It’s Season 3 of The Family Dinner Project Podcast! In each of our episodes, Content Manager Bri DeRosa and Executive Director Dr. Anne Fishel talk through tough topics related to family meals and parenting. Missed our first two seasons? You can check out all of our episodes here.
In this episode, Annie and Bri are joined by Drs. Melinda Macht-Greenberg and Paula Rauch. They are longtime clinicians and educators, as well as mothers of adult children and grandmothers. Dr. Macht-Greenberg is a psychologist on the faculty at Tufts University and Tufts University School of Medicine and maintains a private practice. Dr. Rauch is a child psychiatrist on the faculty at Harvard Medical School and at Massachusetts General Hospital. Together, they bring more than 70 years of clinical experience working with children, adults, and families across the lifespan. You can read more about them on their Substack Evolving Together: Parent and Adult Child Connection.
The conversation revolves around how to handle tricky family dynamics between adult children and their parents, especially when the pressure of family holiday celebrations adds stress or anxiety.
Episode Highlights:
- Go to 5:42 for a discussion about estrangement vs. engagement
- Go to 13:15 for strategies Paula and Melinda recommend to navigate difficult moments in an adult parent-child relationship
- Go to 18:53 for the doctors’ thoughts on a Thanksgiving scenario with adult sibling conflict
- Go to 26:55 for their take on a scenario where an aging parent worries about talking with their children about handing over holiday responsibilities
- Go to 31:54 for practical tips on food, fun, and conversation to strengthen adult family communication at the holidays
Related Links:
- The Family Dinner Project Thanksgiving Page
- The Family Dinner Project Holidays Hub
- Episode 1: Home for the Holidays?
- Episode 7: Holiday Politics
- Episode 18: Dinner with Older Adults
- The Politics of Thanksgiving
Episode Transcript:
Bri DeRosa: Welcome back to the Family Dinner Project podcast. I’m Bri DeRosa, and joining me as always is my co-host, Dr. Anne Fishel.
Anne Fishel: Great to be with you, Bri, as always.
Bri DeRosa: Great to see you, Annie. And we have some special guests in the studio with us today. So today we’re gonna be talking about adults who are home for the holidays with their families and that parent-adult child dynamic, which can be wonderful, but also can be sometimes tricky.
So, uh, to help us, we have Doctors Melinda Macht-Greenberg and Paula Rauch. They’re longtime clinicians and educators, as well as mothers of adult children and grandmothers. Dr. Macht-Greenberg is a psychologist on the faculty at Tufts University and Tufts University School of Medicine and maintains a private practice.
Dr. Rauch is a child psychiatrist on the faculty at Harvard Medical School and at Mass General Hospital. And together, they bring more than 70 years of clinical experience working with children, adults, and families across the lifespan. You can read more about them on their Substack, Evolving Together: Parent and Adult Child Connection.
So thank you, and welcome, Melinda and Paula.
Paula Rauch: Thank you.
Anne Fishel: Yes. Welcome to our Thanksgiving podcast. As I think about Thanksgiving, the mother of all family dinners, I want us to focus on a really important part of Thanksgiving dinner, and I’m not talking about the turkey or the pecan pie. It’s the way that change is an essential characteristic of keeping our holiday rituals vibrant.
Of course, there are longstanding traditions and cherished recipes. No one much likes my mother’s sweet potato pudding with marshmallows. There would be protests if I didn’t make it. But along with the continuity that comes, there are changes in any family: new partners, arrivals of children and stepchildren, alternating years to allow for Thanksgiving meals at in-laws.
The hosting and time of the meal may change. A parent or grandparent is missing because of illness, death, or divorce. Any really good ritual has to flex to make room for changes in adult relationships. And our guests today, who I’m gonna refer to now as Paula and Melinda, have lots of wisdom to share about how parents of adult children can talk to each other about some difficult and sensitive topics that may show up around the holidays.
Adult children are living their own lives, often with partners, children who are being parented differently than we parented ours, work that we may not understand. And while the, all that is happening, the adult parents are changing as well, retiring, becoming grandparents, facing health issues, aging and downsizing I found there’s information about adult families, but it’s scant, and it falls into one of two buckets: the rise of cutoffs between the generations or about the need for parents of adult children to say as little as possible, often to prevent the threat of estrangement.
I love that our two guests today are offering another path forward. So let’s get started, and before we dig into Thanksgiving, Paula, would you get us started by talking kind of big picture about what prompted your interest in this very meaty topic?
Paula Rauch: Well, Melinda and I had been talking about the kinds of questions that we had ourselves as mothers and grandmothers and the kinds of questions that our friends were bringing to us, all of which we found endlessly interesting.
And together, we had this, a long clinical set of experiences that involved focusing on children, understanding them through the lens of development, but always including parents. And a good part of both of our careers, certainly mine, was parent guidance. And one thing that one learns as a clinician is that parenting doesn’t stop when children turn 18 or 21.
It goes on. So there were so many questions, and it was so interesting to us, we started to talk about a book. And then people started, our friends and colleagues were saying, “A book? Well, it’ll take so long. I need to read that book.” And that’s what took us to the quick opportunity to get feedback and to provide some guidance on the Substack
Anne Fishel: I love that. I mean, I’m, I’m in that cohort of people, of friends of yours who’ve been saying, “I can’t wait for the book. Let’s hear that wisdom now.” I wondered, Melinda, if, I know you use the word engagement a lot on the Substack, and I wondered if you could sort of talk a little bit about what you mean about that when you’re encouraging that instead of estrangement.
Melinda Macht-Greenberg: Yeah. So it really grew out of so many conversations that Paula and I had with people at, at all developmental stages. And, and at the heart of it, Paula and I are both developmentalists, and we think about parenting from a developmental perspective. Just as our children change and grow and evolve, so do we and so does the relationship.
One thing we kept hearing over and over again, in particular from the parents, was the worry that they would have that they would do something or say something, and that their adult child would distance themselves or, or cut off contact altogether. That theme of anxiety was running through so many different conversations that they would have.
They were questioning themselves before they would send that text. They were, uh, always sort of interpreting or reinterpreting conversations in their minds and trying to think about, “How do I continue this incredibly important relationship without alienating my adult child?” And from there, and with the backdrop in social media and traditional media, with a lot of conversation about estrangement as an approach, we began, through our discussions together, to talk about is it possible to try engagement first?
Unless, and we always give this disclaimer, so unless there are issues of abuse or maltreatment where for your safety, it is important to be separate and distant or estranged from any relationship at all. So we’re not talking about those very important, um, safety considerations. But from the more everyday sort of conversations around the table, those types of things, is there a way to be able to engage before thinking about estrangement, and could estrangement be the last resort rather than an earlier consideration?
Anne Fishel: Yeah. So I– as you were talking, I was thinking that the, the, all the talk about estrangement itself puts some pressure on adults. It’s like a shadow that hangs over those, checking your texts before you send it. “Uh-oh, if I send this, is this gonna make my child not wanna talk to me anymore?” But I wonder if you’ve heard other things about what gets in the way of adult, parents of adult children moving forward and bringing up something that they wanna talk to their child about. Like, what, what are some other things that get in the way?
Paula Rauch: I think very often parents of adult children really don’t know how to get the conversation started, and they may just not have the words to get started. Or they may feel like, “If I say this, I’ll seem too intrusive. If I don’t say this, I’ll seem like I don’t care.”
And they get pulled into kind of the two polar opposites, as opposed to having some stepping stones to get started. How are the ways to be engaged? And I think there’s also a misunderstanding around the communication piece, where people envision that communication is about talking instead of being so much about listening.
And so also what are the questions that a curious parent can ask their adult child to engage their adult children in having important conversations? And I think with those little nudges, the conversations just flow so much more easily.
Bri DeRosa: Annie, you raised the, kind of the specter of estrangement. And I’m thinking about the fact that I don’t really think my parents worried that I was going to cut them off if they said something that I didn’t like. I certainly don’t think that my grandparents had that worry.
But it is a worry that I am observing now in friends and family who have adult children. And so I’m wondering if Paula or Melinda or both of you, is there any kind of light that you could shed on this? I hesitate to call something a trend, right? But it is certainly a shift. And can you help us maybe understand why for the current generation of adults and parents of adults, there is more of a shadow of potential estrangement than maybe there was in the past? What, what am I missing? Like, what changed?
Melinda Macht-Greenberg: I think, and Paula and I talk about this question a lot because it definitely seems to be a generational feature, whereas I think that in older generations, there was the idea that, well, we may not always see eye to eye, or maybe people are not as supportive as I might like, but it, it didn’t really enter into our thinking that we might not continue or continue the relationship in the same way.
Family relationships were, in my upbringing, too, were for life and, and that was something that was always just foundational to my thinking. So I, I think we, we talk about this as a generational component, and I agree with sort of your hesitancy to use the word trend because I don’t want to invalidate the feelings and experiences perhaps people who are in their 20s, 30s, and 40s may be having.
I think that what we’re trying to do is actually bridge the generations, and we’re seeking to sort of bridge that divide where families can come together, even if people may have different perspectives or different relationships with social media or, um, have different conversations with their friends because those things are really important, and we want to validate all of those experiences.
In long-term lifelong relationships, there are bumps along the way, and most of life, most of conversations take place in what we talk about as this murky middle. That murkiness is not the end of the story. It’s the middle of the journey, and when we help people to see the, to take the long view and to see relationships as lifelong that have these ups and downs and have, are sometimes living in the, the murky muck, then we, we help them to say, “All right, how can we move forward?” And that’s, that’s a lot of the voice that we’re trying to bring to the conversation.
Paula Rauch: And we’ve been thinking about it from a three-generational perspective, too. When the murky middle is too quickly experienced as, um, something you can’t get through, but something that you turn around and go in the other direction, not only does the adult child miss out on, albeit imperfect relationships with their parents, but if they have children, so do their children.
And there are important roles that grandparents play in the lives of children that we would wish that every child has the opportunity to experience, barring, you know, circumstances, as Melinda said, where there’s more safety concerns.
Anne Fishel: So I’m finding myself wanting a kind of a roadmap for this murky middle, and I know it can’t be like a perfect GPS of getting from one side to the other, but I wonder if you could give us some goalposts, some signs along the road, some stepping stones, the language you used earlier, even if at some point you have to ditch the roadmap and, and bushwhack your, your way through a conversation, if there’s some kind of helpful steppingstones in this conversation that you’ve discovered as you talk to adult families
Paula Rauch: For me, I think there are a couple of things. One is to, as the parent of adult children, to do a good bit of self-reflection. What am I comparing this relationship to? What was my fantasy about what it was going to be like? And really taking my own pulse to be sure that I’m not expecting something that is not going to be. I’m not even gonna use the word reasonable.
I’m just gonna say is not going to be. So I, I think that piece, doing some of your own work, um, and talking about it with whomever, with a co-parent, with a good friend. Who are the optimistic people in your life that are in favor of maintaining relationships? Because those are often the ones that I like to talk to, not the, the not the doom and gloom ones.
And then I think going into conversations at quiet times, that it doesn’t have to happen, certainly not at the moment where there’s a lot of emotion. Often it’s light touch at those times, but doubling back and trying to understand what, what happened or what was going on, help me understand. One of the goalposts in the murky middle is to just be curious and to just wonder if you’re getting what is different.
And for sure, being an adult child in 2026 is very different than it was for me 40, 50 years ago. And so I’m, I am learning to listen, and I’m listening to learn, and that, along with self-reflection, I would say are two important goalposts as you find yourself in the murky middle.
Melinda Macht-Greenberg: I think another aspect of that that we talk about is that the people are much more anxious than they used to be.
Everybody’s anxiety level is heightened all the time, and part of that anxiety is anticipatory anxiety, which is the idea that we think that something might not go well, and we start to become anxious about it in advance. And that, that can at times be very difficult to manage, and sometimes it’s that anxiety that, as Paula says, makes us sort of stop and turn the other way and say, “You know what? It’s easier to just avoid this than to try and address it.” Because avoiding it actually in the moment might help some of that anxiety to go away. Because after all, if I’m not thinking about it right now, then I’m not gonna be anxious about it right now.
But in the long run, we think that oftentimes these lifelong relationships and families are, are worth saving, and that’s the idea of sort of thinking about how do we get through that murky middle, of how do we use that almost proactive anxiety, those signals that our, our minds and bodies are sending us to say, “You know what? Let me think about this situation that’s coming up at the holidays. What can I do now in advance? What kind of conversation can I open up now with my adult child as part of that anticipating, so that the event can be joyful, and we can, we can, uh, spend the time together with less of that tension surrounding it?”
And so a lot of the work that we talk about is how to be– how to have proactive conversations, whether it’s around going on vacation or going to holidays or doing different kinds of things, so that we can work through that murky middle and have each other as partners in that journey.
Paula Rauch: And celebrate the small positives when you plan ahead and something goes a little bit better, not expecting everything to be a home run. But if you can get on base, first base is awesome.
Melinda Macht-Greenberg: The other piece we talk about is managing expectations. Because if the expectations of the adult parent is that not only is everybody gonna come together, but everybody is going to be happy and everybody is going to feel a certain way, well, sometimes we can be disappointed by our own expectations.
So managing our expectations and, and looking for those little things, those things that can fill us up and bring us joy, those– that’s really important. Because one of the things that we talk about is that sometimes having conversations moves things forward. But also, the fact that people are showing up, that’s communication. Having the people who come and sit around the table together is a way that people are saying, “You, you are important to me, and I wanna be here with you, even if we might be having some stress or tension right now.”
Bri DeRosa: I’m so glad that you said that, Melinda, because I was reflecting on sort of the intrinsic pressure that a parent might feel, uh, if they’ve tried to lay this groundwork and they’re trying to meet in the murky middle and they’re trying to set expectations, and then also you’re layering on a holiday dinner, for example, where there’s a heightened sense of possibility and a heightened sense of expectation around what you want that day to be like.
And that can be very difficult to let go of, I think, for everyone involved. So the idea of managing expectations and taking who shows up and letting people come as they are, to a certain extent, I think is a great segue into these questions that I know Annie and I have for you about Thanksgiving dinner, holiday dinners, big family gatherings.
Everybody’s gonna be there. How do you navigate that? How do you lower the expectations? It’s a lot.
Anne Fishel: I did have two family situations that I think may be coming up for many families around Thanksgiving, and this might be an opportunity, Melinda and Paula, to sort of share the roadmap, the murky middle in action.
So the first one is, what’s your guidance for parents of two adult children who disagree so much on their politics? And mind you, Thanksgiving will be coming shortly after the midterm elections, so things will be, could be quite hot. So the daughter won’t come to Thanksgiving unless she gets reassurance from her parents that her brother won’t be taunting her and picking a fight about politics in front of her children. What would you offer to these parents as a way forward to talk to their kids, to their adult sibling kids?
Paula Rauch: I think first off, we can never guarantee, and I think it’s worth going back to the long relationships that parents have with their children. Is this something new, or has this twosome of brother and sister maybe had a little bit of a mixing it up relationship all along the way?
But as a parent, one can go back to each of the adult children, talk about the holiday, see what we as the parents can do to keep the temperature down, find out from our children, again, what would help them to turn the temperature down. And it doesn’t have to be about politics. There are so many things that can be polarizing. If someone is going to be affronted, there are any number of choices of what is going to be upsetting, not because someone chooses it, but because when families get together, the emotional temperature can get turned up.
So talk to each of the children. Talk about how important it is to get everyone together, and how can we make this go as well as possible? And if it starts to get uncomfortable, what’s, what’s a plan B and C for, for turning the volume down during, during the event?
Melinda Macht-Greenberg: I’ll tell you a very quick funny story. When my mother and her brother were in their 80s and they were at a, we were at a holiday, and they were sort of bickering to each other, and somebody turned to me and said, “It never ends, does it? It never ends.” And so sibling relationships are complicated. And, and I think and to some extent, we all can kind of understand that, and I do.
I am a big proponent of humor as a way of diffusing situations and sometimes activities or doing things, “Come help me in the kitchen” kind of thing to separate and, and, and just bring down the emotion if some of that emotion starts to rise. I think that one of the things that this example raises is the idea that parents at all stages are often holding space for emotions.
And in your example, one of the things that, that, that we’ve talked about and, and noted was that each of the children come to talk to the parent about what they anticipate is going to happen, and they want the parent’s support and reassurance. And so that role of parenting doesn’t necessarily… It changes a whole lot, but that idea of parents being the holding space for emotion still continues. But it, it often, as parents are aging, takes on even a greater importance because we may start to think, “Look, I need this to continue because I don’t know what’s gonna happen to me or to grandparents or to other people in, in the years to come, and I want this to go well.”
Anne Fishel: Might you advise the parents to talk to their kids about talking to each other? To help them have some language to manage that conflict or put it on hold or whatever it might be. I mean, in a way you’re saying we’ve gotta prepare the next generation for the time when we’re not gonna be here, and so that would put some of the responsibility on the siblings.
Paula Rauch: And some siblings would rise to the occasion and some would not. And so I think it also, parents know their children best, so we want them to feel like they have the tools. If you were gonna encourage your children to talk to each other, and you could say, “I wonder if there’s a way for the two of you to talk,” and if there was a past experience where there was a conversation, “I remember before Grandpa’s funeral, you guys had a wonderful conversation about how to handle that for Grandma.
I would wish that you would try that again now.” And see if, if there’s a shared history that you can bring up about ways that conversations happened in the past. It’s not always going to work, but we would hope that people would have a couple of tools on their belt for moving things forward.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah. I’m really glad that you said that, Paula, because one thing that I heard from both you and Melinda and, and also I think a little bit from you, Annie, was the idea of having kind of a back pocket plan for if this does start to go south.
And I think being able to say to the hesitant sibling before the day, “Look, let’s make a plan, okay? Like, let’s figure out what we will do if what you are concerned about starts to take place,” I think could be really powerful. “I’ve picked these games or these activities that we’re gonna be able to have available. We can do those if the conversation starts to become hostile or uncomfortable and we can’t get it back on the rails. We’re gonna stop. We’re gonna do something else. We’re gonna provide a place where, you know, maybe in the other room there’s football on and over here there’s something else happening, and people can go to a separate space for a little while. We’re gonna have a way that we can all continue to be together but doesn’t require us to expend all of our emotional energy trying to solve a conflict.” Right?
So I wonder if that’s one thing that maybe would be useful, or if there are other kind of practical tools that the two of you can recommend.
Paula Rauch: I think when there are grandchildren in the mix, I always worry when the adult children, the parents of the grandchildren, think they’re protecting their child by having their child not hear conflict.
So I actually think because conflict is part of life, these are opportunities both in the moment, but also after Thanksgiving to talk about that maybe this adult doesn’t agree with that other adult and how those situations are managed.
So I think there’s a lot of learning that goes on. But I do think that sometimes the kids can be the ones that, that diffuse the situation if there are grandchildren involved that you– They need to be kept busy with games and maybe deciding who’s gonna go into another room to play a game with the kids and who’s gonna be in the kitchen helping with prep or helping, helping with doing the dishes, uh, are ways of diffusing everybody sitting around the table at once.
Melinda Macht-Greenberg: I think one of the things that we’re sort of talking about, one of the, the themes is helping people to find common ground, that we’re not all going to agree on everything, and siblings growing up together, even though they grew up potentially within the same environment, may end up having very different feelings and thoughts about all kinds of things.
But there is often common ground, and maybe that common ground is around family traditions or about things that they like to do together or activities and interests that have nothing to do with politics or other kinds of topics. And it may be helpful in advance to talk with your adult children about what are some of those things that bring us together, what is that common ground, and thinking ahead about what are some of those conversations that perhaps you all wanna focus on. We can lean away from some of the other trickier things that might be good to have that conversation at some point, but perhaps not at the holiday table.
Anne Fishel: Yeah, I love that. What would you prefer if we could keep conflict off the table this Thanksgiving? What would you prefer that we talk about?
Here’s another Thanksgiving dilemma. In this one, an adult mother of adult children is facing her sense that she’s getting older, and it’s getting harder for her to manage all the prep and cleanup for the holiday. She’d like to raise this issue with her adult children, but she’s worried that if she does, they’re gonna start treating her differently.
They’ll worry about her. They might be dismissive of her. They might sideline her. She’s also feeling sad that she’s not gonna be, doesn’t feel up to hosting, as this has been a really joyful role for her for decades. And maybe she doesn’t even know if she’s ready to hand over this role. How might you guide the mother, and how might you guide the adult children who maybe have a sense that this is in the air, and maybe they might wanna bring it up with their mother?
Melinda Macht-Greenberg:I think that in, in many ways, this is a very important topic because the larger topic is around aging, and that’s complicated in so many ways around sadness and grief and fear and what does it all mean and what does it mean for me. And, and so the holiday may represent a moment of having to think about this, but it’s probably representing something that people have been thinking about a lot anyway.
And so how to be able to talk about it and, in fact, introduce the topic of, “We have an aging parent,” that may be a complicated thing for adult children to do.
Paula Rauch: I think there’s also a little bit of a script piece of this, whether it’s the adult child talking to the parent or the parent talking to their adult child, to start with what you love.
“I so love preparing Thanksgiving dinner, and I want to be able to be fully energized and enjoy it, and I can see the handwriting on the wall,” or “I’m beginning to worry that all the parts of preparation are gonna make it harder for me to enjoy this special time that I just love spending with you.”
If it’s the child, it’s, you know, “I love all the things that you do to make Thanksgiving so special for all of us, but I want to begin to be part of the planning part of this or the helping because I can anticipate that someday this is going to be me doing this, or it’s gonna be partially my responsibility, and I wanna be sure that I’ve learned all of your tricks for making it as special as it is.”
So it’s like, here’s what I love about it, here’s what my worry is, and again, here’s what I love about it. And some people call that the feedback sandwich, good, bad, good. But it is, I think, starting from a place that is joining, talking about what the challenge is, and then coming back to what you love. And, uh, I think the idea that we can talk about things and not change anything is also important To say, I, I wanna begin to talk about this.
I’m not sure I want anything to change this year, but I know it’s a conversation that I wanna have. And when I think about my own family, I remember my father saying to us, at one point in his 80s, he said, “I think I’m still safe to drive, but I just wanna let you know that if at any point you think I’m not, I’m relying on you to tell me.”
And so that was an invitation. It was a standing invitation to all of us, and one can make, as in the grandparent generation, we can make those standing invitations to our children. “Tell me when you’re worried about me, ’cause I may not see it coming.”
Melinda Macht-Greenberg: I think you raised something that you and I talk about a lot, and I think this is really important: The idea that these are ongoing conversations. They’re not one and done. They happen over time, and you may think that actually we’ve kind of resolved or dealt with something now, and then a little time goes by and you revisit it because there’s been some change, maybe a health change or maybe there’s been some situational change.
Somebody’s moved farther away, whatever it may be. So these are conversations in families that are recycled over and over and over again as the relationships evolve, and it’s important to start at some point because that starting is just becoming that, one of those building blocks for the future conversations.
Anne Fishel:Yeah, I think that’s so important. And I don’t know if that’s part of the roadmap, but I think it should be. It’s not that you get to the destination, so in that way, the map is not such a great metaphor, but it’s that you can start a conversation and then come back and back and back to it, and you don’t have to be, have it be one and done. It can’t be one and done.
Paula Rauch: It can’t.
Anne Fishel: So I’m thinking we’re gonna have to pivot even though this is such a rich conversation, but we’re gonna do our kind of coda that we do with every podcast, which is to talk about the three elements of a great family dinner, and true of a great Thanksgiving dinner as well, the food, the fun, and the conversation.
And Bri, I wonder if you would start us off talking about a food idea that maybe helps adult families to enjoy the Thanksgiving meal.
Bri DeRosa: Thanks, Annie. I was thinking it almost doesn’t matter what the specific food is, but the really important part, I think, if you’re having kind of an adult parent-child, you’re trying to work something out together ahead of Thanksgiving, I think the involvement, the engagement in the planning what you’re gonna have is maybe the important part.
So I could envision this going a couple of different ways, right? One is that for some families, it might be really meaningful to reset and be like, “Hey, this is a great time for us to get in the kitchen together and make this one special family recipe that I know is meaningful to us both. Let’s do that while we talk about why this is meaningful. I learned this from my great-grandmother, and I’ve been making it for this long, and now I’m sharing it with you and maybe showing you how to make it, or we’re doing it together the way we always have,” right?
So I think that’s kind of maybe one way that you could go. Even if it’s like your mother’s sweet potatoes, right? Nobody even likes them, but we have to have them, so let’s do it.
I think it might be productive for some families to be like, “Hey, you know what? You’re coming to the Thanksgiving table this year,” and maybe there’s some reluctance or you have some new ideas or a new dietary pattern or something. “I would love you to choose something new and interesting and meaningful to you that you would like to make and bring and share with us. And you can tell me what that is, and we can incorporate that into the meal.” And I think that’s a very welcoming gesture that might do a lot of work of like building the goodwill and breaking down a few barriers so the adult child isn’t feeling like, “Oh, I really need to go home to everything being exactly the way it always is.”
‘Cause that can also heighten that expectation that everything’s gonna feel the way I think it’s going to, right? So those are kind of my two ways that I would maybe handle food, depending on what your family situation is, but I think the involvement and the engagement is actually the important part.
Anne Fishel: I love that, Bri. I think that really gives some nice ways to think about it. Kind of doing a meal, a favorite dish together or just reaching out to adult children to get their input about what they wanna make.
Melinda Macht-Greenberg: I love how you put that together. It’s a great way to also bring families together to share new traditions, especially as new people enter the family. So as there are new partners, or children or stepchildren and everybody comes together, how do we, how do people bring and share a traditional food or traditional part of their day is a way of incorporating and including everybody? Instead of the idea that it has to be the way that it was when the children were little.
Anne Fishel: Yeah. All right, well, I’m gonna provide the fun, and I’m gonna share a game that my adult son, Joe, taught my family, and my family rolls their eyes whenever I bring up playing a game. But this is the one game that my family loves to play. We play it whenever we get together.
So it’s called Top Four, and everybody gets at least four Post-its, and each person writes down a phrase or experience from very positive to very negative. So it might be first coffee in the morning, or spotting an owl on a walk in the woods, or missing a plane because you overslept, or eating a chocolate you thought had nuts but actually has raisins. So, you know, just a range of silly or more profound things.
Everyone throws their Post-its in a pile, then each person takes four Post-its from the central pile, and each person takes a turn reading the four Post-its that they picked. She reads them aloud, and to herself, she ranks them from most positive to least positive, and everyone else tries to guess her ranking, and they rank the, the Post-it the way they think their family member would do it.
And if you match with how the person ranked, then you get a point. And it’s really a game of empathy and also of learning new things about each other.
Paula Rauch:One of the fun things that used to be part of the Thanksgiving when my older brother hosted, and I was thinking about reinstating this year, is for every holiday he hosted along with his wife, they decorated Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head for the occasion. And since, since he moved away, Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head have not been joining us for our special holidays, and I was thinking that this might be a good year for them to return, dressed for the occasion.
Anne Fishel: I love it. Bringing back-
Melinda Macht-Greenberg: –I love this so much.
Anne Fishel: So how about, in addition to that, how about some conversation starters that help the two generations or the three generations connect?
Melinda Macht-Greenberg: Well, I don’t know if we can top the potatoes. I think that seems, I don’t know. Where do you go from there?
Paula Rauch:The most common one that happens organically in our family is we talk about the people that are not at the table anymore, and particularly my mom, who said many memorable things. My grandmother also was a woman of many memorable comments.
And so it’s, it’s quite commonly the case where we will say, “Mom would’ve loved this,” or “I can just hear Mom saying this or that at this time.” So I think asking each other what would this family member who’s no longer at the table be saying if she were or he were sitting here today.
Melinda Macht-Greenberg: Yeah. That’s, that is such an important way of linking the generations and sharing the stories with grandchildren and future generations who won’t have had that direct interpersonal relationship, but they’re learning about all these people through us. So that’s an amazing thing.
And I think as part of that, too, when I think about our family table, which has grown over the years, including extended family and partners and, and now grandchildren, is to also talk about what some of those traditions were.And if everybody sort of shares a little bit about some of their growing up traditions, it’s a way of sort of just, again, linking and making those kinds of connections.
Anne Fishel: I just wanna thank you, Paula and Melinda, for such a wonderful conversation. Thank you for your, your wise words about the power of taking your own pulse as an adult parent, taking responsibility for y- your own stuff, for making room to listen to our adult children, for tolerating some discomfort, trusting that we’ll be able to make it through the murky middle sometimes, maybe not all the time, and come out the other side feeling maybe a little more understanding, a little more connected, a little more engaged with each other.
We’re gonna be linking in the show notes to your Substack, Evolving Together, Parent and Adult Child Connection. And as for our listeners, remember, you can reach out to us on our website, thefamilydinnerproject.org. You can find us on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. Thank you, Bri. Always a pleasure to host with you.
Bri DeRosa: Always glad to be here, Annie, and many thanks again to Melinda and Paula for being here.
Paula Rauch: Thank you for having us.
Melinda Macht-Greenberg: Yes, thank you for including us.
Anne Fishel: Great. It was great to have you. Well, we’ll see you on the next Family Dinner Project podcast. And until then, have a happy, connected, delicious Thanksgiving.
