Indeed!
I think the key is adjusting your expectations to what is normal for you specific kid.
I hear from my son every couple of weeks, if it goes longer I will text him. Radical I know but texts (and phone calls and visits etc) work both ways.
With my daughter if I don’t hear from her at least once a week I check in with her. Not because she needs a shorter leash but because she communicates with me regularly and a week long silence is unusual.
She texted me last night to say “hey forgot my charger so I won’t be in touch this week while I’m out of town” My son did the same thing when he joined a tree planting crew in Northern Manitoba except his was “no cell service for the next 6 weeks, talk to you when I hit civilization” This is the kind of consideration I appreciate - when something out of the ordinary is going on let me know so I don’t worry.
I HATE this. If you want to be in touch at least make the email you send useful. I hate calling people who are going to spend the entire time complaining about how long it’s been since I’ve called. Seriously do you wonder why? LISTEN to yourself.
OMG, I actually agree with one of your posts.
I don’t know your mom so I can’t tell her intentions but that seems more humorous than passive aggressive. I might send a similar text to my son if I haven’t seen him in a month or so, though he usually comes over on Sundays for dinner.
My mother never called me except on my birthday and that really gave me the feeling that she didn’t care that much about my life or what I was doing. She had a more overbearing mother so she overcompensated by showing too little interest.
I don’t see a problem with letting adult children know you’re thinking of them, they’ll appreciate it someday. I don’t think once a month is too often to contact adult children. It’s sad that families are so emotionally distant from each other in our society.
Then let them know you’re thinking of them, not what they should be doing for you. I send my kids articles I’ve read that I think they’ll find interesting, I write to them about what is going on in the family and I send them photos of the dogs doing stupid dog things.
This is a pretty big trigger to me overall - I never had a call with my mother or grandmother (Dad’s mom so not genetic) that didn’t include a complaint about how long it had been since I called them or visited them or wrote to them. It’s the only thing I remember about communications with them. I don’t remember happy conversations or shared moments just their unending passive aggressive swipes that whatever I was doing it was never enough.
For gods sake if you want to communicate with your kids - communicate! Don’t whine about them not communicating or set rules for how much they must communicate.
Very well put! I would have even put up with their stupid forwards over the complaints. I’m going through this with my dad. I call him weekly, but if, say, I get really busy and two weeks go by, I’m guaranteed to hear a whine and/or a complaint about how he’s really lonely and no one calls him.
Jesus god almighty! I am not responsible for your social life! Go out and make one! I am - I am living my life. And your whining does not make me want to call you again. Actually, then the longer I go, the less I want to call because I know I will hear a complete.
My parents had email long before I did and when I was away at university, this is how they would contact me. Sometimes it was to see if I was still alive (they would hide behind one question or another but that’s what it really was).
Even now, if I don’t respond to a text within 24 hours, they will panic a little.
It’s actually kinda nice knowing that I am that loved.
(Apparently, I am a weirdo.)
During finals freshmen year I went a few days without checking my voicemail; this resulting in the grad student that supervised the RAs showing up at my door and pleading with me to call my mother. She’d completely bypassed the university and went strait to calling the local police terrified I was dead. :rolleyes: In retrospect I’m surprised she didn’t drive down to the campus in person. The entire time my father kept trying to tell her I was probably really busy with exams. :smack:
My parents expect to hear from us once every week or two at least, or they start worrying. Just a very short e-mail is enough (they both write once a week), but my mom in particular gets upset if she doesn’t hear from us at least that often. I don’t find it particularly intrusive. I had a friend whose mom called 3-4x per day. Now THAT was intrusive.
Gah, my grandmother was like this, it didn’t matter if I had called her earlier THAT DAY, she would still complain. She also liked to end the call by speculating that she would likely be dead before the next time I called.
Just e-mail him this post.
But what do I know. I left home at 18 and never spoke to those people again. My Drill Sargent hated me 'cause I was so fucking happy to be there. And I don’t have kids.
My dad just did this to me again today. He went apartment hunting so he specifically told me: don’t call me until I get back. He was gone until Sunday. I am really, really busy right now, so it was today (Wednesday) before I called him. And at the end, I got a passive-aggressive swipe that I hadn’t called in “so long”.
It does not make me want to call him, let me tell you.
ducati, With so many parents, who are not active in their kids lives, I think it’s great that you’ve been so active. Really cool.
But your son is now 18 and needs to learn to make mistakes on his own without his father ready to rescue him. This means that he needs that freedom without checking in daily.
Can you find something else to shift your passion to? Big Brother or another organization that helps kids without fathers?
Well, I have a daughter who doesn’t want to be seen with me, so I have that going for me, which is nice.
Maybe I’ll go bother her. 
I’ve had interviews for good jobs that were so perfunctory that I called them “Is he white?” interviews. I’ve had interviews for bad jobs that were so perfunctory that I called them “Is he alive?” interviews. So yeah, somebody need proof of life.
When I was a teen, calling was too expensive so we wrote letters. Did same all through the military, letters were the cheap way for any communication.
Email & Facebook are the most common with my siblings …now.
I prefer the P-38. Two engines for that extra margin of safety, guns in the nose, great range and twice the pretty sound!
When my grandmother would pull that, it was totally passive-aggressive. If we were extra busy and didn’t go over or at least call twice through the week, you could set your clock by the phone ringing at 8am on Saturday. She’d say hello, and then there would be this long, watery, quavering sigh followed by “I just wanted to make sure you were alive” in the most pitiful voice imaginable. You’d think from her tone that she hadn’t heard from us since we contracted the plague a couple years earlier, although it had been at most 8 or 9 days since we’d been to her house and we’d probably called at least once since then.
She never, ever called us and said “I just wanted to see how you were doing” or “I hadn’t talked to you in a while and wanted to check in” or “I just wanted to hear your voice.” It was always, always, ALWAYS the freakin’ guilt trip. It got to the point that my brother and I would turn the ringers off on the phones in our rooms to get out of having to answer those calls.
That’s a good post. I don’t call my mom terribly often and yet I know I’d like it if my kids (oldest starts college next week!) called more often.
Most likely they’ll do exactly what I modeled for them with my own parents. 