Grandparenting: Basic Guide

1.  When the baby is born, don’t come to stay. It is curious to me that by some mechanism the emergence of an infant from the body of a daughter or daughter-in-law is taken as an open-ended invitation for a sleep-over visit. I won’t be a burden. You won’t even know I’m there. You won’t have to do a thing. I can help with watching the baby, doing laundry, going shopping. You’ll need the help. These are some of their honest well-meaning intentions. The reality is that your body is slowly recovering, you’re in pain just to walk around, you’re incredibly sleep-deprived, you want to focus on the baby so everything else in your life and home have been put on hold. What do you get? Critical, judgmental houseguests.

It’s great, perhaps essential, to have supportive parents or relatives nearby when a baby is born. It can be crucial to have someone trusted to watch the baby while you sleep for a couple of hours. And it is indeed helpful if somebody is willing to do the laundry or some basic shopping. But the stories I hear are often about grandparents who bring their usual daily routine with them, play with the baby when the baby is happy but give you the crying baby. I hear about grandparents who, though they might not say it, still think of you as their child so they expect to be able to direct the baby’s care. After all, they’ve already been there and done that.

So when the baby is new, stay in a hotel. Or at least find a different relative nearby you can stay with.

2.  Pay for college. Obviously, if you’re not well-off enough to pay for the kid’s college, you can’t do this. And I’m happy to say that love and support is way more important than money. If you have no money, than it’s even more important to be supportive of your adult children. Now that I got that out of the way, however, money is sometimes where the rubber meets the road. Your children are adults now, with children of their own. They will be concerned about providing for the children and will be worried about this. It’s OK to believe in self-sufficiency and living within one’s means. But complaining about the cost of your yacht maintenance while your kids are struggling is not going to get you whatever sympathy you’re looking for. It’s not an empathic thing to do, and it’s potentially lethal to the relationship you have with those grandkids. So if you can, put money away for college. If you can’t, share with an open hand. Take the grandchildren to Disneyland. If that’s too much, take them to the movies. If you don’t like the way your kids handle money (who’s fault is that?), then do your giving directly to the grandchildren. But sharing what you have in this way takes a serious burden off of your children, and it might materially improve their lives. They will be grateful for it.

3.  Watch the children. What do you have that no one else has? Trust. The disturbing stories we hear on the news have made parents more cautious than ever to leave their kids in the care of a stranger. A grandparent is in the unique and privileged position of knowing the parent for his or her whole life. The parents know where you live, know who your friends are, and know how to get hold of you. They may not want you to let their children watch cartoons all afternoon. They may not want you to feed the child chocolate cake and 2 glasses of milk every schoolday afternoon. But they will love that their child loves you. And they will love you for being there to babysit. Generosity with your time will give you the opportunity to bond directly with your grandchildren without their parents filtering your intentions. Hopefully, your children will see this as the valuable gift that it is.

4.  Bite your tongue. I have said this several times, but I’ll say it again here. You had your opportunity. You raised your children in the best way you knew at the time, and now they are raising their own. It might look to you that they are needlessly flailing about and trying to re-invent the wheel. You might feel that you could save them a lot of trouble by just telling or showing them the way certain things should be done. If you get asked, then go ahead and be the teacher. But if you aren’t asked, volunteering an opinion could leave you vulnerable. This isn’t picking out a color for the drapes! For better or worse, your adult children have chosen a path to follow with their own children. If your suggestions contradict this, you won’t change anything. But you might give the impression that you think you know better, or that you’re interested in continuing to treat your child as a child. How will this help? Your experience and knowledge are important resources if they are wanted. If not, you are playing with fire.

Empathic Grandparenting

As I publish more and more about parenting, I’ve been getting a lot more questions about the role of grandparents. Parents, whether biological or foster or adoptive or step or any other kind, have certain reasonably uniform tasks they usually need to accomplish with their children. Survival basics, such as food and shelter, schooling, love and support, and promotion of the child’s general sense of growth and accomplishment as they grow and develop. If there are some hurdles on the way, people ask me about it, and I do my best to give them some ideas on how to manage.

When grandparents are the primary caregivers for the children, and there are many, many families like this, then they are really acting as parents. In this context, parenting advice applies no matter what your title is. I have known fine adults raised by relatives both close and distant, and sometimes by parents who weren’t related to them at all. In all of these situations, I recommend openness about the reasons behind the situation. This openness should be limited to what is developmentally-appropriate for the child, and which protects the child’s sense of self worth. If parents are gone, then they’re gone and there’s no point in giving the child further opportunity for emotional scars by learning that what you say can’t be trusted. It’s hard to imagine a sadder image than a child waiting at the window for the parent who won’t return. So be as honest as you can with them.

An important part of the bargain when we take on the responsibility of being parents is that there are no warranty periods or lease expirations, during which we can trade up to a new model as long as the one we’re returning has only normal wear-and-tear. More needs to be said about what is and is not appropriate, and I’ll try to do that another time.

For most grandparents, however, the primary responsibilities of care for the grandkids falls squarely on the shoulders of your children and their spouses. This is a blissful arrangement in which you get most of the benefits of child indulgence with little of the consequences. Sure, it’s not as good to buy love as it is to get it spontaneously. But--just between us--it’s still love and it feels mighty good when bartered for some new toy or ice-cream before dinner that mommy would throw a fit about but we’ll just keep it as our little secret.

For those who’ve been reading my advice about getting kids to eat right and behave nicely, it might come as a surprise to know that I don’t disapprove of any of the above. Every child deserves to have somebody in this grandparent role, where some of the rules are a little more flexible than at home. I think there’s an important place in every child’s life for a trusted non-parental adult who isn’t spending every waking hour managing the relationship. But that’s not the same as having carte blanche.

With that said, however, we all know that childhood obesity is a big problem. There are many causes, of course, and I have no special cure or treatment. But I have had one insight that I have not seen written about in all the studies I’ve read: grandparents.

There are many reasons that both parents have to work outside the home. Mine did. With most elementary schools still dismissing their students at 3:00 in the afternoon, most working parents have to find some arrangement for the 2-3 hours or more before they get home from work. In my community, this is often a job gladly taken by grandparents. They treasure the opportunity to be with their grandchildren and have such an important role in their lives. They also are happy to help their children by being there when needed.

But when I talk to children who are overweight, I ask them about their diets. It becomes clear that their parents aren’t usually taking them out for fast food, and aren’t letting them eat potato chips instead of dinner. Most parents are reasonably careful about what they feed the kids, so the extra calories aren’t coming on their watch. Again and again, the calories just don’t add up. While it’s true that school lunch is often not nutritionally optimal, it’s usually not a major problem. They usually don’t have the money or transportation to get fast food. But again and again, I hear about the time in the afternoon with grandparents. There’s a lot of school-day afternoons filled with television and very fattening snacks. It’s one thing to be the indulgent grandparent who gets the kids stuff their parents wouldn’t or couldn’t get them. It’s quite another to be contributing to serious and long-lasting health problems for the child. Though I don’t want to be confrontational, I really wonder if these grandparents, who melt at the first hint of a whine, really feel all right with the consequences of that big piece of cake as an after-school snack.

I have often wondered about the mysterious mechanism by which brain functioning seems to change as soon as one’s offspring has offspring of their own. There is a clear difference between being a grandparent and being a parent, and I’m fine with that. But why, besides failing vision, can’t grandparents see that their grandchildren don’t need that extra cookie?

We get our parenting knowledge from several sources. Our own experience as a child is a major source, whether this was good or not. Our perspective on the parenting techniques used by our parents is a very biased one. In general, we love our parents. Perhaps as a result, I have heard people describe as useful some incredibly counterproductive experiences they had as children. Did washing your mouth out with soap stop you from using bad language? Sometime, parents are aware of the mistakes made by their own families, and make a conscious decision to go in another direction. This leaves the parent trying to find a path when they have no landmarks. And, of course, there are all kinds of parenting experts willing to suggest things, perhaps in a book or blog, that the parent hadn’t thought of.

Grandparents, however, have the certainty of their own experience. This can be a pain in the neck for parents who have decided to do some things differently. Just because you raised your kids a certain way, doesn’t mean that’s the only right way to raise them. This is often a major source of friction between adult children and their parents. If you, as a grandparent, value contact with your children and grandchildren, you must respect their point of view.

I guess it should go without saying that there are always exceptions. But it’s a mistake to assume that you are one of these exceptions.

In the next post, I’ll offer some specific guidelines for grandparents.

The Slobbering Grandmother

I don’t like taking off my shoes when I go to someone’s house. Hey, haven’t they heard of vacuum cleaners? But I’m the visitor, and it’s their house, after all. So even though I don’t like to do it, and they don’t have to do it at my house, I take my shoes off. It’s polite, as a guest, to respect my hosts.

Even with 9 months to think about it, even if you read all the available books about how to prepare, you’re never prepared when the baby arrives. Suddenly, you’re a parent.
As I said in An Aunt Who Shares, our modern style of family unit often leaves new parents, and new mothers in particular, very isolated. There is a natural tendency with bright independent young adults not to ask for help. I think this is a mistake, and tell them so. I encourage getting those grandmothers and other close relatives to watch the baby for short periods that allow the new mother to get some precious sleep. An absolutely essential part of being a good parent is being available to your child. With a newborn, you need to look out for your own healthy nutrition and exercise, and more than anything, you need sleep. The baby needs the most alert, healthiest mother possible.

So part of the journey into the ‘parent’ part of your life is taking care of yourself so that you’re there to take care of the baby. It’s one of the key stepping stones of adulthood.
In this spirit, I had been seeing one of my new babies nearly every day. The mother, Melissa, was struggling. She was indeed isolated, by the circumstance of having moved here from far away. Her husband was as supportive as he could be, but I suspected that he had an extensive list of pre-birth expectations that needed immediate reappraisal. When they were in the office, for example, he seemed to be impatient with any cry from the baby. I got the feeling that he thought that if the baby was crying, the mother was doing something wrong. Still, he let her do 99% of the baby care. Newborn care looks easier from the outside. Melissa was, of course, sleep deprived and emotionally fragile. I knew she was getting depressed.

But the reason for her call late at night, when the baby was about a week old, was a surprise. “I need you to answer a medical question. Is it safe for the baby if someone who’s had herpes like a hundred times is kissing him on the mouth and slobbering on him?" But I heard something else in her voice. I asked why she’s worried about this.

Her husband’s mother had come to visit. She insisted on holding the baby and kissing the baby on the mouth, kissing his eyelids. She did, in fact, have a long history of eruptions on her lips. Melissa told me that she had politely asked her mother-in-law not to do that, since it made her uncomfortable. The activity didn’t stop. The next day she asked again, and this triggered a cascade of discussion which included Melissa asking the baby’s father to ask his mother to stop doing this. The mother-in-law, in a spirit of helpfulness no doubt, explained that she raised 3 children of her own and knows much more about babies than Melissa. Her son said that he didn’t want to get in the middle of anything. Melissa called me and asked ‘a medical question.’

In general, I don’t like getting in the middle of anything either. But I told Melissa that my answer had 2 parts. First, the recurring cold sores that her mother-in-law gets on her lip are certainly herpes. It’s from a virus she caught years ago, that doesn’t go away but remains dormant in the nerve cells of her spinal cord and reappears from time to time with illness or sometimes stress. It’s definitely contagious when there’s an eruption, but it is probably somewhat contagious just before or just after an eruption. So since her mother-in-law isn’t having an outbreak right now, chances are very good that the baby will be fine. I pointed out for future reference that during an outbreak, I’d be reluctant even to let the person hold the baby, since if they touch the annoying sore, the virus can be spread on the hands. I apologized for not being able to tell her categorically that this woman shouldn’t be handling the baby. Melissa sounded disappointed.

I reminded her that there was a second part to my answer. This was her baby, I reminded her. This lady had her 3 kids, just as she said, but she was not this baby’s mother, and has no say in how to raise it, feed it, hold it, or choose who gets to do what with it. It was hers. I told her that I, too, cringed when she described this woman kissing the baby’s mouth and eyes. I was glad the grandmother felt affection for the baby, but when asked to stop, there could only be one acceptable response, and that was to respect Melissa’s wishes.

It’s OK with me if, in the car on the way home, the mother-in-law complains bitterly to whomever she’s with about the lousy job her son’s wife is doing with her baby. It’s OK if she calls her friends and tells them how her son married someone so unworthy of him. Where it crosses the line is telling her son or daughter-in-law these opinions, and it’s way over the line when she goes ahead and does what she thinks is best despite the wishes of the parent.

I have posted in An Aunt Who Shares about how much we might have lost when our society moved away from the multigenerational household. These have been the standard for generations. The expression It takes a village to raise a child is an African aphorism (Nigerian Igbo culture) that confirms the naturalness of having more than a single caregiver.

But again and again I am the unlucky witness to conflict between mother and grandmother when a new baby arrives. As hard as the transition from adult to mother might be, there is a transition from mother to grandmother that is clearly a difficult one for many. The bookstore doesn’t have a big section of parenting books for grandmothers. If I wrote one, it would be short, so I’ll outline it here.

• Share your love, your time, your money
• Babysit
• Offer advice when asked
• Indulge the child much more than the parents ever should or would; much more than you did with your children
• Keep visits short
• Mind your own business

You are not the parent. You had your chance, and for better or worse, it’s over. Move on.
Your daughters and sons still need you a lot. But it’s their life now, and their family. If you want to keep your family together, respect theirs. The reward will be the calls and invitations to visit that you really want.



Epilogue: Melissa appreciated my support. I asked her permission to do a blog post about it, and she said it was OK. Things are tense with all of the husband’s side of the family.