Parents Forever
Woodward, Kenneth L.
AND OTHER LIFE SENTENCES PARENTS FOREVER You and Your Adult Children Sidney Callahan Crossroad, $19.95, 202 pp. Kenneth L. Woodward idney Callahan is often ahead of the curve. Back in...
...Although it is traditional for parents to want to advantage the next generation's "social well-being," Callahan rightly warns parents to resist trying to gratify "adult children who think themselves automatically entitled to an upscale standard of living it took parents a lifetime of hard work to achieve...
...Back in 1965, she wrote a book about working mothers before most of the rest of us realized there was a problem...
...In a book of such modest length, Callahan manages to anticipate and discuss a variety of issues which confront families as parents and children readjust to aging, independence, and new forms of connection...
...Which may be one reason why so many young adults are putting off parenthood until the last biological moment—or skipping that phase of life altogether...
...Good parents, she writes, have the task of encouraging in their maturing children "movement toward a grown-up family of equally competent adults who can found homes of their own if they choose...
...For most middle-class Americans, her audience, the ideal arrangement is "separate households in a cooperative family network...
...And that's Callahan's point: parents are never really relieved of parental concerns...
...These days, earthly parenthood alone seems to last an eternity...
...How children and parents spend their time when it is theirs alone to spend says more, I suspect, about who those people are than what kind of work they do or how they handle sex...
...These days, parents and adult children can expect to spend as much as sixty years living separately together...
...If parents are always parents, children are always, well, their children—which means that emotional conflicts are to be anticipated across the life cycle...
...her voice, thank God, belongs more to the mother of six adult children than to the professor of social psychology...
...even the best parenthood carries no warranties for parts or service...
...If there is one subject she could have developed more thoroughly, it is the idea of leisure...
...How should parents react when their adult children shirk hard work...
...That is fresh air indeed in an age where dysfunctional families are the only kind most books address...
...This is a book for the Moonstruck generation: for parents who remember a time when relations between adult children and their parents were eased by established conventions (not the least of which were shared meals, as in the film, where inter24...
...Callahan's title, Parents Forever, could be mistaken for a Mormon tract...
...Nor should they wonder why bad children happen to good parents and vice versa...
...Callahan wisely reminds parents that they need not like the adults their children turned out to be in order to provide the "attentiveness, empathy, and the will to further the well-being" of their offspring...
...Callahan writes from the parental perspective...
...Even Mormons, though, don't envision spirit children becoming heavenly adolescents...
...Now Callahan focuses on relations between parents and their adult children, land-mined emotional territory which is usually uncharted by the folks who churn out guidebooks on family life...
...marry a slob...
...Had the Bush and Clinton folks read Callahan first, we all might have been treated to an elevated discussion of family values...
...Anxiety, thy names are Mom and Dad...
...Callahan has one basic rule for how to decide what to do or say when conflicts arise: treat your children better than you would your best friend...
...When grown but only nominally adult children return to the parental nest, Callahan resolves the problem of who sets household standards in favor of parents: "Parents do not assert their claims to authority solely on the grounds of age, property rights, or because they have more money, but because it is morally right that whoever has founded a family and put in years of committed effort gets to set the rules...
...Mormon doctrine, it will be remembered, teaches that marriage lasts for all eternity (God himself is married) and that those who are lucky enough to become gods themselves will spend the hereafter propagating "spirit children...
...On these and other painful subjects, there is no better book than Callahan's...
...opt for the other political party...
...reject inherited religious beliefs...
...Which is to say her advice throughout is wise, humorous, and speaks with the only authority that counts—experience...
...20 November 1992 generational problems and sibling spats were absorbed and often healed over the breaking of bread) and who have lived to see most of those conventions frayed, if not altogether unraveled, by enormous changes in sex, marriage, and the family over the last three decades...
...divorce...
...Those of us who look forward to eternal rest and recreation can only pray the Mormons have it wrong on both counts...
...My own copy now bears the marks that only really good books deserve: underlined passages on almost every page...
...or announce their homosexuality...
...We worry that our children will never cross the receding threshold of adulthood, then worry when they do...
...How well they get along depends on many variables...
...Tact, patience, and the old monastic "discipline of the tongue" are the virtues she counsels and exemplifies...
...It is especially helpful for parents who admire but cannot duplicate George Bush's extended family, want no part of Ronald Reagan's fractured family, and are properly dubious about the Clintons' "lifestyle partnership...
...decide not to have children (grandchildren...
...Callahan is, as she says, optimistic about the future of the family...
Vol. 119 • November 1992 • No. 20
