REMOTE CONTROL
The art of grandparenting from the sofa of your own living room
Here are some of the best suggestions I’ve encountered for remote grandparenting, starting with younger ones and working up to teenagers and beyond.
The grandparents set a virtual treasure hunt around the parents’ house and garden. Obviously, this requires a bit of advanced planning, but it has the potential to absorb all parties for many hours: setting clues; working out clues; buying the treasure; wiping the coronavirus off the treasure; hiding the treasure; and dealing with the sugar crash once the treasure has been consumed.
Reading books together over Skype or FaceTime. My mother-in-law has started doing this at 6pm every evening, holding up the pictures in front of the camera for the spellbound children. Facebook Portal has a reading app for the more tech savvy. Similarly, older children can practise their own reading in front of their grandparents. One friend’s father has had to be dissuaded from reading Churchill’s biography to their four-year-old, although it might have had a useful soporific effect.
Lots of extended families are still sitting down to eat together, using apps such as Zoom or Houseparty to bring disparate households on to the same screen. This can get chaotic fairly quickly, but if you angle the camera correctly, you can still hide the fact that you’re eating with your elbows on the table and that you don’t use the butter dish they gave you for a wedding present.
See how many poems you can learn and recite to each other. If you’re looking for inspiration, go to poetrygeneration.co.uk, a website launched this week that posts one video per day of a poem read out by a self-isolating older person.
Interview your grandparents about their lives and turn it into a newspaper article. Then translate it into French. Or Mandarin. Learn Mandarin together, if you haven’t already.
Teach your grandchildren something they don’t know, such as how to cook. Grandchildren can consolidate their own learning by teaching their grandparents the GCSE Latin they no longer need or how to suck eggs.
Hold a virtual debate club over Zoom. Agree the motion on Sunday morning, giving all the grandchildren time to prepare, and schedule the debate after lunch.
Taking inspiration from Gary Barlow and Ronan Keating’s virtual duet, attempt to form a family orchestra, each in his own key and time signature (for which you can always blame the slow broadband). I’m keen to try this out for a rousing, three-piano Easter rendition of Thine Be the Glory.
Lots of families are using video apps for long, drawn-out board games, such as chess, Scrabble or Monopoly, or for setting quizzes. To make the game last even longer, you could send each chess move by text message – or by post.
What better time to write proper letters to each other? Revitalise the pleasures of a staggered correspondence, and the thrill of the thud on the doormat. In our family, we’ve bypassed the Royal Mail altogether. My wife visits her father every second day to share, at a two-metre distance, food, moral support and cards made for him by the children. “Grandfather, I love you,” read one from our three-year-old. Which says it all, really.