Amplify: The unique joy of grandparent-grandchild relationships

This is the weekly Amplify newsletter, where you can be inspired and challenged by the voices, opinions and insights of women at The Globe and Mail.

This week’s newsletter was written by Irene Galea, a business reporter at The Globe and Mail.

Of all the types of close bonds – romantic relationships, friendships and family connections – I feel the bond between grandparents and adult grandchildren is given short shrift.

Do an internet search for books about this type of relationship and you will get two kinds of results: cheerful children’s picture books depicting happy kids playing with grandma and grandpa, and books about the grief of losing them.

This is a shame, given the instrumental role this bond plays in many people’s lives. A friend of mine described the love between a grandparent and a grandchild as a laughing love – full of joy, without the strictness or pressures of parent and child relationships. Grandparents can take part in raising a child without all that, meaning they can get more joy out of the experience.

And it’s a bond that grows over time. If you’re lucky, the relationship becomes more egalitarian and mutually supportive. It changes from a caregiver-like relationship to one of deeper understanding, based on friendship.

There are no monolithic rules for what a grandparent-grandchild relationship looks like. Factors like distance, relationships between parents and grandparents, language barriers and cultural norms all shape how we relate to our grandparents.

I’ve been one of the lucky ones: I’ve always been close with my grandparents, and especially my grandmother. We shared a mutual love of sewing and camping. This past summer we even travelled together to England to visit the home she grew up in.

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Nanny’s journey took an unexpected turn in September when she was diagnosed with cancer. In the weeks that followed, I spent a lot of time thinking about how special our connection was.

Most of my friends had lost their grandparents when they were younger, or they didn’t have such a close relationship. And yet I had Nanny for nearly three decades, our bond growing more profound with time.

I began to wonder whether demographic shifts would lead to more – or fewer – relationships like ours. On the one hand, people are living longer. But on the other, the average age of parents at the time of their first child‘s birth is increasing. I wanted to know if this would change the overlap between these two generations.

The staff at Statistics Canada didn’t know. But they directed me to someone who did: demographer Rachel Margolis. As a sociology professor at the University of Western Ontario, she studies how family dynamics shape population change over time.

Margolis found that, on average, the length of time that people are spending as grandparents is either staying the same or increasing. That’s because improvements in health and mortality have more than offset the delays in parenthood.

“People are living as grandparents for a pretty long period of time, historically speaking,” Margolis said. “And they’re in better health for longer, even though they’re becoming grandparents later in life.”

That’s great, because grandparents are important. The first study to examine grandmothers’ brain function suggested they may be more emotionally connected to their grandchildren than to their own adult children.

A 2021 study from Emory University, based on 50 participants, found that when looking at pictures of their grandchildren, the parts of grandmothers’ brains that are responsible for emotional empathy – feeling their pain and joy – light up more than when viewing pictures of their adult children, and even more than the children’s own fathers’ did.

And the value of a grandmother might even be linked to our social and physical evolution as humans. The “grandmother hypothesis” posits that women evolved to live longer than men, on average, because they can provide assistance to their children in raising grandchildren, therefore improving a population’s ability to produce healthy offspring.

For me, having Nanny around for longer meant I had more time to get to know her. In recent years, we spent countless evenings sitting at the dinner table with a glass of wine and sometimes a photo album, talking about her childhood. I have hours of recordings of her now, sharing these memories.

As I grew and matured, I came to understand how she was shaped by the deep losses and challenges she had to overcome in her lifetime. She lived with the absence of a father she never knew. War separated her from her mother. She experienced the death of both her mother and grandmother in the same year. At 21, she became a mother, and later raised two young girls alone, in a country far from her family.

In these trials, I learned the origin of the strength I always saw in her.

But with greater connection comes a deeper sense of loss. When her illness arrived, I realized the gravity of what was before us, in a way I don’t think I would have when I was younger.

In the hospital, in some ways, the role of caregiver reversed. I stroked her hair and kissed her forehead and felt a strong sense of protectiveness over her, the way I imagine a parent might feel about a child.

She passed away in November. I’m deeply grieving her loss. But what I feel too: the gratitude for having known and loved her for so long.

What else we’re thinking about:

I recently finished reading The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath and found the book both relatable and moving. Plath started keeping journals in her teen years, and the book contains entries from the decade that followed. Her poetry is known for its unmediated, raw style. I feel this is even more prominent in her journals, which are stripped of the polite veneer that still predominated at the time, especially in works by women. Plath’s writings are in turn self-obsessed, vulnerable, humorous and dark.

Marianne

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