On a visit to my doctor, I asked how his new grandchild was doing. He told me with pleasure that he had just returned from a recent visit. The families live in opposite ends of the country and they take turns visiting once a month so that he can see his granddaughter and watch her development monthly.
I wondered to myself if he had watched his daughter’s development that closely. Many grandparents I know are bemoaning their children’s late marriages, delay in having children – women as well as men – pursuing professional careers, and generally living life on a different timetable than they had.
Life consists of many stages, which psychological theorists define differently. Freud focused on psychosexual stages, particularly early childhood. Erik Erikson, considered an ego psychologist, defined the stages he delineated as psychosocial stages, to include the impact of social experience across an entire lifespan.
Later theorists, such as Jerome Kagan, believed that both biology and environment were important factors in development and questioned the widespread belief that adult personality was determined by childhood experience alone. But it was Gail Sheehy, a journalist not a psychologist, whose book, Passages, focused attention on the transitions that people make in their adult lives.
Before Passages was published in the late ‘70’s, the stages of children’s lives were well known, but little had been written about how adults develop. Sheehy described the development of both women and men and showed that women’s lives have different changes from men’s. She was one of the early writers to focus on an important problem that continues to face contemporary women: combining motherhood and a career.
Life does consist of many stages but surely becoming a grandparent is a major transition in development. Perhaps having had to give up the mothering role with their adult children, grandmothers in particular look forward to what they hope will be the next stage in their children’s lives and their own.
Grandmothers seem to fall in love with their grandchildren in a somewhat different way than they did with their children. They are more likely to see various behaviors of a young grandchild as age appropriate – perhaps even charming. Their own children may accuse them of being more tolerant of their grandchild’s behavior than of their own behavior when they were growing up.
Why are grandparents so much more relaxed with their grandchildren than they were as parents? One reason may be that they do not feel ultimate responsibility for how their grandchildren are raised. Mothers in particular worry about whether they are doing it “right.” The many shelves of books in the book stores with child rearing advice are a testimony to the concerns of parents.
Erikson named his last developmental stage of late adulthood, Integrity vs. Despair, during which people reflecting on their lives feel a sense of satisfaction or failure, the latter leading to feelings of “what should have, could have” been.
For grandparents, grandchildren hopefully are not a means of still achieving “what might have been”, but rather contribute enormously to the feeling of satisfaction in adult life.
Good Enough Mothering 