will never cross the threshold, but the one where they are paying the rent. During those intervening years, which for some families can span fifteen years or more, your family is in transition, your kids are in varying states of independence, and nothing is the way it was or will be.
We would argue, and the research confirms, that the role we play in our kids’ lives as they move from the final days of childhood over the threshold of adulthood is as important as any other time in their lives. These are the defining years, the years when our children make some of the most consequential decisions of their lives. This is when our teens discover who they are. This is when they learn about risk. For better or worse, our influence on our teens and then later young adults is far greater and lasts much longer than we ever imagined. Our role in their lives and the attachment we have formed will impact everything, from their potential drinking, drug use, and sexual behavior to their mental health and more. A study of first-semester freshmen, which monitored communication between parents and their new college students and the drinking patterns of those students, found that “increased parent communication is associated with less drinking among first-year college students.” Students ingested less alcohol on the days they spoke with their parents. The popular press overflows with studies suggesting the negative impact of the close connection between the generations, but research may show otherwise.
The oft-cited argument for backing away from our involvement in our teens and college students’ lives is that “We only spoke to our parents once a week, and we were fine.” But were we? Was minimal guidance during our young adult lives truly a good thing? Instead of relying on those older than us for advice, we often leaned on our peers, who knew no more than we did. During our high school years, our parents often had no idea where we were, and by college we were almost totally independent. Yet, looking at the data on drug use, drinking, and teen pregnancy for our generation, it is not clear that this was ideal either. Many experts urge parents to diminish their involvement in their teens’ and college students’ lives. They suggest parents return to the ways that we were parented, with a more hands-off approach in order to make certain our kids learn to be independent. But we would argue that not only is there no returning to an earlier time but that the relationship between the generations today is vastly improved. It has been fundamentally altered, and the question is not how we go back but rather how we go forward—and how, within the new paradigm of a more intertwined relationship, we ensure that our sons and daughters take full responsibility for their adult lives.
Copyright © 2019 by Lisa Heffernan and Mary Dell Harrington