I have come to realize that the way you learned how to be a mother was from your children. Some of that learning may also apply to being a grandmother.  What I learned has served me well throughout life.

     When my younger son was about four years old, he told me that the “trouble with you is that you overblow.” I asked him what overblow meant and he explained it meant that you don’t get mad when you are mad and then you get so mad that you overblow. That was a profound insight, especially from a four-year- old.

     Sorry to say, at the time that feedback from my child probably had a greater influence on my dealing with others, especially professionally, then it did with my responses to my children. Mothers tend to “overblow” when a child seems not to be paying attention – or as parents say, “not listening”. Patience tends to run out when you have other chores to attend to.

    Also, as a parent you are particularly vulnerable to feeling that your children’s behavior is. a reflection on you. That feeling is reinforced when others blame parents for a child’s misbehavior.  A pleasure of being a grand parent is that the relationship is most often free of the the need to reprimand or chastise issues of misbehavior.

     My granddaughter as a young child told me to “listen to the children.” At the time she seemed to be telling me to pay attention to the children’s point of view when parents were telling their own story about a child and his or her behavior. What I understood about this was not that children were telling a different version of the same story but instead were expressing different feelings from those I had heard from parents.

     Basically, in any disagreement between people there are different points of view about events, or in this case about behavior.   I think children are asking us to listen to how they think and feel rather than to what parents may be reporting. As grandparents it may be easier to do that, and children may get the sense that we hear them – that we understand them, without regard for the so-called facts of a given situation.

     Most of us would like to feel understood by others. Not always easy to do in daily interactions.  I don’t think our grandchildren are necessarily asking us to take sides in a conflict they may have with their parents. The challenge for us as grandparents may be to provide the understanding and support that our grandchildren seek without that turning into criticism of their parents and thereby creating a generational conflict.

 I continue to learn from my grandchildren as I did from my children.

     As a child learning history in school, it came as a shock to think that my parents lived through and remembered the first world war.  To me that was ancient history, impossible to identify with anyone currently alive – especially my parents. Now, having lived through the great depression, second world war, Vietnam war, the Civil Rights movement and the rebirth of Feminism, it is not only my children but my grandchildren who see me as part of ancient history.

     As well they might, having themselves lived through a major pandemic, the attack of 911, as well as more recent conflagrations such as the war in the Ukraine and between Israel and Hamas.  Not to mention the technological changes that have transformed the environment in which they live.

     My own grandparents came from Russia and are recognizable to me as   the inhabitants of Fiddler on the Roof. Their lives are almost more familiar to me than the contemporary lives of my grandchildren. The contemporary world of my grandchildren seems almost more remote to me than the world of my parents, grandparents and even my own.

     The social and cultural changes brought about during this generational history have had an impact on relationships between women and men, between parents and children, and by implication between parents and grandchildren.  For one thing, the nuclear family is often no longer nuclear.

Children now grow up in what is called blended families, with brothers and sisters who are offspring of different sets of parents than their own. As a result, they may also have multiple sets of grandparents – for better or worse. The age span between siblings is often greater than in years gone by.

     The Fifties image of the working father and the stay-at-home homemaker mom is no longer applicable. Some moms may now be primary wage earners while dads now wash dishes as well as mow the lawn. These changes undoubtedly have had an impact on the way children develop.

     The saying is, the more things change, the more they are the same. The problem in relationships between men and women, parents and children, may be that the things that have changed often conflict with those that have stayed the same. Ideas about these relationships have changed, but the feelings attached to older ideas remain the same.

     The conflict between new ideas and old feelings can create various issues in relationships. Children growing up today are exposed to the new ideas but also to the older feelings often transmitted by previous generations.

     Listening to my grandchildren, I can hear expressions from time to time of both sides of the conflict, as well as their attempts at resolution. A benefit of growing old!

     Recently, my thoughts have gone to a line in Leonard Cohen’s poem Anthem – “forget your perfect offerings”.  The preceding line says to “ring the bells that still can ring.” I thought of this when listening to a discussion between grandchildren. Perhaps at their ages, stages, they see many bells that still can ring and want to ring them all.

     One of my grandson’s advised his younger cousin not to take the advice of parents too seriously.  He reported that he had rejected all of his father’s advice until he heard the same thing from others and found it out himself. He later learned that everything his father told him was true but it didn’t have any effect until he learned it from his own experience.

    I wonder if it is a characteristic of parents to want their children to learn from the parent’s experience, perhaps with the thought of preventing them from making mistakes. Perhaps it is also characteristic of many children to believe they will not make the mistakes they think their parents may have made.

     Some years ago, my son asked his father if someone had died and left him some money. His father asked what made him think that, and my son replied that repairs needed in the house for some time now were being taken care of. Apparently, it did not occur to him that household money management was involved in putting aside funds needed for the repairs.

     Perhaps it may also be that children do not understand why they are unable to have everything they want and attribute the limits on available funds to parental inadequacy, or to mistakes a parent has made that they will not make. It is only through their own life experience ringing different bells that they learn which ones may ring for them and perhaps it is also what leads them eventually to give up their “perfect offering.”

     It is this ongoing cycle of parents wanting children to learn from the parents’ own life experience, and children insisting on learning from the realities of their own lives, that makes the world move forward. In any case, that is the belief of some of today’s leading innovators, such as Musk, Bezos, and Buffett.

     Grandparents, on the other hand may see the value in both sides, agreeing with what parents have learned through experience, yet identifying and supporting grandchildren in their own quests and search for their own life experience. Perhaps that can be a major contribution of grandparents to their grandchildren’s lives.

     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.

     It seems as though all emotional experience has become a battleground to be fought in the culture war.  A recent entry is an essay presenting “mom rage” as a social diagnosis, as well as a result of the pandemic. The author of the essay resorts to feminist theory as well as to others. Perhaps developmental theory is not one that was considered.

     Very young children are not yet completely socialized, are not yet aware of the need to consider others, and have little control of their impulses.  Also, language skills are just developing and they are often not able to say what they need or want.

      I encountered this when coming upon my very young grandson interacting with an aunt who was visiting. Without thinking I began a conversation with the visitor who politely responded to me, whereupon the child began poking her and becoming provocative. Understanding what was happening I told my grandson that I realized I had interrupted his play with his aunt and that he could tell her, “My turn” instead of poking her. He was able to do this and further conflict was avoided.

     I realize that as the grandmother I was not the one being provoked and as an onlooker could understand the child’s behavior. When mothers are primary caregivers, they may have to deal with comparable situations many times a day when they have many other responsibilities and are often stressed physically and emotionally. They need or want compliance from the child and may not be so understanding of his behavior and developmental level.

     These may be the moments when a mother’s own anger rises to the surface and she may struggle with her own impulse to lash out at the child. If this is the “mother rage” the author is experiencing it is a common feeling that almost all mothers can recognize, full-time mothers in particular.

     Of course, these days many mothers are also working mothers, meaning they have multiple responsibilities and sources of stress beyond a child’s behavior. And despite the significantly greater participation by fathers, mothers often remain responsible for addressing child-care needs, plus the usual household responsibilities.

     Grandparents can, and often do pitch in to help when living close enough. There are grandparents who have been able to take over daily care in families with working mothers.  Do grandmothers then experience the “mother rage” referred to?  My own experience suggests they do not. Perhaps the difference lies in the feeling of responsibility for a child’s behavior. Mothers are the ones blamed or criticized for a child’s behavior. It may be the feeling that it is somehow her fault that intensifies her anger when a child is provocative or misbehaves.

     In any case, parents do need help in the child-rearing years. Help from grandparents may be a partial solution when possible but a broader family support system is needed, particularly good, affordable child care. Theorizing about “mother rage” is not the support needed.

      An old movie by that name told a story about an event as it was experienced by three different participants.  Each participant gave a different version of what had occurred.  I was reminded of this in a recent conversation with a grandchild about a family matter that all other family members were aware of in one way or another.

     In this conversation my grandchild had his own point of view and also one about everyone else’s perspective in the matter.  I too, had a point of view and had heard the view of others directly from them individually. None were alike – including my own. Yet each one believed his point of view was the correct one.

     My grandchildren each also had an opinion about what should be done in the matter. I wondered if they were waiting for me to say what should be done, as if my opinion would be determinative.  I refrained from doing that for several reasons. Aside from not wanting the role of family arbiter, it was clear they each had a different opinion about who was at fault in the matter: mother or father. Children often blame their parents for things they don’t like. As grandmother I chose to avoid the blame game.

     More interesting to me was hearing the description of parents from a child’s point of view – in this instance from one my adult grandchildren. His description included his view and judgment of their behavior, as well as an analysis of their personalities. This differed from the opinion I had heard from his younger brother.

     It was apparent that for both of them their judgments included and were based on childhood memories. Current behavior of their parents was not clearly differentiated from the way they had experienced their parents as young children. What children experience, according to their developmental stage, is often quite different from what parents think they were doing or intended doing.

     For example, children may feel unfairly criticized or blamed by their parents for certain behavior. They also may feel overwhelmed by parental anger. Especially when it comes to sibling rivalry, they may experience parents as unfair. At different stages of their own development, they may identify with one or the other of their parents. This may help shape their later opinions of parental behavior.

     As grandparents, we may think we know the true story of how a grandchild was raised. However, our own perceptions are also influenced by our own developmental stages. As parents we also may not have understood what our children experienced.  Now as grandparents, we may need to question our perception of how our children are raising their children.

     Perhaps the message is that all individual experience is part of Rashomon. The meaning we give depends on who we are as individuals as well as where we are in life’s stages. 

     I started writing this blog many years ago, calling it Good Enough Mothering, because in my experience both as a mother and parent educator, I saw mothers trying to be perfect, feeling they were not doing a good enough job raising their children.  My blog for parents was started in order to have a conversation about this question, and about the many other questions mothers have asked me over the years.

     Now as a grandmother, I am in a different role, yet find myself asking and answering the same questions. Many of the issues we dealt with as mothers continue to surface as grandmothers, because in fact, we are still mothers, even though now engaging with our children about the raising of their children – our grandchildren.

     There is a common theme in the changed role. In both instances there is the assumption that parents are responsible for their children’s behavior, that they have – or should have – the ability to “make them behave in particular ways.” Mothers are always blamed for their children’s behavior.  Now they are, and feel blamed, by their own mothers, now grandmothers.

     Oddly, as grandmothers we seem much more certain about how our children should be raising their children than we were when we were raising them. Does grandmother know best? Our children may feel as though we act that way.  As children, they expected us as mothers to make life perfect for them. Our inability to do that created feelings of guilt. Do we now expect them to do that for their own children?

Are we transferring that need for perfection to them when they become the mothers of our grandchildren? As grandparents we are apt to see our grandchildren as perfect, blaming any imperfections on their mothers – our children. Inadvertently, have we as grandmothers joined the critical chorus blaming mothers?

I have often heard friends who are grandmothers say, the best thing about it is that you can enjoy your grandchildren without having to worry about the day–to–day responsibility. Grandchildren may experience this as being allowed to do whatever they want. Mothers may see this as spoiling their children, thereby transferring the blame they often receive, to the grandparents.

So, who and what is a good enough grandmother? Answering that question about a good enough mother meant thinking about the purpose of child-rearing, raising and caring for dependent children, preparing and teaching them to live in the world they will live in, learning to meet their own needs while considering the needs of others.

How does that relate to being a good enough grandmother? We do not have the responsibility of raising and caring for dependent children, except perhaps in unusual circumstances. How about teaching them to live in the world while considering their own needs as well as the needs of others? Grandparents are often thought to be in teaching roles. How does that accord with the role of parents?

I welcome your input in thinking about the answer to these questions and how you see the role of grandmothers, including any questions or anecdotes about your grandchildren.

You can respond by clicking the contact option on the home page of this website.  I look forward to hearing from you.

In a conversation with a young adult who is in the process of adjusting to the work world, the subject became doing what you are told, or being asked to do.  This young person said he has no trouble being asked to do something as long as he is told the reason for doing it.  He then recalled when growing up being told by his parents when he asked why something needed to be done, “Because I said so.” To him, this was an unacceptable response as it was reasonable to want to know why something had to be done.

This raises the question of the role of autonomy, and the degree to which autonomous functioning is possible living in society with other people.  The dictionary defines autonomy as being “self-governing, independent.”  Autonomy means more than independence in the sense of being able to take care of yourself physically.  Self-governing implies being able to take responsibility for yourself and for your own behavior.

The dictionary definition includes the phrase, “subject to its own laws”.  This is intended as a reference to independent nations, but it is striking how well this idea could be applied to children, particularly at certain points in their development.  It is just at the point that children decide they should be subject to their own laws that conflict can develop between parents and children.

Often two-year-old’s who had been easy to raise and manage, seem all at once to have arrived at a point of asserting their own likes and dislikes, their own ideas of what they want to do and don’t want to do, and their disinterest in their parent’s agenda.  It is as if they had decided they should be subject to their own laws, not their parents’ wishes.

This is the behavior of emerging autonomy.  All the children’s endowments, both innate and acquired through experience, have come together to produce the assertion of self that often is expressed as defiance of parents.  As the butt of such expression – while struggling with the difficulties caused in simple day to day routines by our children’s resistance to our wishes and refusal to cooperate – we may see this as negative behavior.

There may be no better example of the difference in perspective between a still developing child and a parent whose responsibility is the further development of that child.  Young children, still guided in some measure by the pleasure principle begin to assert their own wishes in defiance of parental requests.  Parents, faced with the tasks and responsibilities of daily life, require children’s cooperation for basic tasks such as getting dressed, coming for meals, bath and bedtime.

Contemporary parents, trying to be democratic rather than authoritarian, often try to reason with a child, explaining often endlessly why what they are requesting is essential and is for the child’s own benefit.  All to no avail.  The problem is that the child’s motivation is to get to do what he wants to do while the parent is using reason to persuade the child to accede to the parent’s requests.

A child’s “why”, actually asked in the service of non-compliance, may seem like a reasonable question but to the parent who has already tried to answer it reasonably many times over, the only remaining answer is, “because I said so!”  Summing up in frustration the whole area of parental responsibility combined with adult experience.

Growing up means finding a balance between one’s own desires and the need to respond to the expectations of parents and then others.  Supporting children’s emerging autonomy, while they learn to operate within parental and social boundaries is a major challenge for parents.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What I hear from many mothers is a determination not to be like their own mothers in the way they raise their children.  They want to correct what they regard as the mistakes that were made with them, by which they usually mean things they didn’t like as children that then impacted on them as adults.

A mother said, “One of the things that happens after you become a parent is that it puts you back in touch with yourself as a child, and you don’t want to do the things that you didn’t like.  But you find that it is a continuous struggle to avoid repeating these things.”  What she is saying is that certain interactions with her children bring out feelings in her that are the feelings she had in similar situations when she was a child.

Why is it a struggle to avoid repeating the things she didn’t like?  The problem is that her feelings put her back into the position of the long-ago child, while in present day reality she is the mother.  As the mother she may identify with her own mother, but as the child, she would like to change what her mother did.

This identifying with your own mother – even when you didn’t like what she did – while also identifying your child with yourself as a child, can be a source of conflict for a parent.  At times it can lead to a conscious decision to do the opposite of what your own mother did, while at other times you may not even be aware that this conflict influences your responses to your child.  There are some familiar parenting issues that many parents can recognize.

One has to do with freedom from restrictions such as bedtimes, curfews when children are older, even questions about limits on independence as children reach different developmental stages.  Often mothers say they want to give their children more freedom than they were allowed.  (Children usually feel they should have more freedom from restrictions than they are allowed.)  The problem that then arises is that if you don’t want to use your own parent’s rules as a guideline, you have to follow a different course that is uncertain.  This can lead to doing the opposite of what your own mother did, and can create its own problems.

Feeling our own mothers were too controlling can translate into giving children choices about everything.  For one mother, who felt she was being too controlling about everything her child did, her correction became asking her three your old daughter what she wanted to wear, what she wanted to eat, or what to order in a restaurant.  The mother thought this would help her child feel more involved, so that she wouldn’t feel as controlled as she, the mother, had.

In trying to correct things from our own childhood we actually play out an old conflict in search of a new ending.  As a child we rebelled – or wanted to rebel – against our mothers, and now as a parent, without realizing it, we are continuing the rebellion.  The trouble is that in reliving an old mother-child relationship you are turned back not only into the child you were, but the mother you had.  As your mother, you can only do what she did.  As the child, you are still rebelling.  This is the struggle to which the mother quoted earlier was referring.

The real struggle, is to give up being either the child we were, or the mother we had.  The task if to create a new mother-child relationship based on who our child really is, and on our adult selves as mothers.

 

 

 

 

Life seems to consist of taking developmental steps.  The significant theories and the thinkers whose psychological theories are most often referred to, all use unfolding development as the context for understanding behavior.

Freud proposed that human personality development in childhood takes place in psychosexual stages.  Sexual energy, or libido, by which he meant all pleasurable activity and thoughts, is discharged as we mature biologically in different ways and through different parts of the body.

Freud believed the first five years of life are critical in the formation of adult personality.  Libidinal wishes for gratification must be directed into socially acceptable channels setting up a conflict that must be resolved before an individual can successfully advance to the next stage.

Erik Erikson, an ego psychologist who expanded on Freud’s theories, also believed that personality developed in a series of stages.  His theory, however, centered on psychosocial rather than psychosexual development, the impact of social experience across the whole lifespan, how social interaction and relationships play a role in the development and growth of human beings.

Jerome Kagan, a psychologist and researcher who has written extensively on the nature of the child, differs in significant ways from earlier theorists.  He believed that children are very adaptable and that their biology promotes a regular developmental progression.  He questioned the belief that adult personality was determined by childhood experience alone, arguing against what he called “infant determinism,” the widespread belief that experiences and parenting during the first three years of a child’s life are the most important determinants of adult personality.

Gail Sheehy, the writer who contributed the idea of passages, was a social commentator rather than a psychologist or researcher.  Her widely read book, PASSAGES: Predictable Crisis of Adult Life, refers to the transitions that people make between years of relative stability in their adult lives.  The stages of children’s lives had been well known, but little had been written earlier about how adults develop.

Sheehy describes four predictable passages of adulthood drawn from in-depth interviews, concluding that all adults must navigate the same passages, either failing and becoming life’s losers, or succeeding and leading more fulfilling lives.  Adults cannot skip a passage, jumping from a disturbed late adolescence to a fulfilled midlife.

Whichever theory you follow, taking steps in development can mean new challenges and satisfactions.  It also can mean giving up or letting go of earlier gratifications.  In a way this is true throughout life as hopefully we continue to grow as well as get older.  The first steps in this process is true of a baby’s first steps.  When you start to walk you don’t get carried as much.  But you have the pleasure that comes from finding you can move on your own.

Starting school is a step away from parents, bringing new expectations.  Children have some anxiety about taking this step having not yet fully mastered new skills and not fully confident that they will meet the expectations of new situations.

Adults might have such feelings starting a new job, new boss, new colleagues.  As adults we don’t cry or try to leave – although we might want to.  Maturity has given us tools with which to adapt and master new situations.

Anxiety experienced at all stages may be an expression of apprehension about our ability to perform as expected.  Recently, many people express the feeling that a major decision or life change is imminent.  Are these life passages that we are confronting or rather the suddenness of the transition as we emerge from the pandemic?

There are rewards and losses in these passages.  Hopefully, the rewards can outweigh the losses.