Parental roles and responsibilities, especially with young adult children.
Puzzler
Shipmate
in Epiphanies
Situations with my children and grandchildren have made me think about parenthood today and parents’ responsibilities towards their children, especially when these are still living at home as young adults.
How can parents responsibly enable their young adult children to become independent? What does their parental role then become, particularly if they have previously seen themselves as providers?
How can parents responsibly enable their young adult children to become independent? What does their parental role then become, particularly if they have previously seen themselves as providers?
Comments
I guess I don't know the specifics of the question. Maybe that is hard to reveal. But, this link might be helpful. Tough Love
This link is broken. No URL is given. BroJames, Purgatory Host
I happen to work at a facility for disabled adults, so - in general terms - I know a number of those. There are some adults who never make it past "diapers," for various reasons. That's a hard conversation. My employer is arguably one of the better places, and I know that it's very expensive to provide even a baseline level of care with dignity.
Another vector I'm aware of is a story I heard from a friend who worked with Iraqi refugees years ago. She said that in a traditional Iraqi culture, the male patriarch would own a large compound, and as the sons grew up, they would marry. But as they married, they would stay in the same household, with additions being added to the patriarch's house. This story was told as a commentary on "In my father's house, there are many rooms" from the gospel.
And even my mom basically lived with her parents until she was married to my dad, as I understand it, or living in an apartment they helped pay for. And she was well into her 20s when she married him. She might've qualified as someone who would've struggled to achieve independence, I'm not sure because I only knew her after a disabling car accident, but that was also a thing.
Then there's a friend of mine in choir who lamented his son who was failing to get a job with an engineering degree for lack of social contacts, so he was living at home and would eventually have to settle for some kind of job.
I think the liminal space between youth and adulthood is a lot more complicated than most folks like to admit, and without a lot of social infrastructure, that space is only getting more complicated to navigate. Add this to my other observation that a lot of professional success, at least in the USA, gets built more on social connections than any kind of competence or skill, though a certain baseline of these is usually necessary. You can't just walk into the local factory and expect a job anymore.
Hope that's not too much grist for the mill.
Also the economy is a complication. How much should an adult child have to contribute? I would want to make sure an adult living at home wasn't acting like a child. But what does that mean. For instance, if the adult can't afford to pay rent for themselves, they may want to not contribute much so they can save money. And yet they are costing their parents money. I think it's relevant whether the parents can afford that. If their parents are very rich, they may not care much for financial contributions. I'm pretty sure I'd expect an adult child of mine to contribute in other ways as much as they could. For example: My sister and her bf live under the same roof as my family. They pay their share of the rent. But they also do their own laundry and contribute in other ways.
How parents should adjust their attitude is harder for me because I would find it hard to stay appropiately out of the business of an adult kid of mine who as living under my roof if they were making mistakes. In the end though I think it's a question of whether it's my business or not. If they said they'd do the dishes and they didn't? My business. If their choice of date sucks? Not my business unless they asked.
*And I'm finding everything (gestures at politics in the U.S.) a bit overwhelming today!
[Ha. Crossposted with my spouse, Bullfrog. Didn't know he was posting on this thread and haven't read his post yet.]
Maybe being a young adult these days is a lot. Certainly financially being a young adult is harder than when I graduated college. (In fact it was already harder when my younger sister graduated.) And when I graduated, being financially solvent as a young adult was a lot harder than when my parents were kids. I know you said not just financial, Puzzler. I'm just thinking this all out.
Also, I think we are doing a lot more for kids than we used to and maybe more than we should. My mom walked to Kindergarten. I question whether that was really a great idea even then. (Was she really truly wise about cars at 5 years old? Really?) My eldest first took a train alone at 10. Many of my friends were impressed and most would not have let their children do the same. What we as a society allow has changed a lot in the last 50 years. I presume K's peers learned how to navigate their world alone or will. Will they be more reliant on their parents than my mom was as a young person. Probably. That said K is also more self aware and much better at asking for help and studying than I was at her age. I think many of her peers are. They'll need parental support with different things than I did. Maybe that's okay as long as I can catch up with the times and figure out what that is.
*And I'm 41, since timeframe is probably relevant to the rest of this post
I think it is hard for young adults as it will be years before they can be fully financially independent. Those from better-off families will have become used to so many things being provided and are initially unaware of the costs involved.
From the parents’ point of view it is tricky too. If they are used to supporting their offspring they are reluctant to withdraw from that role, especially if they are well off and it is no hardship. But when they are no longer providers, what is their role?
One example from my family. My son loves cooking, so each weekend he shops then batch cooks and freezes food in single portions. His son 24 works unsociable hours so is glad of a meal to reheat. But he is not developing life skills of budgeting, planning, cooking. Is this infantalising, demeaning? Is his Dad overprotective, controlling, even?
(This is just scratching the surface of some of the issues, but one that is easy to use as an example).
By allowing them opportunities to be independent, and opportunities to fail safely.
My eldest is in college now. So she's not "independent", in the sense that we pay for a lot of her costs*, she's on our health insurance, and she comes home for vacations, but she's gradually stepping towards full independence. I"m not expecting her to move home after college - I think both her career interests and personal interests will take her a considerable distance away, and I'm suspecting that we'll end up in a position where we see her in person once or maybe twice a year at most.
I'm a little sad about that, because I like her, and want to have her around, but that's how it goes.
To @Gwai's point about us doing more for our kids these days, I think there's a lot more variation as well. My own kids have cycled by themselves to the park up the road since they were about 7 (and much younger if they went with an older sibling). "Be home in a couple of hours for dinner." My 9yo has a friend whose mother won't let him out of her sight.
*We sit down with her each year and go though her budget - here's what you'll owe the college in fees and rent etc., here are your estimates for other costs, here are your scholarships, here are your loans, here's what we'll pay, here's the amount you have to fund from summer jobs etc.
If you're seriously poor, then you literally cannot afford to keep your adult children around and will have a powerful financial incentive to shove them out of the house. You will also have a powerful incentive to exploit them for labor or other needs as they get old enough to take them on, which is healthy, to a degree.
That said, I know one person who is..alienated from their parents...at least partly because their parents expected them to raise their siblings when they were the eldest of four. There are hazards to this approach.
And if you're a certain kind of rich, you can afford to give your kids the financial security to screw up at college, say, or experiment with a failed business because...whatever. You can afford to invest in their failure and chalk it up to a learning experience.
The trap might be having enough financial security that you don't need to evict our children from your house, but not having enough financial security to give them a proper launching into security. That's awkward. If I hadn't gotten certain kinds of lucky after I finished college, I could see myself hypothetically going that way in a weak job market without strong interview skills.
Yes indeed. We're in suburbia, and the park, and the school, are on residential streets with sidewalks. In a big city, my choices would be different. (I don't really need to answer the question "at what age would you let your kids use public transport by themselves", because there isn't any (at least, not in a useful sense)).
We can teach kids bad things as well, though - a group of local moms decided to organize a "bike bus" to cycle to the elementary school. Which seems like a nice enough idea. Except that they go once a week (so it doesn't really have anything to do with transportation), cycle all round the neighborhood with amplified music (so it's more like the party bike bus than "how I get to school"), and the whole convoy blasts through stop signs without slowing. They have parents as outriders to make sure the traffic stops, so they're not actually trying to kill the kids, but they're not teaching sensible traffic safety in any way. I am afraid that some kid will learn that it's OK to blast through stop signs because that's what they do with the bike bus, and get hit by a car as a consequence.
They also helped with deposits on all 3 houses. Even so, I was over 40 before I could afford to buy, and my brother was in his 30s. We'd both been renting for several years before those events. The only reason my sister could buy in her 20s was that she'd met her now-husband at university, they both had good jobs, and this was in the mid 90s just before house prices round here jumped again.
This reminds me of the shock a friend's mother had when she discovered that I was cycling the whole mile to school on my own. I was 9 and had started middle school that year. Had to go by myself as Dad was walking to work in the opposite direction, and whilst Mum was going in the same direction taking my sister to first school and my brother to nursery, they both started later. The friend had an older sister, so was accompanied by her, on a route that was shorter than mine and didn't involve a main road! Sometimes I think it's a question of not just wanting to allow things, but having to do so because of circumstances. @Gwai has a good point about location mattering as well. I had to cross that main road, but there was a zebra crossing very close to where our road joined it, and there are separate bike tracks on both sides of it. Without the crossing and the bike tracks, I doubt Mum would have been quite as calm about it all.
My own sons had to catch a bus to another town several miles away to get to high school so were used to travelling independently on public transport from about 11. I let them walk to the park at about 7 but it was not far. We taught them to cook and budget so they could look after themselves at uni. We pay the uni rent for the youngest, but the eldest pays his own from his doctorate stipend.
The youngest is 20 and has a long term girlfriend and I don’t expect him to move back home. It is possible the eldest, who is autistic, might temporarily come home when he finishes his doctorate because we live in a good place to find a job but he would soon want some independence from us. I was quite anxious about them when they left for university, especially the eldest, but they are doing fine. They know they are free to stay here if they want but also free to be independent - whatever makes them happy. I think if they lived here they would contribute to cooking, tidying etc.
Once the three that went off to college they came back for the first winter break, but they all got summer jobs where they went to school, and they didn't look back. I think it was a matter of them saying to themselves, "Well, if #1 can do it, I can do it too."
There was only twice we had to intervene during their launching phases. #3 child developed anorexia nervousa when he was 18, but since he was legally an adult, we all but had to file for guardianship when he became resistant to treatment. I was literally on my way to where he lived to file the court papers when he finally consented to inpatient treatment.
#2 son got involved in a severe accident in Las Vegas--he fell off a skywalk. While he already had two kids by two different women, Mrs Gramps and I were still next of kin so we went there to make the necessary medical decisions until he was capable of being discharged from the hospital. He ended up with a very good settlement with the owners of the skywalk which has allowed him financial freedom. He did marry one of the women, the other woman married someone else.
Two of our grandchildren are now launching into their adulthoods. One has gone to college. She will graduate this year and appears to have an internship set up for the summer. Originally, she did not want to go for a Masters, but she is in a field now that excites her, so I think she will go on.
The other grandchild did not go to college, but she has become a manager of a local eatery. She has made some choices her dad wishes she did not make, but that is a part of growing up too.
It is good to see our kids encouraging their children to become independent just like we did. No doubt they have been faced with even more challenges than when our kids grew up. The pandemic really screwed their high school careers up. Housing is astronomical compared to when our kids set out on their own. Some of the opportunities my kids had were no longer available to the grandkids. But at least these two have found a way.
The second wave of grandkids will have their own challenges. Third granddaughter is a sophomore in high school. She is really into theatre in tech support, but she has been stage manager for two productions now. First grandson is on the spectrum. He is 11, but he is receiving very good therapy and progressing well.
Fourth granddaughter is five, but I am thinking she will also go into theatre. She loves the lights.
Then we have two other grandsons, one not quite two, the other just a month old. Knowing their parents, though, who are leaders in their fields, the sky is the limit for them.
Grandson W, who has a troubled story, was probably helped on his way though his Dad’s contacts. When he messed up, you can imagine how his Dad felt, and that was just one of many let downs. There have been more since, leading to a mutual decision that W should leave home.
I am interested to hear of / from others who feel let down, even betrayed, by their offspring, and how it affects their approach to parenting at that stage.
New strawberry plants come out of adult plants. The adult plant feeds them for a while through a shared stem but this eventually withers away. Then the baby plant is on its own.
I always figured my job is to love and nurture the Tubblet whilst equipping them with what they need to thrive independently. Part of that is accepting that they are their own person who makes their own choices.
One of the hardest things is accepting that my expectations of them and opinions about how they live their live are exactly that. Mine. Not theirs.
Not sure if this helps any though.
You can’t lead your adult children’s lives for them.
More recently we have a situation with one of them (now mid 30s) for which I had expectations which haven't been met. I have to remind myself several times a day that, as @Tubbs says, these are my expectations, not theirs, and it's a case of working to be grateful for what is rather than sad about what isn't. (And, again, not saying too much.)
But I asked, “Well what about W?”
My son and daughter are currently estranged; I don’t know exactly why, but it started around W.
It is not for me to say to what extent their upbringing differs, but what I do know is that more money has been invested in his family by my son, and more time by my daughter, if that is relevant. Might be?
That one's difficult, isn't it? There's a tension in how we feel about gifts. At one level, you give something to someone, and it's now theirs, and they can do with it whatever they see fit, but it hurts when you give someone your hard-earned effort (whether it's money that you've worked to earn, or your time and skills to do something for them), and you see them squander it and throw away. It feels like your love and care is being thrown back in your face. It's hard not to be the younger brother in the parable of the prodigal son.
@Nenya It's easy to say but so hard to do. I have the same conversation with myself regularly.
Three years into university life, I'm just grateful they eat the occasional vegetable!
My kids are 14 and 11, and have many more plans for their adult lives than I ever did at their age. It will be interesting to see when they move out, and how easy it is for them.
I think the comments about letting them make mistakes and not saying too much are spot on. It must be very hard to do sometimes though.
My oldest child wanted to be a palaeontologist. We knew that was hit and miss but the enthusiasm kept him studying which got him good A levels and the computing course he wanted by then. He's now intending to be a Naval Officer.
Middle child wanted to be a baker; again we left him to it and he decided to make that a hobby and study science A levels. He's got offers for Chemistry courses from a trad University (Sheffield) and an ex-Poly for insurance (Nottingham Trent)
Youngest has always wanted to work in childcare and is studying that post-16 at college where she's thriving.
I think keeping them enthusiastic about learning and thinking about what they want to do is the thing.
However, you can and should teach practical skills - cooking, cleaning, laundry - long before university; we perhaps started ours younger than the norm but it was dictated by me having major surgery and my other half spending the bulk of the working week away from home. On finances, we started out with pocket money and saving, and then when they got to (I think) 13 or so gave them an allowance to cover clothes other than school uniform and topping-up a mobile phone.
On the choice of university, etc, they were pretty much left to their own devices, mainly because it coincided with my other half's last days. Now just over 30 they both have rewarding careers, are homeowners, have married and one has started a family.
Responsibility? Guilt? Intervention?
What does it do for self-esteem?
Maybe it's a bit like dealing with elderly parents. They're adults with agency and make their own decisions regardless of what you think. Then it comes down to what's the most important - the relationship or being right.
To the second word of the second paragraph. No need to feel guilty. As a number of us have already pointed out, the odds against young adult children flying the coop are stacked against them. Likely, at some critical time, something happened which encouraged them to remain safely in the parental nest. They have a lot to gain by staying at home. But there is a lot to lose.
I came across this article that might help you in your struggles.
https://bestlifeonline.com/house-rules-adult-children/
I think item number four is a good suggestion. In addition to helping provide financial support and doing chores, they need to set personal development goals. One of those goals would be to set up a reasonable timeline to be living independently within, say six months, even if they have to go in with some of their peers to establish their own housing.
Since I live in a university town there is a lot of young adult housing in the area. Not knowing where @Puzzler lives, it is my bet there is some young adult housing in @Puzzler's area too.
Oh, and regarding furnishing a new apt for the adult child, there are a lot of secondhand stores around.
@Puzzler, do look at the link I had provided about Tough Love. I believe it has follow on links if you feel you need outside intervention.
I should just like to point out that I am not directly involved: it is my son’s situation.
One of his children has recently moved out. He works but still gets a lot of support. The other is still at home, but is in a relationship and they will in due course be wanting to set up home together.
In both instances, parental support will not cease. In many ways I think this is more of a parental need. Both my son and my daughter-in-law seem to need to keep their adult children dependent. This is why I keep coming back to parental roles, both male and female.
@Gramps49 the Tough Love link did not work for me. The other link did and I agree with it.
Same for me - the Tough Love link just takes me back to this thread @Gramps49 .
The link can't be fixed because no URL is present. We'd need to get the URL to fix it.
L
Epiphanies host
Thank you LC. I lived with my parents right up to the day I got married. Nothing wrong with that at all.
I guess we did the "traditional" thing of going out and getting a job, and I know I had an easier time of it than my sister did, but it is a constant source of humility to me how much of my adult life has rested upon these simple events of dumb luck.
This isn't to say I was lazy or stupid. It's just that the adult world is terribly capricious in my experience, and as an adult I find that terrifying. If you're not rich it's an absurdist crap shoot with seemingly infinite stakes. And I don't know how many people who are a generation or so older than me appreciate that.
When my children started work, they paid one third of their income but had no other bills to pay. Our son left home when he was 18 to live with his girlfriend. He didn't pay us anything but he 'borrowed' money from time to time. Most of it became a gift. In her early 20s our daughter left home to share a house with a church girlfriend. She struggled to pay her bills and when her friend got married she moved back home. She was once again giving
us a third of her wages. She left home when she got married.
Our principle had been to teach them that bills have to be paid and that everything they earn was not for spending on themselves. In May 2016 she and her husband bought us a bungalow so we could live near to them in Sheffield. We paid them about 70% of the cost back when we sold our house and have been making monthly payments ever since. We couldn't cope without them.
For some, freedom for parents to be a couple again, to pursue careers, hobbies, travel etc - or loss of identity/ direction?
It’s a phrase often referred to by mothers, but I don’t think it is necessarily so restricted.
I think my son and his wife can’t begin to let go. They don’t want an empty nest. They still plan on family holidays, just the four of them, which I guess is fairly rare with children of 20 and 24.
My son sees his role as Provider, and I think he is struggling to find a new role in the family. It is part of the bigger question about the role of men in the family as well as in society, but that could equally well be asked of women.
I think it is important for empty nesters to find their independence too - I started a doctorate the year my eldest left and it meant I had something else to keep me occupied. But Mr Heavenly and I are generally too busy with work and fixing up our house to obsess about what our sons are doing outside meeting up. My anxiety is better for not knowing!
They both worked part time while they were at home, and our daughter had a year's paid placement, but we didn't ask them to pay us anything for their keep as we knew they would be saving for the time when they left home. Had they been irresponsible with money we would have played things differently (expected some sort of rent which we'd have saved and given back to them when they needed it at a later point).
Since they left home Mr Nen and I have both done some training and are involved in various voluntary things as well. Both offspring still touch base with us regularly and sometimes need our support with practicalities which we provide if we can. You can still be Providers even when they're not living with you, if you're able to be and want to be.
I wouldn't say there's been a loss of identity or direction for me, but I miss them every day.
My eldest brother (RIP) lived at home with our parents until they had both died and he wasn't able to cope with life. I wouldn't want our offspring to be in that situation. Part of our job as parents is to teach them independence, I believe.
I'm pretty much saying the same as @Heavenlyannie , and also agree with her last sentence!
We still have two at home one working and one not. Our oldest thinks she is on the spectrum and with my very limited understanding could see that she was not like other girls, but in so many ways I am glad about that! Both kids are creative, thoughtful compassionate, intelligent, and funny.
Growing up, I never had a weekend job, and found it hard to get a permanent job after leaving school, there was a recession at the time. My Nanna was never a homeowner and seeing her in her old age having to move house and the upset it caused has made me a mad obsessive about home ownership and hope daughter will make that leap sooner rather than later.
I have been firm on is teaching kids skills that they will need when they move out of home. My Mum was a stay-at-home Mum and did everything. I have spent time talking to the kids about savings, interest rates, additional costs in owning a home, superannuation and credit cards and all the things that no one told me about in detail. I note My son’s school did this well, he took a real-life maths course and I am grateful for that as what I’d said was reinforcement, which is something he needs. They have had to wash, clean, cook and vaccum since high school.
We’ve had a lot of disruption in our lives with Cheery son’s health, so we weren’t always around so, it’s been a bit hit and miss and for the sibling, a bit of a mixed bag of carers and changes at a moment’s notice. Unfortunately I think at times our daughter had a lot of pressure that she was probably too young to deal with.
Both kids attended the same schools but being 8 years apart their experiences were very different and due to leadership changes and staff transfers, the schools were all very good, but different for each child. Transport wise they were both driven in primary school, In high school they both walked as we were close to the school and in College it was a mixture of riding, bussing and being driven. Both have been late in learning to drive compared to their age cohort. I don’t think that’s necessarily been a bad thing as both kids are very conscious of road safety and mindful driving.
Daughter could bus to Uni, or walk and initially she also worked part time. She did suffer from severe depression which led to her taking a gap year from Uni, changing courses, losing her job and generally having a very tough time. Fortunately, when she returned to study, she did very well, because of this she was able to undertake some electives at another local University and have those form part of her degree. She still lives at home and after me reading the riot act, she got a job and now she has an ongoing permanent. She has needed us to help her find referees, navigate the job interview process and I even drove her to the first day of proper work as it was teeming with rain, she was driving to an unfamiliar part of town on a road that is notorious for heavy traffic of a morning. By this time, I had stopped working and was happy to get her off to a good start, rather than have her arriving for her first day in a tizz and not being able to perform at her best. That was a one-off and I don’t mind doing the odd thing like that for either kid.
She pays board to us, it covers her room, meals if she’s home when we are eating (she works shifts) and use of our second car. We do charge her about half the amount she would have to pay to live in a share house. Because of this, she has more saving than the husband and I have ever had and mostly lives frugally. Once she pays the government back for her degree, we would like her to buy a townhouse or a unit. Fortunately/unfortunately depending on your perspective, she wants to move overseas for work and I get worried that she will miss the boat on home ownership, particularly as she in unpartnered and so will have a massive mortgage on one income.
Son is still finding himself, has some health issues and some mild impairment from his cancer therapy and meningitis, which makes it hard for us to find him suitable work as he tires easily. We don’t really know what the future might look like for him and he has done a couple of short courses to give him a taster of graphic design and computer animation. He would prefer to be working, but I don’t want to see him locked into a low paying dead end job.
The cost of living crisis is constantly in our media at the moment and I worry the kids will live with us forever and I do think moving out of home at some point is very important in terms of being totally responsible for all the things being an adult brings.
One thing that we have not done super well is get our kids into a stage where they have their own social networks. Both kids have had friends when they were younger, but as time has moved on and people have moved away for study or work, they don’t really have any close friends that they see regularly. Son has tried to keep up with is friends, but most people are too busy, and daughter’s friends have difficulty because many of them don’t have what we took for granted as a regular job. They have short term contracts and gig economy jobs where they don’t have regular work hours or normal weekends. The daughter often works shifts, which is not helpful. I often feel that we are having the family time now that we had to forego when our son was so unwell. We’ll have a movie night, or a trip down to the river for picnic, or just hang out at home and we all enjoy that perhaps in the way that others don’t or would find boring. In spite of everything that’s happened in the past I do feel thankful that both my kids are still here and mostly healthy and I know how much of not just our effort it’s taken, but the grandparents and the church community and the friends and the work colleagues and we’ve managed to get here mostly OK. We’re a bit damaged, but I think that’s just life. No one has a completely clear run, there will be all the inevitable griefs.
I never regretted our decision to move cities for better employment opportunities and the chance for our kids to have tertiary education. I missed out because even though the education was “free”, the cost of living out of home was beyond the pocket of my parents. I have been thrilled that they have had the opportunities that husband and I didn’t have. Even if the children did not want to take on post school study, living in a small city rather than a regional town, has given so many more opportunities for work options in terms of trades, or hospitality, or retail, or the various national attractions that are dotted throughout our city. In addition, that the population is made up of people from many different countries has exposed them to other cultures and experiences and I’m very glad of that. I hope all of it will be helpful when we are no longer around to support them with our presence.
I think our parenting has been imperfect but good enough and I think with a little more mentoring our daughter will live independently of us, we know it will take longer for our son, but that’s ok and if it looks like it won’t happen we’ll have to plan our affairs accordingly.
Sorry this is so long!
I mean, of course, after our daughter and boyfriend (now husband) got together...
I would have to advise Puzzler to back off. You son and daughter have made their choices. Wish them well. Now, if they come back expressing frustration with the present arrangements, you might want to refer them to other helping agencies, some of which have been suggested here
I have already been asked to suggest sources of help for Grandson W, and that seems to be working out so far.
What I am interested in is how to support my son who seems a bit at a loss at the idea of his changing role in the family. He could probably more easily step back if he felt his offspring were well able to forge their own way, but as things stand, that is far from certain.
Unfortunately, I'm a bit of a fixer and will sometimes try to intervene when perhaps it's better to hold back. I'm learning, but it's a slow process!
Just to follow up, I only lived out of home for 6 months before getting married. I think it was an important thing to do, and it was hard. Just the feeling of having no back up in case of a safety incident was overwhelming, and I'm glad I moved through that with no real disasters. Cheery husband and I married young and I struggle with the fact that our daughter is now older than we were when we relocated to our now home town, and she's still living with us. I would really like her to move out of home, even if she needs to go to a share house or if she buys a place, get a boarder in to help with costs. I think she needs the experience of living with other people who perhaps aren't as forgiving or accommodating as family. It's all part of having to function in the world.
It's completely different to your own scenario, but that's just it, all our circumstances are individual and we are all just muddling through as best we can, with the tools we have in our own toolkit!