Whole-Brained Grandparenting

Some play-doh. Now that' s a nice toy!

This article I wrote is currently appearing on Perfectionist Leibniz. It is called "Whole-Brained Grandparenting."

Expecting your first grandchild?

I remember when I received the phone call that my firstborn was expecting his first. My head and my heart were full. I remembered back when we had placed that phone call to our parents. I had expected hoots and hollers on the phone, and instead there was a long silence. Now I know what was going through their minds! We lived miles from family and existed on my paltry earnings while my husband was in med-school, and they were worried.

It has been said that procreation best belongs to the young and impulsive because after a certain age, you'd never have the nerve to have children.

"When you have children," my mother told me, "you become a hostage to fortune." She may have misquoted, in a way fitting to her caring personality. I've also heard, "When you have children, you give hostages to fortune." We who have parented long enough to have a child able to produce a child know all about this. As the sign in my local plant nursery so succinctly puts it: "There is no guarantee on the life of this plant, or of any other life on this planet."

Our hearts and minds are full because the job of parenting doesn't end when they leave home. It must become more subtle as we allow our adult children to make their own decisions, but our influence remains and there are information and wisdom to impart. Thus the call for whole-brained grandparenting.

For instance, your adult child may read the same financial advice article for new parents that I just came upon, which contained the following: "At a glance the question of whether one spouse should quit work [and stay home] is clear cut: If the spouse earns only enough to cover child care costs, staying at home probably makes sense." Looking further yielded only that "benefits" were often 35% of the salary package.

Like the mythological Cerberus, who guarded the gates to the Underworld (metaphorically, the things just below the level of cognition), I have three heads, and all 3 were wagging: (1) the heart that feels a baby benefits most when cared for by its parent; (2) the head that thinks the article-writer was irresponsible not to point out this wasn't a decision to make strictly on the basis of finances; and, (3) the whole-brained EQ coach who believes important decisions require EQ as well as IQ.

So what gifts will you give the new baby? As a grandparent, our parenting modeling continues. Our choice of gifts will say a lot.

Do you rush out and buy the $300 stuffed duckie or take care of half their Wish List at Toys R Us? Or do you symbolically get the show on the road for Responsible Parenting? The birth of the first child signals a huge transition - taking on the emotional and financial responsibility for a new life. You want to oversee, in a respectful and hands-off fashion, that all the bases get touched.

Financially, here are some topics you might bring up:

1. A parent must have a will, unless you want "the Court" deciding who raises your child (the Guardian), and who administers the finances (the Executor). They need not, and often should not, be the same person.

2. Insurance. Some "rules of thumb":

• You insure the life of someone according to their ability to provide income. This doesn't include babies.
• An adult in their 20s, 30s, and 40s is statistically far more likely to need disability insurance than life insurance.
• Group insurance plans through jobs aren't portable. Individual policies are.
  

3. College education. 529s are great - you can use any state's plan and the beneficiary can attend school in any state - but college is "gravy." Like they say on the airplane -- apply your own oxygen mask first; then your child's. An 18 year old can, if necessary, provide her own college funding. The higher priority for the parents (and the future benefit of their children) is to provide for their own retirement.

4. Uniform Gifts to Minors. Do they (or you) want to establish a savings account in the child's name? As a grandparent, I doubt you do - it reverts to the child's sole discretion at age 18 or 21, and you know this is putting a weapon in the hands of a child, but your grown children may not. Best-case scenario, your 18 year old grandson argues with his parents about whether to spend the $200,000 on college or living for a year in Tahiti with his girl-friend. Worst-case scenario, he just does it; it's his money.

5. The $600 matching crib set. Can the baby exist without it? I imagine yours did!

Giving the gift of sitting down and going over the realities is not very glamorous, but then neither is changing diapers. Your daughter may have her head in the clouds, and her husband, his feet on the ground, or vice versa; or both may be in either position together. You, on the other hand, can see and share the big picture.

What if you gave them a giant stuffed duckie and tied around its neck some gift coupons -- a paid visit to your trusted lawyer; tuition to a parenting seminar; a year's supply of maid or lawn service; and a 3-night cruise during the first year with you babysitting back home? Scaled to your income, of course.

My grandmother was very loving, very practical, and also very wealthy. Her gift to me when my son was born consisted of some exquisite designer layette items; a year's diaper service; and a note with a little P.S. that she knew my husband was "looking after the will and that sort of thing." She could have given a lot more financially, but she exercised restraint, modeling what's really important. Most meaningful to me was the note inside. She was born in 1898, and the note began, "Welcome to the sacred sorority of motherhood." Somehow that needed to be said.

And over the years, she had given me much excellent advice, including "Don't listen to those pediatricians, listen to your heart." As an example, she told me that her pediatrician had told her to let the baby cry. "I didn't listen to him," she said. "Babies cry for a reason."

Don't proselytize about what you don't give, and don't apologize for what you can't give. My other grandmother, whose life was rich in love and Spartan in possessions, handed me a wedding gift of rags for cleaning, obtained the way rags used to be - from scraps of her worn out clothing and linens. I placed it next to the sterling silver service for 12 from the other grandmother on the gift table, and valued them both about the same.

Whatever you give materially or in-service, be there to help them sort through the fad-du-jour advice, get in touch with their own values and priorities, and touch all the bases. Directly, if asked. Subtly, if not asked.

But just do it!

And, by the way, congratulations!

©Susan Dunn, MA, The EQ Coach, http://www.susandunn.cc/. Susan is the author of "Midlife Dating Survival Manual for Women," available at http://www.webstrategies.cc/ebooklibrary.html. She offers coaching, Internet courses and ebooks around emotional intelligence for your personal and professional development. Retirement, midlife, and transitional coaching. Get certified as an EQ coach, the perfect retirement career. Mailto:sdunn@susandunn.cc for information on the EQ Alive! program, certifying coaches in all fields, all over the world. To subscribe to free ezine, go here.

How Do Doctors Think? How do YOU Think?

EQ ... it's The Missing Piece.

One of the values of The EQ Course(r) (Offered by Susan Dunn, M.A.) is that it teaches you HOW YOU THINK which is, of course, invaluable.

From Jerome Groopman's book, "How Doctors Think":

I had no ready answers to these questions, despite having trained in a well-regarded medical school and residency program, and having practiced clinical medicine for some thirty years. So I began to ask my colleagues for answers. Nearly all of the practicing physicians I queried were intrigued by the questions but confessed that they had never really thought about how they think. Then I searched the medical literature for studies of clinical thinking. I found a wealth of research that modeled "optimal" medical decision-making with complex mathematical formulas, but even the advocates of such formulas conceded that they rarely mirrored reality at the bedside or could be followed practically. I saw why I found it difficult to teach the trainees on rounds how to think. I also saw that I was not serving my own patients as well as I might. I felt that if I became more aware of my own way of thinking ...

EQ gives you a META skill. Don't miss out. It's the missing piece.
The EQ Course(r) on special until July 1 for $99 this month if you mention this blog offer. Email sdunn@susandunn.cc for more information. Course is on the Internet with email interaction.

To Know How to Grow Old

TO KNOW HOW TO GROW OLD ...

"To know how to grow old,” wrote Henry Frederic Amiel , “is the master work of wisdom, one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living."

One of the most important things you can do to assist in this process, is to work on your emotional intelligence. It includes competencies such as flexibility and resilience.

Want to see how it works?

I have a client who is sure if he retires, he will die. He’s a physician and has been working those long hours since he was in his 20s. His father worked as a physician practically until the day he died, so this man has no role models. You know other people never count, it’s the ones close to you – if your solipsistic, and anyone who thinks they will die if they retire has that sort of narrow-minded, rigid thinking.

I have a female client who is having trouble with the changes in her appearance. While the doctor’s sense of self resides in his profession, this woman’s sense of self and self-esteem resided in her beauty. She is convinced she is no longer beautiful.

Both of these clients are lacking in the emotional intelligence skills that can ease any transition – for this is just another of the transitions in life.

After all, they’re saying that “60” is the new “40” and so forth. We are all living longer, and living in better health, so doesn’t it make sense to prepare for all stages?

You are going to “grow old,” everyone does, unless you don’t get to – and who ever thought of learning how to do it? Well what we want to learn how to do, is how to do it WELL.

One of the keys is a competency we call Resilience. It means being able to bounce back from rejections, losses, setbacks, and adversity, while remaining bouyant and optimistic about the future.

Adversity can hit at any age. Divorce is a hard thing to go through, and people go through it at many different ages. Youth are known to be more “resilient,” and to move through it faster. If you want an example, go to a singles groups for 20 years old, and then a singles group for 60 years old. Most of the people involved in both groups have been divorced, but oh what a different in attitude and outlook. Group #1 is already looking to the future, and eager to meet someone new. Group #2 is spending a lot of time talking about the past.

The mind, you see can get into ruts and run in circles all too easily if we allow it to. When you study emotional intelligence (at least if you take a good course that goes beyond the surface fluff which is usually about how your thinking brain shuts down when you get angry), you will learn a lot about the brain. We form neural connections when we learn things, and while we stop at some point to make new brain cells, it is available to us for – well, maybe forever – to make new connections. And how do you do this? By learning new things.

The more radically new, the better. That means if you’re an engineer, going on a getting your Ph.D. is nice, but it would benefit the resilience of your brain to learn opera or water skiing. If you’re a musician, it would be super to learn a new instrument, but would be far more beneficial, in this respect, to learn how to grow roses, or take up physics.

What should you learn? Something that scares the heck out of you. Something you know nothing about. Something where, when you sit down, you feel LOST. (How long has it been since you felt that way.) You’ll almost feel the wheels grinding as you grope around. I describe it as there’s no skeleton to hang the stuff off of.

I’ve worked with a number of EQ clients who have started into something radically new and they report great results. “My memory’s coming back,” one of them told me. “I thought it was gone.”

Another client, whose professions is ponderous and full of responsibilities, where he is the expert and the one everyone turns to, says it is “fun” to sit in the back of the room and know nothing, and to have to keep raising his hand. I must add that at first he did not, it took come coaching. At first he resented knowing nothing, and being “ignorant.” I encouraged him to continue, “just to see,” and pretty soon the results took over and became his own motivation. He opened up in many other new areas. He is now willing to travel, which he did not want to do before.

You can get in a box, especially if you’ve worked in the same career field your entire life. It seems foreign, or simply impossible, to take up something new. It doesn’t even seem interesting.

And that’s another way to become resilient as you age. You know how they saw if you find people boring, it’s because you are boring, or bored, and what you need to do is GET interested. Being bored by people, by life or by occupation is a habit of thinking after all, and the way you GET out of it is the same way you GOT into it. By going through the motions.

Instead of shutting down when you meet someone who bores you, that you think you know all about, or you disagree with them politically, or they come from another place in life, stop and enforce upon yourself the concept of “curious.” Force yourself – yes, force yourself, that’s how it begins – to say, “Really? And why do you think ____ is a bad candidate?”

Almost beside yourself, you will learn interesting things, and regain some joy that’s been lost in your life.

If you walk past a rose garden every day and either don’t see it, or think the person is ignorant to be growing roses, change your attitude BY FORCE and approach it differently.

Of course it’s up to you. Certainly nobody is going to MAKE you do this if you don’t want to, but I throw it out as a challenge. After all, someone famous said that when things become old (and the world can become old, yes, if you are rigid and brittle), then what you need is NEW EYES, and that’s part of what EQ is all about.

Knowing how to grow old is demanding, but not any moreso than learning how to be an adult, for heaven’s sake, and take your first job. You went after that, didn’t you? Well, here we go again. An emotional intelligence course can really open your eyes. Why not give it a try? You might like it so much you might want to go on an become a coach yourself. It’s a great profession for someone with some wisdom!

©Susan Dunn, EQ and professional life coach, www.susandunn.cc . Career, relationships, retirement and other transitions. Individual coaching is available by phone or email, no contract required. Pay as you go.

BECOME A COACH. Susan trains and certifies coaches worldwide in a program that’s all long-distance, fast, affordable and effective. She is a founding member of CoachVille and has a master’s in clinical psychology. For free ezine mailto:sdunn@susandunn.cc and write “ezine” for subject line. And be sure and check out her ebook, “Speak on a Cruise and Travel the World for Pennies.” Email for info.