• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, September 10, 2024

You might have missed it, but last Sunday was Grandparents Day. And the world has a lot of grandparents. In fact, according to an article in The Economist, at no time in history has the ratio of grandparents to grandchildren been higher.

The boom in boomer and Gen X grandparents was statistically predictable. Since 1960, global life expectancy has jumped from 51 years to 72 years. At the same time, the number of children a woman can expect to have in her lifetime has been halved, from 5 to 2.4. Those two trendlines mean that the ratio of grandparents to children under 15 has vaulted from 0.46 in 1960 to 0.8 today. According to a little research The Economist conducted, it’s estimated that there are 1.5 billion grandparents in the world.

My wife and I are two of them.

So what does this mean to the three generations involved?

Grandparents have historically served two roles. First, they -- and by they, I mean typically the grandmother -- provided an extra set of hands to help with child rearing. And that makes a significant difference to children, especially if they were born in an underdeveloped part of the world. Children in poorer nations with actively involved grandparents have a higher chance of survival. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, a child living with a grandparent is more likely to go to school.

But what about in developed nations, like ours? What difference could grandparents make? That brings us to the second role of grandparents: passing on traditions and instilling a sense of history. And with the western world’s obsession with fast-forwarding into the future, that could prove to be of equal significance

Here I have to shift from looking at global samples to focusing on the people that happen to be under our roof.

First of all, gender-specific roles are not as tightly bound in my generation as they were in previous generations.  My wife and I pretty much split grandparenting duties down the middle. It’s a coin toss as to who changes the diaper. That would be unheard of in my parents’ generation, when Grandpa seldom pulled the diaper patrol shift.

Kids learn gender roles by looking at not just their parents, but also their grandparents. The fact that it’s not solely the grandmother that provides nurturing, love and sustenance is a move in the right direction.

But for me, the biggest role of being “Papa” is to try to put today’s wired world in context. It’s something we talk about with our children and their partners.

Just last weekend my son-in-law referred to how he and my daughter think about screen time with my two-year-old grandson: heads up versus heads down.  Heads up is when we share screen time with the grandchild, cuddling on the couch while we watch something on a shared screen. We’re there to comfort if something is a little too scary, or laugh with them if something is funny. As the child gets older, we can talk about the themes and concepts that come up. Heads-up screen time is sharing time -- and it’s one of my favorite things about being “Papa.”

Heads down screen time is when the child is watching something on a tablet or phone by themselves, with no one sitting next to them. As they get older, this type of screen time becomes the norm. When we talk about the potential damage too much screentime can do, I suspect a lot of that comes from heads down screentime. Grandparents can play a big role in promoting a healthier approach to the many screens in kids’ lives.

As mentioned, grandparents are a child’s most accessible link to their own history. And it’s not just grandparents. Increasingly, great grandparents are also a part of childhood. This was certainly not the case when I was young. I was at least a few decades removed from knowing any of my great grandparents.

This increasingly common connection gives yet another generational perspective. And it’s a perspective that is important. Sometimes, trying to bridge the gap across four generations is just too much for a young mind to comprehend. Grandparents can act as intergenerational interpreters -- a bridge between the world of our parents and that of our grandchildren.

In my case, my mother and father-in-law were immigrants from Calabria in Southern Italy. Their childhood reality was set in World War II. Their history spans experiences that would be hard for a child today to comprehend – the constant worry of food scarcity, having to leave their own grandparents (and often parents) behind to emigrate, struggling to cope in a foreign land far away from family and friends.

I believe that the memories of these experiences cannot be forgotten. It is important to pass them on, because history is important.

One of my favorite recent movie quotes was in “The Holdovers” and was spoken by Paul Giamatti (who also had grandparents who came from Southern Italy), playing a history teacher: “Before you dismiss something as boring or irrelevant, remember, if you truly want to understand the present or yourself, you must begin in the past. You see, history is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present.”

Grandparents can be the ones that connect the dots between past, present and future. It’s a big job -- an important job. Thank heaven there are so many of us to do it.