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.

Well, don’t get too excited – it ain’t over ‘till it’s over, and maybe not then, either. What used to be a brief hiatus between graduation and Real Life lasts a lot longer than it once did.  Emerging Adulthood,  Postadolescence or even Adultolescence – whatever the label on this life stage, it now stretches not just through the early twenties but all the way to the end of that decade and even beyond. Which means many Postparents will be giving their grown kids shelter or paying their rent, propping them up or  bailing them out, for a lot longer than  expected.  And the not-so-existential question they’re  asking each other is,   How long, o Lord, how long?

A safety net is one thing, and most middle class parents want to provide it for their grown kids, but often the help is a subsidy, not a safety net.  “From each according to our ability, to each according to their needs,” says the father of three kids in their 20’s, none of whom is self-supporting yet. “Doing whatever it takes to make them happy,” chimes in his wife.

As their parents, who survived a depression and a world war, wanted them to be secure and independent adults, they want their children  to be happy and fulfilled adults.. That shift in values, from the Greatest  to the Me generation, explains why they’ve  raised an Entitled generation, which is  taking so long to grow up.

Some are well on their way within a few months of finishing their education, while others struggle with the conditions and diseases most prevalent in young adults -  addiction, depression, and  dependence, as well as  schizophrenia and bipolar disease.

But  most 20-somethings will  eventually get around to commencing adulthood, even if their diplomas, apartments, jobs, partners, children and mortgages don’t happen on the same predictable schedule as  they used to.  Meanwhile, there’s one thing parents  can do to hasten the commencement  of their first grown kids’ adulthood so they can get on with their second: Give up trying to make them happy.

By  equipping them with the education and training to make a meaningful life and an independent  living,  you’ve done what you can.  As it is to all grown-ups, the rest  is up to them.

A boundary statement sets out the lines, or boundary, between the business and the family. It protects both from boundary violations – the family from unwarranted intrusions on the business, and the business from unacceptable demands from family members.  It’s not just about leaving family “baggage” outside the plant, office or boardroom or letting outgrown family roles like spendthrift or tightwad, mediator or instigator, determine how family member view or interact with each other.  A well-written boundary statement recognizes that the needs of the business and those of the family are not necessarily or always the same. It sets out procedures to be followed when, for instance, the problems of a family member who works in the company affect not only the individual but the business itself – alcoholism or drug abuse, for example.

Healthy family systems don’t necessarily translate to healthy business systems – for one thing, businesses put the best interests of the enterprise ahead of those of its people, even if it disadvantages some individuals. But families exist to nurture and support their members and further their personal agendas.  For another, decision-making in families is frequently based on emotions, whereas business decisions are (or should be) based on facts, not feelings. A well-crafted boundary statement takes issues like these out of the closet (maybe even the same one where family secrets, skeletons and animosities are buried) and exposes them to the light of reasoned discussion and agreement.

Most teenagers’ sense of the future, as Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan describes it, is simply “the present that hasn’t happened yet.”  But now it’s suddenly clear that the future is upon them, and heading into it without a direction or even a map to possible destinations is a very scary proposition.  Their anxiety may be heightened if they’re feeling parental pressure about choosing a career or even a major – worrying that even a preliminary choice will define and determine the rest of their lives, they may act out their fears in a number of ways, including precluding or delaying the college option by procrastinating until they’ve missed key deadlines in the college application and admissions process, ignoring incomplete graduation requirements, or even engaging in uncharacteristically risky behavior.

Before it gets to that point, help your teenager envision a possible future – not by giving advice about deciding on a career, but by helping them inventory their own skills, interests and values. Ask them to recall seven or more times in their life when they enjoyed what they were doing, thought they did it well, and felt a sense of accomplishment – selling Girl Scout cookies, managing a high school team or club, getting up a garage band, putting on a play, running for student office, being a camp counselor, organizing a food drive at school, even getting a driver’s license. Why did they do it? What did they like most about it? What part of it were they best at?  Then help them look for commonalities, patterns that may not by themselves express a particular vocational leaning, let alone a career path, but that can be a starting point for teenagers to assess themselves functionally.

Meanwhile, stay open to the possibility that hesitating when it comes to going to college right after high school may not be the worst thing that can happen to your teenagers.  Experience has shown that some adolescents have a better college experience by waiting a year or even longer. The “Seven Stories” exercise may help yours focus more clearly on alternatives to college – a gap year during which vocational training, work/study jobs, organized travel, volunteerism (AmeriCorps, for example), apprenticeships, internships, or even military service can provide some of the real world experience that might illuminate (or even eliminate) the confusion about whether going to college without a goal beyond just graduating is worth what it costs.

What’s a parent to do? Here’s a strategy  from “Ready to Launch: Parenting Through the College Transition,” a new on-line program I created for www.pricelessparenting:  Tighten Up While Loosening Up.  Tightening up means  being vigilant about  their academics and letting them know you mean it. Post   a January-June calendar in plain sight and circle all  deadlines  for  papers, reports, midterms and finals  as well as senior activities like proms, picnics, class trips and graduation parties. Tie their academic performance to giving permission and/or money for those activities. Remind them that colleges will get their final grades and  even (mis)conduct reports, which might jeopardize their enrollment even if they’ve been accepted or influence what  courses they’re allowed to take when they get there.

Loosening up means  putting them in charge of themselves – allowing them more personal freedom and autonomy in other aspects of  their lives.  If you haven’t yet left them at home alone for more than an evening,  take yourself  somewhere else for a few days and see how they manage. Let them set their own curfews and alarm clocks and handle their own money, whether you provide an allowance or they earn it. Allow them to manage their own time, relationships, and social life. Invite them to participate in family activities; don’t  include them without their consent (which means that they, not you, get to tell Grandma they’re not coming to her birthday party.)  Ask, don’t tell, especially when it comes to giving advice; before offering it,request  their permission,  which may feel strange the first time they say No, thanks  and you have to manually put your lips together to keep from giving it anyway.  Let them make their own mistakes  (they will anyway) because that’s the only way they’ll know better next time.

Meanwhile, what can you do to ease your own symptoms of transition fever,  like Future Nostalgia? That’s  that achy sense that all this will soon be over, and while in some ways you can’t wait, in others you’d just like to freeze this moment in time.   Well, maybe not this one,  when they’re shutting you out with a teenager’s withering coolness; instead, focus  but one  you can remember as if it happened yesterday ( which it probably did). Concentrate on  that unexpected hug or thank-you, that special something   that reminds you how much you love them. And try not to think about how much you’ll miss them when they leave.

In my version, I’m trying to sneak a shopping cart full of all my possessions past someone in authority.  I don’t know exactly who it is, but I’d recognize my superego anywhere.  Nor do I need to go into analysis to understand what that dream is about or why it’s so frightening; it’s about being poor…and ashamed. The sense of shame is familiar; it’s the same way I sometimes feel when I find myself in a clothing store that doesn’t carry anything over size eight. In pricey boutiques like that, I am a worthless, undisciplined slob who deserves the scorn of the haughty, curveless, Armani-clad saleswoman whose baleful look seems to say, You brought this on yourself, it’s all your fault. And while it’s easy to minimize the damage to my self-esteem by staying out of stores like that, the shame associated with the bag lady nightmare isn’t something I can avoid by passing up a designer sample sale.

I knew someday I’d be old but I never worried about being poor, too. Even when I had no money, I never felt poor. I’ve been broke, but that’s different, in the same way being flush is different from being rich.  I always thought of  “broke” as a temporary condition that would be magically remedied in due time – which, back then, I had plenty of.

I’ve been writing for a living all my adult life.  For nearly two decades I turned out a book every couple of years, as well as essays and columns and magazine articles. I had some good years and some not very good ones, but I managed to support myself and my kids without any financial help from their father. Much of that time I lived on the come or on credit; I used the next book advance to pay off the bills I ran up while finishing the last one. My bank manager used to say the loan examiners laughed when they read my file because it contained book reviews instead of a statement of assets.  Sometimes I answered calls from collection agencies by saying I was the babysitter; occasionally I “accidentally” forgot to sign my name on the check to the phone company or the orthodontist in order to buy myself a little extra time.  And often I compensated for feeling unjustly deprived of life’s little luxuries, like fresh flowers or out-of-season raspberries or even a manicure, by charging something much more extravagant that I really couldn’t afford.

When my kids were teenagers,  I inherited enough money so I didn’t have to live on the edge any more. My middle class parents weren’t wealthy, but they’d lived through the Depression and were careful with money ever after.  Like others of my generation, I was the beneficiary of their fiscal prudence as well as the long uninterrupted period of economic expansion that followed World War II.

The money was by no means a fortune but it was enough to make me feel pretty flush. I had my house cleaned regularly and massages twice a month and I paid my bills the day they came in with a frisson of pleasure that replaced the edgy excitement that used to come with slipping a check into a preprinted envelope and hoping it cleared. I spent money on my kids and, later,  their kids, on my causes, my pleasures and my conveniences. I started a scholarship fund in my parents’ memory and celebrated a landmark birthday by taking my closest women friends to a spa in Sonoma for the weekend.   And I always had that feeling that even if I was a little extravagant, the good times would keep on coming. In the go-go years when the economy as booming,  it was hard not to think so, especially if you had money in tech stocks, where I put mine after I liquidated my parents’ much more conservative investments.

I’d had to ask  them  for help  a few times over the years  when a crisis threatened my tenuous balancing act with money – a hole in my roof, an unexpected medical bill, an exhausted transmission. It was always a last resort, because it made me feel like a child again.  I didn’t want  my kids to feel that way; even more, I wanted  to enjoy my new financial freedom with them by making their lives a little easier while I was still alive to watch them enjoy it.  So I  helped them with college  educations, and later, with down payments on their first homes, and I took them on trips and adventures, mindful of what my son said on our way back from Africa, after I’d sold the house that cost my parents ten thousand dollars when they bought it: “Not to be morbid or anything, Mom, but I’ll remember this trip long after you’re dead.”

I’d never planned to retire….certainly not when I as barely 40. But after I came into my money, other things seemed more compelling. Freed of the pressure to write for a living, I got a new passport; long before the expiration date, it needed extra pages. I learned to SCUBA dive, and then I spent a few months on a Caribbean island where I could dive every day; in the evenings I tried my hand at the kind of speculative writing project I could never have afforded to do in the days when I hardly took a breather between books. Predictably, it never earned a dime, but the process was its own reward; I realized what I needed to know to take my work in a different direction, and the next year I enrolled in a PhD program in order to learn it. The money made me feel in charge of my own life in a way I hadn’t, before; whatever else might stand between me and my desires and ambitions, for once the obstacle wasn’t that I couldn’t afford to reach for them.

Eventually, though, the stock market went south and my reckless ways caught up with me, which is why I’m having the bag lady dream and cleaning my own apartment and hoping the advance for the new book arrives before the property taxes are due.  I can’t remember when I last had a massage and I’m running out of due time.

Nobody got me into this bind except me; no sweet-talking broker took advantage of me, no mendacious CEO savaged my pension fund. That’s what I tell myself as I ponder the three possibilities for getting out of the financial bind I’ve wrapped myself in: Finding a rich husband, breaking a book out of the midlist into the bestseller rankings, or winning the lottery.  (What’s really scary is that, statistically speaking, the lottery is probably the likeliest possibility.)

Money is the last frontier of self disclosure, so those of my friends who were also left some by their parents don’t talk very much about what they do, did, or didn’t do with it  (As opposed to those who earned it – money seems to figure more in their conversations). We recognized our co-inheritors by the slightly more prosperous lifestyle that followed their parents’ deaths – the second home, the exotic vacations, the vague allusions to taking early retirement or embarking on a second career. Generally we were careful who we discussed those things with, but sometimes not careful enough; I remember when a good friend who knew no legacy figured in her future said she couldn’t stand hearing about trips she’d never be able to take or ambitions she couldn’t afford to pursue. “I’m glad for you that you can,” she told us one evening when we were all slightly tipsy, “but it makes me really resent you because none of you will ever have to worry about money again and I always will.”

That was a few years ago, but now I know exactly how she felt. I’ve always been pretty open with my closest friends about my financial situation, and that hasn’t changed since my fortunes have declined. They know why lately I don’t pick up the check as often as I once did, or travel or shop or frequent expensive restaurants the way I used to, and our relationships haven’t changed.

My kids know I’m worried about money again, but they remember when they were growing up, and I was always worried about it, so they’re very reassuring:  You managed then, you’ll manage now, they say, and they’re right – I did and I will. I seem to be much more bothered by my inability to be generous with them these days than they are: in fact, they keep reassuring me that  I could always move in with them if I had to.  I know they really mean it, just as they know that, much as I love them, I’d rather set myself adrift on an ice floe (although in my case it would probably be a raft in a tropical sea), because none of us ever wants to be that kind of burden to our children.  As for my grandkids – happily, they’ve never confused my presence with my presents.

In the “I cried because I had no shoes until I saw the man who had no feet” department, perspective demands that I count my blessings: I’m not facing eviction, I’m in no immediate danger of having to eat in soup kitchens, and I’m not entirely without resources. Right after I came into my inheritance I read a book about the psychological meaning of money written by a very astute psychiatrist who said we all make agreements with money, but some of them are agreements that money can’t keep. ..for instance, that it will give us status, power or excitement. That statement resonated within me; I realized that excitement what was what I’d felt out there on the thin edge of financial disaster where I’d lived for so long.  I decided that I didn’t need or want that kind of excitement in my life any more; thanks to my windfall, I could let go of it.   So I made a new agreement with my money; that it would keep me from having to worry about my future, which was a lot further away then than it is now.  But what I ignored was my part of the deal, which was to be a good manager of that windfall.  Which is why now, in the middle of the night, when sleep doesn’t come, I wake up counting the assets I know I have left and the number of years I think I do, and worry what will happen if I run out of the second before I run out of the first.

I don’t regret a dollar I spent, gave or loaned, and I’m glad I had a good time while I was young and healthy enough to enjoy it.  Even though finances rather than a visitation from the Muse forced me out of what turned out to be a decade or so of premature retirement, I’m kind of glad to be writing for a living again and grateful that I still can.  However, I do wish I’d made different decisions in the good times – paid off my mortgage, diversified my investments, invested in a good long term care insurance policy when I was ten years younger and it would have been a lot cheaper. The excitement I feel around money now isn’t like the old days, when I lived in the future, sure that the breakout book or the rich husband or the winning lottery ticket or even the inheritance I felt guilty waiting for would someday materialize.

These days I get a kick – a small one, but a kick nonetheless – out of seeing how much less I can live on than I did when I was flush.  Too bad I didn’t appreciate that kind of kick, that kind of excitement, a little sooner.