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The generation gap feels wider than ever – but grandchildren are better for you than Sudoku
Grandparents who take an active role in childcare report lower levels of depression and have better cognitive functioning. Lucy Denyer reports – and offers some tips on how to get to grips with young people’s world
Several times a week, one, two or all three of Marcia Milne’s young grandsons potter over to her house after school: one might come over for a bath and a chat; the eldest, Bran, a bookworm, might want to share his latest literary discovery or Fox, the smallest, will interrupt a game of bridge to say hello. Milne takes them on outings and listens to their problems, being careful not to ask too many leading questions. They, in turn, confide in her and treat her hot water supply with casual impunity.
Milne’s home in southwest London is in what was originally the garage of her family home, now converted into a house for her and her husband, with their daughter Flora, her husband Nick and the three boys living in the main house next door. She admits that it’s not always plain sailing. “Flora’s got her own way of doing things, quite rightly, and I have to be very careful not to undermine her discipline,” she says. “I’m more lenient and often not perhaps as strict as I should be and I do get into trouble for that.” Nevertheless, the extended family setup, complete with collective family card games on Friday evenings, sounds pretty ideal.
Grandchildren will make you happier, and grow your brain
Experts agree that this kind of setup is good for everyone, regardless of generation. “We human beings are pack animals, and we’re meant to have groups of people that form our world,” explains Ryan Lowe, child psychotherapist and spokesperson for the Association of Child Psychotherapists. “Grandparents are the obvious best option for extending your pack out of just a nuclear family.” This is good for kids because it helps them form additional internal working models of human behavior, which in turn helps them build healthy relationships. For grandparents, meanwhile, “one of the best ways of not experiencing too much detriment in your cognitive thinking is to keep growing your brain. Sudoku is one thing, but grandchildren are a whole other level,” laughs Lowe. Recent research backs her up: a 2021 Emory University study found that emotional empathy was strong in grandmothers who spent more time with their grandchildren; those who spend time with their grandchildren report lower levels of depression and loneliness, while a 2023 study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that even those providing minimal care to their grandchildren had better cognitive functioning than non-caregivers.
The age of the grandparent
The chasm of understanding can be wide, however. We are in the age of the grandparent: there are 1.5bn grandparents worldwide, accounting for 20 per cent of the population, and the ratio of grandparents to grandchildren is higher than ever before. But even the youngest of today’s grandparents will have had a significantly different childhood to that now being experienced by their grandchildren, who are growing up in a tech-dominated world with a whole new, and often bewildering, set of societal mores and norms. Throw in the fact that, with soaring childcare costs, nine million British grandparents now spend an average of eight hours a week helping to care for their grandchildren, and many of the thorny issues become impossible to avoid.
Academic Vicki Harman, who has studied grandparenting, observed in a 2022 paper that “the two central norms of grandparenting are ‘being there’ and ‘not interfering’” – but that these dual approaches can be difficult, “because while grandparents feel they should not interfere in the way in which their children raise their grandchildren, they also feel a sense of responsibility to their grandchildren, and worry that on some occasions not interfering could be interpreted as not caring”.
So if you’re spending more time with your grandchildren – or if you’d like to get to know them better – how can you go about it, especially in those tricky areas of tension? And what are the real benefits of trying?