The Transition from Parent to Grandparent

The transition from being a parent to being a grandparent is both sudden and steady. Hopefully it is also graceful, if one is willing to accept the changes attendant to it. But for those who resist change, the journey from being a parent to a grandparent can be sorrowful. There is a loss of power and importance – even with the potential gain of enjoyment.

Where a parent may need to get in the ring of wresting with a wayward child, a grandparent gets to stand outside the ring, and in the child’s corner. A loving advisor may be looked to more than a pleading parent.

This assumes that the grandparents do not have to share or to take over the parenting responsibilities, should the parents be unwilling or unable to parent satisfactorily. There is more of that going on these days than ever before. Though we may be more understanding, calmer, and simply better parents later in life, our energy and endurance are not what they once were.

Among the vital nutrients that grandparents can bring to their grandchildren are these: peace, acceptance and wisdom. Who better than a grandparent to restore calm and generate faith and hope? Who can deliver to a troubled grandchild more effectively and believably convictions like: “it’s all going to work out” or “this too will pass” or “everything happens for the best” or “don’t worry, we will get through this”?

Grandparents are more readily able to accept what parents cannot, because they have been through the whole process and know that in the end life goes on and remains worthwhile, that in the end most everything is small stuff.

Grandparents can more easily affirm and love their grandchildren unconditionally, while parents are still trying to motivate if not manipulate their children into becoming what they can become – at least as envisioned by the parents. Grandparents have less ego involvement, less to prove and more to simply enjoy. And children would much rather be enjoyed than pressured.

Grandparents generally do not ask as much of their grandchildren as parents do of their children. They appreciate and value them as they are, and are usually more expressively grateful for whatever grandchildren do for them than are the parents, who are still weighing and measuring what their children do in response to what they do for them.

Grandparents have a wisdom that emerges as the fruit of living. Pity that more grandchildren, as well as children, do not seek and respect the wisdom of aging. This is why I say that if youth is wasted on the young, then wisdom is wasted on the aged.

At the heart of the wisdom of grandparents is their calmed clarity concerning what really matters and what does not. Being relationally fruitful, successful in love and able to fully enjoy your daily life are what really matters. That is all we really have: Our daily life. If you cannot truly enjoy living today, you may eventually regret it, when the days have shortened and the grave has drawn near. That is one of my few regrets: I did not enjoy my daily life as much as I could and should have. And I cannot go back to relive it.

Who better than a grandparent to understand and relate that what really matters is enjoying, loving one another across the ever beautiful, sometimes treacherous but always amazing journey called life? Grandparents know they cannot wish their grandchildren more than to wish them well in love.