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This is a cri de coeur about stuff. The stress of lugging it, moving it, storing it and even the high cost of replacing lost stuff with new stuff.

It is not, however, about my stuff. Or my husband's.

It is about our kids' stuff.

In short, I am wondering why so many boomer parents seem to have an overly involved relationship with their grown kids' stuff.

Long after our children have reached the age of majority and should be tending to their belongings, we are renting trucks or borrowing vans and driving insanely long distances to move it - despite our bad backs and sore hips.

In our vulnerable middle age we are trudging up and down staircases of grungy third-floor walkups, hoisting cartons and televisions, "helping" our kids relocate after graduation or move into a condo they bought with their own money. (In which case you would think they could afford a professional mover.)

"We wouldn't dream of moving our own stuff," says a close friend who was helping both her 23-year-old and 26-year-old move in Montreal on the same weekend I happened to be helping my 21-year-old prepare for an arduous two-month sojourn in the Far North.

There we were, two supposedly sane sets of parents, bleakly comparing notes on the chaos in our kids' apartments, brought close to despair by our twentysome- things' callous disregard for closet organizers.

"They weren't raised like that," we bleated to each other. "How did this happen?"

Occasionally we would snap at our kids, capable of getting the highest marks at the best universities in the country, yet not seemingly able to move without us.

"I thought you said you'd have the desk dismantled," my friend said sharply to her son who was not even fully awake when they arrived. Meanwhile his caffeine-fuelled parents had been up for hours strategizing his move.

Whose fault is this? I don't need to call a family therapist for an answer.

Of course it's our fault for volunteering in the first place, for somehow buying the line - maybe even inventing it - that no move will go as smoothly if we aren't there to help our children. Obviously this is another manifestation of parental overinvolvement in our grown children's lives.

Back when I was in university, my parents wouldn't have recognized my stuff if they had tripped over it on the street, and they would never have moved it.

I wouldn't have let them. They were too old, or at least I thought they were. Asking them to hoist anything heavier than a highball glass would have been tantamount to elder abuse.

But boomer parents think they are young - they wear tight black jeans, groovy T-shirts and baseball caps. In fact, one of my male friends looked like Joe the Mover during his son's move, even though he is an executive.

These parents have discretionary income to burn and yet for some reason they think they should save some bucks by moving their kids themselves.

This is not only micromanaging, it is dangerously enabling a generation of kids, some of whom, if you can believe the hair-raising stories making the rounds, don't even value their possessions enough to keep track of them. Lost iPods and cellphones are often repeatedly replaced by parents.

I even heard of a kid who lost all of his furniture - every stick of it, including bed, desk, TV and bike - because he left town and entrusted his move to a friend, who lost the plot as friends in university tend to do. The kid's furniture ended up in a dumpster, and his parents grudgingly shelled out the money to replace it, albeit deducting it from his allowance.

To all this Sturm und Drang about stuff, shouldn't parents be saying well too bad, so sad, we helped you once, now it's your turn to find, replace or move your belongings?

Several years ago, when my husband stood extremely red-faced in our son's apartment trying to assemble an Ikea chair, our son, to his credit, was suddenly appalled by the amount of heart-attack-inducing work his father was doing and said firmly, "Dad, I need you to sit down, NOW." Since then, there's been no assembly required.

I thought of this when it was revealed that NBC newsman Tim Russert, who died recently at 58 of a heart attack, had left his family in Italy where they were celebrating his son's graduation, returned to Washington and in the midst of his busy workday, hurried over to his son's apartment to wait for the cable man. This man was a vice-president at a major American television network and a famous TV journalist, and he still felt the need to be the one to let his son's cable guy in?

Again I wonder, whose fault is this?

I think, after their kids move into their first apartment, boomer parents should recite a pledge: Our kids own their stuff, move their own stuff, organize their own stuff and replace their own stuff. Their stuff is not our stuff.

Enough with the physical heavy-lifting. Hopefully, we will next get to work on the emotional heavy-lifting. And before we know it, we could be just like our parents, thoroughly enjoying our cocktails and asking our children with benign curiosity, "How was your move?"