MIND MOVES: The emotional world of the child centres on a few crucial close attachments. One of the most significant of these attachments is that of a child to its' grandparents. This is a relationship of immeasurable psychological importance in a child's life, conferring emotional, social, cultural and cognitive benefits on grandchildren.
The grandchild/grandparent relationship is a relationship of transgenerational kinship. It is a declaration of connection, a certificate of continuity and most importantly a strong bond of love. Indeed, there seems to be a special and unique love that children reserve for their grandparents.
This is different to their love for their parents. It is different to their relationship with their siblings, and dissimilar to connections with their peers, yet it may influence the child in most of his or her other relationships throughout childhood and adolescence, for those children lucky enough to have the company of their grandparents at least during those years.
For grandparents, the birth of a grandchild is a major event. It is a new life whose origin can be traced back through their own lives, encapsulated in this their child's child. It is a transgenerational arc from the past to the present into the future and beyond.
Many grandparents admit they can enjoy time with their grandchildren that they were unable to savour when rearing their own children. Then the relentless responsibilities of parenting, the daily drudge of work and money, of school denied them the time to appreciate their young.
And there are whole generations of grandfathers, who, when they were fathers, were banished to the margins of their children's lives in provider roles. These men, as grandfathers, are now seizing and retrieving that "lost" time, to experience the profundity of the company of children and the depth of their own caring capacities.
But grandparenting is also the best of roles with children, "lovely to see them and lovely to see them go", the rearguard of responsibility rather than the front lines. And sometimes, through these children, old parent/grandparent rifts are healed, a second chance for each.
Some children are privileged with the presence of both their parents' parents in their lives. With extended life spans there are less children with the duo of widowed grannies of previous times. Yet each grandparent plays a specific role in the child's mind.
While the stereotype of shawl-clad, spectacled, fireside, rocking-chair grandmother and walking-stick, pipe-smoking, tweed-jacketed grandfather may no longer be available to the child of today, children often nostalgically idealise "way back then", "when you were young", "long ago" past that they imagine their grandparents inhabited.
This is because grandparents are the holders of history, providing privileged access to the grandchild into the childhood of his or her own parents. They remember what not even a child's own parent remembers, when their parents were babies, what they were like as children.
There is mutuality in the knowledge exchanges between grandparent and grandchild. Children trade the secrets of technology for the traditions of the past. They may instruct their grandparents on cyberspace and text or the finer functions of DVD in exchange for glimpses into a way of life fast fading. Children often share activities with grandparents; complicated jigsaws, card games or chess, the skills of being still and listening to silence, that are not part of their usual occupational repertoires.
Adolescents glow in the acceptance of grandparents. Even the most recalcitrant buckles before the gentle unconditional regard of an adoring grandmother, the stolid, sensitive, solidity of a grandfather's careful comment. Grandparents may be privy to the most compassionate characteristics of their grandchildren, "softness" that may be hidden from parental eyes.
Grandparents may validate the struggling child, favour the least-favoured; provide refuge at a difficult time, stability during parental divorce and mediate between the adolescent and the world. Grandfathers may provide granddaughters with heart-warming experiences of gentlemanly courtesy, and their grandsons with model of behaviour absent in the current course world. Children learn from their grandparents merely by being in their presence.
Children without grandparents sense at a deep unarticulated level that they have lost out on an irreplaceable relationship and the tragedy of parental separation and divorce often includes the exclusion of grandchildren from their grandparents, a special grief for each and a human right denied.
The grandparent-grandchild relationship is an extraordinary intricate affinity, an exquisite construction by nature to enrich and enhance the lives of both children and their grandparents in incomparable ways. And even when a grandparent dies, which is often the child's first encounter with death, grandchildren may understand the seasonality of life, the "time to be born and a time to die", and they may learn that people live on after death in the memories we hold, the manner in which they shaped our lives and in the vow to tell their own grandchildren some day about their great, great grandparents.
- Marie Murray is Director of Psychology at St Vincent's Hospital Fairview, mmurray@irish-times.ie