In the same way as mothers and fathers have a special bond with their children, so do grandparents too.
While not everyone has the good fortune to have their grandparents in their life for a significant amount of time, those that do are extremely blessed.
Thankfully, with the average life expectancy in Australia rising year after year, more young people than ever before are enjoying longer relationships with their grandparents.
If you are about to bring a child into this world or already are a parent, it is important to foster a loving grandparent-grandchildren relationship where possible.
In case you are not aware of the reasons why here are 10 main benefits of fostering this bond.
Children Receive extra love
Our children are the loves of our lives, and we give them every last ounce of love we have.
While this is something they do feel (regardless of if you think they don’t), there is no harm in encouraging them to experience the extra love that can only come from a grandparent.
For this reason, do not underestimate the positive effects on your child of having loving and caring grandparents.
Whether they be the soft-hearted and cuddly type, or more strict disciplinarians, your child’s emotional and social development will benefit enormously from regular interaction with your parents.
Impress family values on your child
You’ll naturally want to have a good relationship with your children. But it is also within your interest to ensure they have good relationships with your parents too.
Doing this will impress the importance of family values on your child. Which will in turn shape their personality, how they view themselves and also treat others.
Grandparents can help out
Parenting can be very hard, especially if you have to work as well, as you will have to juggle multiple roles and tasks. So, if you have grandparents that live near you it can be a godsend.
By looking after and spending time with them, grandparents can help you save money on childcare fees, as well as give you time to get important housework or employment tasks completed.
They may also welcome the opportunity to spend time with their grandchildren whilst also allowing you and your partner to enjoy the occasional date or social night out.
Grandparents can gain a greater sense of purpose
Some seniors struggle to find a sense of purpose in their later years.
So, allowing them to spend time, and even help with the raising of your children can go some way to helping them achieve this.
Just be sure that both the grandchild, and more importantly the grandparents, recognise that you are the parent, and thus don’t try to undermine your overall authority.
If can keep them fitter and sharper too
As well as an increased sense of purpose, spending quality time with their grandchildren has some additional benefits for the grandparents too.
Some studies suggest that seniors who are more involved in the lives of their grandkids tend to have sharper minds and perform better on cognitive tests.
Grandchildren may even be able to relate to them more as well. Particularly if their elders take an interest in the DVDs and TV shows they watch (yes that means singing songs by The Wiggles), or their schoolwork, projects and performances.
Grandparents who do this can often feel more in tune and less isolated from the world around them too.
Children see the importance of other relationships
Whether the grandparents stay at an aged care facility like Kew Gardens or they live down the road, it’s important to cultivate this grandparent-grandchild relationship.
Children learn predominantly from what they see, not from what they hear.
So, if they see you have a good relationship with your partner, parents, siblings, and close friends, then they are more likely to recognize the importance of developing the same for themselves.
In this respect, grandparents provide an excellent way to reinforce this learned behaviour.
Children have someone to confide in
Growing up can be difficult for children, especially as they enter their pre-teen and teenage years when emotions can be hard for them to interpret.
Sometimes children just don’t want to talk to their parents about these issues, especially after a divorce, which is where grandparents can come in.
Should your child have a good bond with their grandparents, they might feel more comfortable talking about things like relationships, bullying, or any tough or embarrassing situation they might have found themselves in, with them.
The more trusted people your child has to confide in the better.
Grandparents teach children about life
One thing our parents have over us is that they have more experience in life, certainly, when it comes to the number of years, they have been alive anyway.
Over the years, seniors accrue a lot of life knowledge, having faced many challenges of their own.
To help them prepare for what’s to come in their lives, grandparents can impart many pearls of wisdom on their grandchildren. This could come in very handy later on in their lives when your children draw upon these axioms and epigrams as required.
They can teach about family history too
Sooner or later children want to know more about their family history. So, what better resource to draw up than their grandparents?
Grandparents play a crucial role in relating family history, narrating stories and details about their parents and other generations of your family tree.
Kids will soak up this information like a sponge, and it will give them a greater sense of their identity and where they came from.
Children have lifelong memories
It’s a sad fact of life that grandparents will not be in their grandchildren’s life forever. So, a major benefit of a positive grandparent-grandchild relationship is that it will create wonderful lifelong memories for the child.
Whether that be the grandparents taking them to the park, playing board games with them, baking with them, or watching sports. Every moment a grandparent spends with their grandchild is a precious opportunity to give them an evocation to cherish for the rest of their lives.
