Congratulations grandparent!

It’s their baby, not yours.....

Life as a grandparent is amazing and instructive. New generations introduce new ways of parenting. Here are my four main take-aways from my first year as a proud mother and grandmother.

1. Your children are no longer children but parents!

Seeing your child hold their newborn baby is deeply moving. They will always be ‘your child’ but they are no longer ‘a child’.

Although our instinct is to step forward with advice or offers of support, we do far better to step back. We show trust by creating a space for them to take full ownership of parenting in their own way.

And yes, that means they will make mistakes, just like we once did. But these mistakes are their mistakes to make. And through them they will discover their own resilience, becoming strong and responsible parents.

2. Grandparenting on demand - our role in the system

From cave paintings onwards, artists have depicted the new family unit as one figure holding the baby, with another holding them both.

Initially, the newborn experiences itself as an extension of the mother who, gifted with ready made milk, often becomes the primary caregiver in the bonding process. The partner, who holds both mother and baby is then called the secondary caregiver.

Of course, children can be equally well cared for when adopted, born through surrogates, or born into other-sexed couples. And research shows that in the early months, this pattern of a primary and a secondary caregiver remains the same.

That neatly shows us our role as grandparents, since we are, if invited, like tertiary caregivers. We ‘hold’ the new family unit in a supportive and loving embrace.

And that can mean stepping back as much as stepping up. Or stepping out with the dogs because the new parents just don’t have time for them right now!

3. You can see but you can’t touch

There is a real generational split when it comes to grandparents expressing a sense of entitlement about ‘holding the baby’ soon after birth.

Because young parents are increasingly being advised to create a safe ‘first month’ cocoon. They might say ‘you can see but you can’t touch.’ Covid has taught us all we need to know about virus transmission, but there good psychological reasons too.

Your newborn grandchild is navigating the world by smell. This dictates how they feel and who to trust. The day-to-day parents, delivering sweet smelling milk, signal safety and satiation, whatever the constellation of the family unit. Sometimes others are invited into that circle too, becoming a part of that safe smelling bubble.

The rest of us are visitors in those early days and we just don’t have the ‘smell appeal’.

So given what we now know about smell, bonding and anxiety, we can be patient and allow our grandchild to bond securely with its most important people first, knowing our time will come soon enough.

4. Protect your grandchild from social media predators

The ban on posting baby pictures on social media is another source of generational friction.

If the birth of your baby coincided with the early days of Facebook, then you may well have posted images of every burp, fart or cute nudy crawls on grandma’s sheepskin rug. However, in just over twenty years, social media have gone from being a fun family scrapbook to a place where predators roam.

Leah Plunkett, Director of Harvard Law School Online, coined the term "sharenting" in her 2019 book on the risks of oversharing on social media. She suggests that it exposes children to identity theft and harassment while also undermining their ability to shape their own narrative as they grow. In the worst case, images can be manipulated and used in child pornography.

Of course we want to show the world how amazing our grandbabies are. My solution was to create a trusted group of friends, who know the social media rules, and who also support me in my progress.

And I could go on and on. If I was writing this ‘grandpanting’ manual, (as the ChatGPT image creator insists on calling it), then I would definitely add more chapters about oversharing, digital apps, compassionate boundary setting, and most of all, the mantra that “it’s their baby, not ours.”

If we invest in allowing our children to be the parents to their children, we will reap the rewards later. Because we pay the love forward, into our children who pour it into our grandchildren.

Surely there is nothing better than that!

If you are a grandparent, maybe you recognize yourself, do you have anything to add?

Or if you are a new parent, did I miss something important, do you want to share?

And yes, I am well aware that grandparenthood can be painful too. After a divorce for example, or a death. When children become ill, or when cross cultural families clash over the ‘right’ tradition.

If this is a subject you want to talk about with a professional, then you can always contact me for a free half hour trial consultation. I always look forward to hearing from you.