Aspire to love like a grandparent
My children have been busy “finding themselves” of late. It makes me anxious.
“Finding” was not what I did when I was in my 20s — I was too busy clamoring up the professional ladder of medicine. I got into Cornell Medical School after graduating from public high school and state university, not necessarily the typical path into the Ivy League. My preppy classmates couldn’t quite figure what to make of me. But it didn’t matter since, at the ripe old age of 22, I knew I had “made it” — one way or another, I was set for life. In contrast, my children, who went to private high schools and elite colleges, have forsworn graduate school and are building their own businesses in the liberal arts, struggling to “make it” along a more tortuous and financially hazardous path.
As the parent of such children, I have one of two choices. I can either be the dragon mom, conditioning my love on demands for proscribed behaviors and perceived successes, or I can love my children unconditionally.
Grandparents are, in my experience, role models for the practice of unconditional love.
“Pampering” grandchildren is almost a hallmark of grandparenthood. Not only do grandparents give gifts and sometimes financial support, they give experiences. One older friend took each grandchild on a high school graduation adventure — experiencing together the memorable landscapes, flora and fauna of Alaska and Chile and the Galapagos, places her children would have given their eye teeth to visit. Even more importantly, many grandparents bestow positive reinforcement, no matter what.
Conditional versus unconditional love has become a modern parenting battleground, and many have wondered if all this pampering is good. Is it?
But before we go into that, let’s ask: Why do grandparents behave this way? I can think of several reasons. Perhaps it is because unruly grandchildren can always be handed back to parents for “real life” conditioning. Perhaps it is because grandparents realize this is their best, last chance to be loved back. Perhaps older people just care less about the objective behaviors of their grandchildren and care more
about nurturing a loving relationship.
Although this last possibility seems least obvious (grandparents seem to endlessly crow about their offspring’s achievements), research suggests that with age, you are less likely to react to negative emotional inputs, such as a grandchild’s bad behavior. In laboratory studies in which several stimuli are presented at once, you as older adults are less likely to attend to and process arousing, upsetting stimuli. You are also less likely to store recollections that evoke negative emotions in long-term memory. The frontal lobe, the seat of executive function in the brain, simply down-regulates with age. A dulling of reactivity is good news when it optimizes emotional experience. It can become bad news if the process goes too far, resulting in a kind of dementia. But a little-known benefit that accrues with aging is becoming more “chilled out.”
Now to the question of whether pampering is good. No one knows the best parenting style for children (which is why it is so hotly contested). But we all know how most children feel about grandparents. If you are strongly present in your grandchildren’s lives, they likely have a special, unequivocal love for you — my children have this for their grandparents. Moreover, my children tell me that it was through the eyes of grandparents that they first found some of their passions and talents.
And how about the givers of unconditional love? It turns out to make you not only happier but healthier. As an elder who holds onto fewer negative and more positive emotions, in one survival study, you were one-third less likely than a negative thinker to die in a 10-year follow-up period.
My friend David Mincberg, a highly successful real estate investor, told me that when his children do things that make him crazy, he nonetheless withholds judgment. Instead of jumping in and giving fatherly advice, he waits to see if fatherly advice is requested. If and when that advice is not taken (this should sound familiar to any of you with older children), he continues to shower unconditional love. I can only emulate David’s behavior.
My aspiration is to age fast — to act like a good grandparent. I aspire to make unconditional love the centerpiece of all my relationships.