Lockdown has brought my children closer to their far-away grandparents
Grandparents can still be linchpins for their families while staying safe and isolated, says Iain Hollingshead
When I think of my 73-yearold mother, the last two adjectives that come to my mind (or, I would imagine, to hers) are “elderly” or “vulnerable”. In the past three months alone, she has helped organise the memorial service for her 108-year-old aunt, made several 800-mile round trips to visit her 104-year-old mother (who still lives alone) and gone skiing with her regular group, which includes a retired member of the SAS.
And yet now, like almost every other grandparent, this former surgeon is under house-and-garden arrest, all the while wondering how she and my father can safely support the younger generation: two working sons and daughters-in-law, newly promoted to the vacant roles of au pair, cleaner, school dinner lady, teacher and nursery worker, attempting to do the same number of hours in their existing jobs in half the available time.
My mother’s solution to the new challenges of virtual grandparenting has been the “occupational therapy” of emailing a diverting, daily curriculum for the four eldest grandchildren, aged two to six (if the youngest, aged 16 months, picks up a knife or permanent marker fewer than five times per day, we give ourselves an Ofsted rating of “outstanding”).
Maths Monday, featuring some blank clocks on which the children could draw the time (“Ah, 9.02am already – how time flies”), was followed by Natural History Tuesday, a wonderful way of bringing the countryside to London. Beautiful pictures from a Hampshire bridle path, taken on my mother’s daily Government-mandated exercise, were accompanied by blackand-white versions of the same images which the younger children were encouraged to colour into autumn and summer.
“I made sloe gin with this bush and gave your father a bottle for Christmas,” read the non-DfE-approved commentary next to a blackthorn in glorious bloom. “Ask if he has drunk it yet.”
Don’t be silly. It’s not yet elevenses. Meanwhile, the older grandchildren, both in Year One, were persuaded to fill the bird feeders and jot down any garden visitors in their i-SPY Birds books. This led to a phone call the following morning in which our threeyear-old was bursting to tell her grandmother about the blue tit also having its breakfast outside our window.
“We’ve got a goldfinch nibbling right now,” said my mother.
“Well, we’ve got a huge rat,” said our eldest (we live in Peckham).
And so it has gone on throughout the week, an eclectic mix of geography (“measure the distance between Granny Boat’s house and Great Granny’s”); history (“a teacher trying to work out who started a fight in a playground is a bit like a historian studying who started a war”); and English (“write down as many rhymes for the word ‘sing’ as possible, being careful not to cheat like Grandpa does when he plays Scrabble”).
We’re all appreciating the mutually beneficial distraction so much that we might not tell the children about the
Senior family members go online to connect with – and inspire – their younger relatives
Easter holidays.
Of course, it hasn’t stopped my wife and me occasionally teetering on the brink of madness, our cracked, overwashed fingers itching for the TV remote on a far more regular basis than normal. But it has enabled our surprisingly happy children to grow closer to their grandparents at a time when coronavirus is driving a cruel wedge between the generations.
And clearly, it’s just one example among thousands. A survey published in 2018 by Gransnet discovered that more than 60 per cent of grandparents look after their grandchildren either year-round or in the school holidays. A straw poll among my friends on Facebook suggests that this has not suddenly stopped during the coronavirus pandemic. A very visible army of grandparents is perhaps doing more than ever, just in different ways, proving that social distancing doesn’t have to mean becoming socially distant.