By: Mónica Bulnes de Lara

One of the greatest values we can teach our children, is to respect older generations.

Children must know, since they are little, the importance of listening to their grandparents, not only because they are older than them, but because of the great value of the teachings that an old person can bring to their lives.

In this day and age when we get impressed of the enormous ability that even the youngest children show to handle any kind of electronic devices, it seems as if parents and grandparents where years and years behind, regarding children interests.

Nevertheless, what really will help them to be in control of themselves and to become better people, will be the fact that they can learn how to manage well in daily life. And there is no such device that teaches them how to do so.

Only the guide of people that have been their age before, that have already walked through the steps children are just starting to walk, will bring them the appropriate wisdom to become integral and happy people.

There are lots of ways to assure that our children benefit from the coexistence with their grandparents. For example, a family activity that can be very fun and instructive for the whole family, is to know the whole history of our parents´ life. There are special books, that can be found in any bookstore, where we can find questions and enough blank spaces so that grandparents can write their answers, describing experiences and anecdotes.

Of course it is not necessary to buy a book. Any notebook will do, and once it is finished, you can organize get-togethers to know the grandparents’ history, creating memories that will last forever. This activity will have an added value: all the family will know where they come from and which are their roots. This is a source of knowledge to understand who we really are and why we react in a certain way.

Grandparents can participate in our children lives in many ways! Being a grandparent may be a fun and fulfilling experience, especially when they are not in charge of their grandchildren upbringing.

Nowadays, there are more and more couples where both of them work outside the home. That is why grandparents have become responsible of their grandchildren upbringing.

This is a very important task, and a very hard one too, since they do not have the same strength they used to have in the past, and many times, the same authority.

So, according with the role they play in their grandchildren’s life, their activities and responsibilities have to be different: if they only visit each other periodically, the role is clear: the grandparents can give the children candies and let them go to sleep a little later than at their parents home. Spoil them in the best sense of the word.

But if grandparents have the responsibility of raising their grandchildren every day while their parents are at work, then the privileges change. They really become “substitute parents”, so the grandchildren upbringing become top priority in their lives, and discipline and authority must be applied, while “fun moments” have to happen less frequently.

This responsibility has a lot of complications: the dilemma of wanting to spoil the grandchildren versus raising them in the right way, the possible differences between parents and grandparents about how to better take care of the children, and the willingness to put our personal wants in a second place.

We have to remember that children come first, and not what we want to do. If we are aware of the role we play in our grandchildren lives, we will know what is our duty. If we have assumed our responsibility as the person in charge of the grandchild upbringing, then, the price to pay is to abandon the idea of being a full time “spoiling grandparent”.

So, being just grandparents or being “grandparents raising grandchildren” is a decision that has to be made only by the grandparents. We, as their children, have to gratefully respect and accept their limitations and conditions, because we have to admit that they have already fulfilled their role as parents, and if they accept to take charge of our children while we work, they are doing something beyond their responsibilities and obligations because they are just being loving and generous, once more, with us, their children.

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