Last month, my family celebrated a special Mothers' Day: my daughter became a new mother -- and I became a new grandmother, and my mom became a great-grandmother! My little granddaughter was named after my grandmother and her father's grandmother. Grandparents are important!
By recent census estimates, there are 70 million grandparents in the United States. First-time grandparents, like first-time parents, may wonder how to succeed in their new roles. Fortunately, there are almost as many ways of being a good grandparent as there are grandparents.
For a variety of reasons, some grandparents and grandchildren have no contact at all, for example, because of bitter divorces with grandparents being denied visitation. But the majority of grandparents are involved to different degrees.
In a 2008 government census, 6.6 million children were found to live with a grandparent, with or without the parents in residence. Other grandparents live within a few miles of their grandchildren. They may see their grandchildren daily: 30% of children whose mothers work outside the home are cared for on a regular basis by a grandparent during their mothers' working hours. Other grandparents see their grandchildren once a week or so. These grandparents intimately watch their grandchildren grow up, but they are not primarily responsible for the childrearing.
Grandparents who live far away from their grandchildren face a particularly difficult challenge. How can grandparents form a close bond with their grandchildren when they are together so seldom?
Families today are often fragmented. In generations before the Baby Boomers, men and women married someone from their hometown and moved a few miles away. Today, that is no longer the case. Through no fault of their own, seniors and their adult children may live thousands of miles apart. Cheap airfare enables people to relocate and also enables visits, so people today don't put as much value in staying put as they used to. Education has become prolonged and may take young adults far from home, where they meet and marry people with backgrounds very different from their own. Career opportunities may take couples to the other side of the country (or the other side of the world), and this may include the grandchildren.
Grandparents may have careers of their own that keep them from following when their loved ones move away, or perhaps they cannot afford to move. In addition, moving closer to the grandchildren may not be practical because of health considerations: seniors may feel the need to remain near their trusted doctors who have known them for many years and near hospitals where they have come to feel secure.
So, too, climate challenges may keep the extended family apart. Some people cannot bear cold temperatures and snow, others hate heat, and still others have no tolerance for high humidity. Extreme weather conditions can be difficult at any age but are especially problematic in the later years. Some locations may be unsuitable because there are persistent allergens to contend with, from plant pollens to industrial pollution. And some seniors dislike the hustle and bustle of city living, while others cannot imagine living anywhere else.
And as if all these conditions and requirements were not difficult enough, imagine what happens when grandparents do move closer to their grandchildren, only to watch their adult child pick up and leave shortly thereafter. I once asked a retired pharmacist why he had moved to California from New York; he told me that he had relocated to be near his daughter and her husband, both professors at Stanford University, and his two grandchildren - but within a year they had moved back East to accept appointments at Cornell. Should he follow them again? Would they stay in Ithaca? He was puzzled and didn't know what to do.
Now imagine having several adult children with several grandchildren among them, and the families are spread out across the country in different cities. Which set of grandchildren would you follow? How often would you see the others?
The good news is that the lifespan is longer now, giving seniors the longevity to watch their grandchildren (and maybe even their great-grandchildren) grow up. The bad news is that these grandchildren often live far away. So how can long distance grandparents create loving, lifelong bonds with their grandchildren?
Psychological research indicates that there is more to attachment than the amount of time parents and children spend together, and the same principles apply to grandparent/grandchild bonds. Lifelong attachments between grandparents and grandchildren can form even with relatively short periods of physical contact.
Video chat is an amazing tool for long distance grandparents. Grandparents can watch the children grow up, week by week, and in turn, when they meet face to face, the grandparents will not be strangers to the children. With video chat, they can do things together visually: the grandparents might buy two copies of a book at the child's reading level, and send one copy to the grandchild and keep one copy for themselves; Then when they talk on the phone or use video chat, they can read the book together. They can share artwork or "attend" a party virtually. (And yet, is there any real substitution for a big hug and a kiss?)
