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Grandparenting: A Grand Job With Great Rewards for All Involved
A Personal Perspective: The greatest gig on earth.
Posted November 30, 2022 Reviewed by Vanessa Lancaster
Our four-year-old grandson was sitting on our living room floor playing when he stopped, called out to me, and then pointed from me to him and back again.
“Grandma,” he said, continuing to point back and forth between the two of us. “We are attached.”
Yes, I told him. We are attached.
He returned to playing, satisfied that I had acknowledged what he knew was true.
I adored his choice of words: attached. We weren’t just connected by love, DNA, family, or even circumstance but were permanently attached through our shared lives.
Being a grandparent is a chance to create a special attachment.
There’s nothing quite like being a grandparent. It’s a chance to connect to the future as well as the past. As a friend once said: It’s never too late to have a happy childhood. Taking the time to enjoy the role of being a grandparent is, indeed, a chance to enjoy building a happy childhood for your grandchild, as well as a chance to enrich your own life.
When enjoyed to the fullest, the attachment between grandparent and grandchild is a two-way street of unconditional love and trust. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime, last chance to get it right.
Some Grandparent Go-To Guidelines
1. Clear your calendar and take off your watch. When you have the privilege of spending time with your grandchildren, the rest of the world needs to take a backseat.
Silence your phone. Don’t plan to do anything but read to your grandchild, play games, draw pictures, go to the park, tell stories, bake something, make lunch together, or have a tea party.
2. Children love to learn, so go ahead and teach them how to do something. Dig into the garden and plant a few seeds. Create a special place in your garden for your grandchild where they can grow whatever they want: flowers, tomatoes, basil, or even peanuts!
Show them how to read a recipe, measure ingredients, crack eggs, sift the flour, and bake some cookies, a cake, or whatever the two of you think might be fun to eat.
If you have a hobby, share that hobby.
3. Spend as much time together outdoors as the two of you can. Have a picnic in the backyard rather than in the kitchen.
Go exploring. Whether you are playing in your backyard or walking in a park, take your time to look for birds, worms, bird nests, beautiful rocks, and leaves. If you know the names of things, teach them to your grandchild. Talk about the weather and the change of the seasons.
Go outside after bedtime to look at the moon and the stars. Teach them the names of the phases of the moon and the names of the stars.
4. Surprise yourself and your grandchild. Take them to an art museum or some other museum where they’ve never been before. It’s amazing how exciting it can be for a young child to experience a “grown-up” museum.
Limit your time in the museum in accordance with the age of your grandchild and their attention span. The goal of visiting any museum is not to see everything in one visit but to have a successful experience from which your grandchild will want to return with you and see more.
When you get home, get out the art supplies and draw pictures together of the things you saw that you liked on your visit to the museum.
5. Read to your grandchildren. It might be the most important thing you can do to help them succeed in school and life. Whether your grandchild is a pre-reader, just beginning to read, or has mastered reading, share the reading time with them in which you read one page, and they read the next. Look at all the pictures in the books and talk about them. Ask questions, then let them ask you questions about what the pictures say and what the words mean. Then help them stretch their vocabularies and their reading lives by reading a next-level book to them.
Find a non-fiction book that speaks to their interest in the world. Maybe a book about rocks, snakes, the moon, seashells, chickens, dogs, cats, or whatever they’re interested in. Help them discover more about what they find fascinating in the world around them.
Take them to the library. Make it a day for reading and exploring.
Spend time in the library reading together. Choose some books to check out to read together at home. After your library time, take your grandchild to lunch or your favorite coffee shop for a treat and talk about the books you found.
6. Do something you wish you had done as a child with your grandparent. Take a long muddy puddle jumping walk in the rain.
Pack a picnic and drive to the nearest body of water. It doesn't matter if it's a creek, river, or big pond. Teach your grandchild how to skip rocks, then spend the afternoon doing nothing but throwing rocks in the water.
7. Whatever you do together, make it an adventure.
