In many families, the parents are exhausted and missing what is in front of them, while the grandparents sitting in the corner read to the child like an open book.
It’s not that the grandparents love the child more. The fact is that they are standing in a different place, under different pressures, and it changes everything they see.
Here’s what’s usually behind it.
1. They are not the main ones
Parents have to feed, clothe and take out the child. Grandparents mostly just have to be with them.
This difference is greater than it seems. When you are not responsible for the outcome, you stop managing and start watching. Grandparents don’t watch if shoes are on or teeth are brushed, so they have extra attention to notice that the child is quiet today, or unusually clingy, or trying to say something they can’t find the words for.
Parents miss these things all the time, not because of neglect, but because they are busy keeping up with all the work.
2. Their clocks run slower
Parents live in a constant time constraint. Grandparents, often retired, have a different relationship with the day.
A child will tell you the most important things in the slowest and most circuitous way imaginable. He comes out from the side, during a long walk, or during the third puzzle. A father racing against the clock cuts it off without much knowledge. Grandparents who have nowhere else to be leave silence, and silence is usually where the real finally emerges.
3. They have already made big mistakes
Once they raised children. They’ve made a lot of mistakes, and they know it.
This story eliminates panic. When a child melts down or says something disturbing, grandparents have seen it before and know that it usually passes. At the same time, parents feel the burden of getting things right, which makes them react more and listen less. The experience lowers the alarm volume. This allows them to remain calm enough to understand what the child is upset about instead of just trying to stop the upset.
4. When a child does something wrong
Parents often take their child’s bad behavior personally. It’s like a verdict on their upbringing.
Grandma and grandpa don’t wear it. That way, when a child lies, or lashes out, or breaks a rule, grandparents can see it for what it usually is: a little person who’s tired, or scared, or checking where the lines are. They are responding to the child, not to their own fear of failure.
Children feel the difference instantly. They tend to confess more and more honestly to a person who is not going to do it about himself.
5. Lower rates change listening
Parents hear “I hate school” and immediately start solving. Is this bullying? Teacher? Should they call someone?
It is more likely that the grandparents will simply ask what happened and continue to listen. They don’t build a case or plan an intervention, so the child can keep talking. Half the time, the child is talking their way into a real problem that they never managed. Parents rush to correct because they love their child and cannot bear to see them hurt.
Grandparents have learned that a longer listen produces more results than a quick fix.
6. They remember being little
Oddly enough, people who are farthest from childhood in years are sometimes closest to it in memory.
That which is old brings attention back to the early things. Grandparents often remember with real clarity what it was like to be small, powerless, and disbelieving. This memory makes them fragile precisely in those places where busy parents forget. They remember that a small disappointment feels huge when you’re six. They take the child’s big feelings seriously because they haven’t forgotten how big those feelings are inside.
7. They want to enjoy the child, not to shape it
Parents are always working on who that child is becoming in some part of every interaction. Each correction, each reaction has a small weight for who they will turn out to be.
The grandparents mostly took over this job. They are not trying to mold the child into anything. They just want to know who the child is, today, as they are. This transition from formation to pleasure makes the child feel accepted, which is rarely the case. The child feels that he is happy, not getting better. And a child who feels excited will show you a lot more of who he really is.
Grandparents are no better than parents. Parents carry a heavy, everyday, ugly burden, and it is this burden that closes the review. Give grandparents a full-time job, and the same fog rolls over them.
However, there is something worth borrowing. The next time your child is struggling to read, it may help to put the to-do list aside for ten minutes and just observe them as a person who has nowhere to be would do.
