Opinion: grandparents matter, and should be treated like they do

Many of us hope to be grandparents and research demonstrates that, as we grow older, becoming a grandparent gives us a greater sense of wellbeing. Our identity as grandparents depends on our ability to perform the role. Being a grandparent can be something of a balancing act. In our research, grandparents talked about the difficulty of being available and supportive but not interfering. The following is a sample of their comments.

“… and I guess I’m still trying to find my role in it all and how [I should] act. What is the healthy way in a normal family [that] a grandparent relates to an adult child? [How do I relate to] my adult daughter and husband as a separate unit now, and then to the grandchildren?”, Daisy, a maternal grandmother, said.

Being able to act in the grandparent role depends on a range of factors. Grandparents whose relationships with their children were problematic in the past often find that their contact with grandchildren is limited by their children, who act as gatekeepers. In our research, grandparents reported the hurt they felt when this happened to them:

“Despite you being a parent and doing what you consider the right thing in your upbringing and doing the best you could all the time, Sharon [grandmother] and I are just shocked at the hostility [from their son] … If I could describe the early days when all this started happening, it was like an ongoing death,” said Ron, a paternal grandfather.

Grandparents sometimes struggled to maintain a relationship with their daughter- or son-in law and these problematic relationships also limited their access to their grandchildren:

“We used to have our firstborn granddaughter every weekend … We had a few run-ins with [our son-in-law]. They then started to say that we didn’t respect him … We didn’t do what they wanted … and he told Neville that as long as we live, we’ll never have the children,” Neville and Jane, maternal grandparents, said.

When relationships fractured in the parental generation, grandparents often had difficulty maintaining relationships with their grandchildren as well, particularly if their child was the non-custodial parent of the grandchildren:

“The marriage broke down … The problem was that our son at the time of their breakdown had another lady friend. So the mother was, naturally, really very angry about that … Unfortunately, the mother has made it very difficult for our son, the father of the child, to have any contact with the child, or with us of course,” said Kevin, a paternal grandfather.

Re-partnering of the parental generation also can make it difficult for grandparents to maintain contact with their grandchildren:

“She met another man, and at first, everything seemed OK. He’s seemed quite comfortable with us around. And then, it was this opposition … When she fell pregnant again, to him, they got really peculiar, and I … was allowed to see the children only with supervision … Then it got to this stage where I’m never allowed to see the children at all,” Denise, a paternal grandmother, said.

Sometimes grandparents felt they were allowed to be involved in their grandchildren’s lives when they could provide support but were excluded when that support was no longer necessary:

“[My daughter] was working only part-time so I was minding him and taking him to wherever she was working so she could breastfeed … she wasn’t working for very long. Then I got a phone call saying we just want to be a family, do it ourselves,” said maternal grandmother Genevieve.

Those who were excluded from the lives of their grandchildren often felt they were failures and that others perceive this as a sign that they have done something terribly wrong:

“And that’s the way the public see you – you must have treated them badly or [done] something terrible to create that situation,” maternal grandfather Ronald said.

Many of the grandparents reported that there was nothing they could do to improve the situation and this lack of agency had a major impact on their wellbeing: “We seem to have no one on our side to help us and the grief at times is unbearable,” said Louise, a paternal grandmother.

Some of the grandparents talked about the major health effects of this stress:

“I cried every day. I felt sick. I felt guilty. I felt shame. Even now, when I go out, I don’t like going out … Yeah, it’s a shame, an embarrassment … It feels like I’m the only one … I have chest pain … It’s really taken a toll on me,” said Marion, a maternal grandmother.

We often use the phrase, ‘It takes a village to raise a child’. However, it is too easy to forget that grandparents are an important part of the child’s village.

Grandparents can offer a range of support, including babysitting, childcare, and emotional or financial support, all of which help parents create more positive child-rearing environments.

Having supportive family networks improves family resiliency and early-childhood professionals have a role in helping people establish these wider family support networks (a concept in the early-childhood literature called the ‘circle of security’ ), which, ultimately, improve outcomes for children.

Margaret Sims is a professor of early-childhood education at the University of New England. You can explore her grandparenting research further by watching her film.  

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