Anonymous Asks (383)

“My (saved) parents seem uninterested in their grandchildren. Is there anything I can do?”

Anonymous, you have the opposite problem many of us encounter, and that is that our children (saved or unsaved) may not have the level of interest in their grandparents that we would like them to have. Alternatively, many grandparents are overly invested in pursuing relationships with their grandchildren and complicate the lives of their parents by meddling.

In short, this is a new one for me among Christians.

Things We Don’t Know

Absence of affection and active dislike are two very different things, though in some people they manifest in similar behaviors. This scenario doesn’t sound like hostility so much as a deficiency in the warmth you believe normal between generations in Christian families.

It’s difficult to be helpful without knowing more about your specific circumstances. I’ll have to stick to generalizations. Let me say this: many things can affect an older person’s level of interest in children. Immaturity, narcissism, geographic distance, health, age, the patterns established for them by their own upbringing, their relationship with their son- or daughter-in-law, the circumstances in which they see the children, distractions in the home, whether the grandchildren are precocious, withdrawn, annoying, undisciplined … all these things and others factor in.

Many things can also affect how we view other people’s levels of interest in our children. Are we perceptive or dull? Do we favor our offspring over other children? Do we find it perfectly reasonable to let them run wild in other people’s houses and behave in ways that make them unlikable and work against their long-term best interests?

Probably the biggest factor in a parent’s satisfaction with the relationships they observe between their parents and their children is the expectations they have for that bond, which can be appropriate, or else quite distorted and unreasonable.

Setting Reasonable Expectations

My own children liked visiting both sets of grandparents, but were closer to my wife’s parents when they were smaller. I didn’t get bent out of shape about that; the reasons for it were obvious. We lived much closer to her parents and saw them on a weekly or even daily basis. Mine lived two hours away, were older and less active. My parents were no less interested in my children than hers were, but they were less inclined to display their love by getting down on the floor with the kids to play, or to prioritize engaging with young children over engaging with us during our limited time together. It did not help that two of my three kids were introverts, and that our busy lives at the time were more suited to day trips than long stays with my parents. By the time my quieter children warmed up to Gran and Papa, it was usually time to go home.

As much as I would have liked to see a closer relationship for my parents with all my children, I had to learn to be content with a few affectionate moments and the knowledge that my parents never stopped praying daily for my kids. I know they loved my children because I knew my parents and understood the dynamics of the situation. Third parties observing the relationships from afar might have felt a normal level of grandparental affection was lacking, but I could hardly help that.

What Can You Do?

So what you can do if you feel there’s something missing in your parents’ attitude toward your children? The actions of peacemakers are evidence they are God’s children. Bringing about peace with others, helping them get closer to one another, is a commendable desire. That’s what the Lord Jesus taught.

A few suggestions:

• Pray about it. Problems we don’t take to the Lord tend to persist, for obvious reasons.
• Ask yourself if your expectations of your parents and children are reasonable before you do anything. Perhaps you have formed them unthinkingly because of some felt need in your own life. For example, do you harbor unexamined envy of families who seem to have it more together than yours? Do you watch too many Hallmark movies? Did your parents neglect you, and you are feeling something missing on your children’s behalf that doesn’t bother them at all?
• Discuss your relationship expectations with your spouse. You need to be on the same page. How realistic are your goals, given the personalities, distances, ages and maturity levels involved? What should you be looking for, and how will you measure it? Would longer or shorter visits help?
• Discuss your perceptions about their lack of interest with your parents, assuming they are reasonable people. What looks to you like indifference could be coming from all kinds of other motives, like the desire not to meddle, or the conviction that their reserve helps to balance you over-coddling your kids. You won’t know what the motives are if you don’t ask. Who knows, they might be quite amenable to taking another approach.
• Share good or funny stories from your own childhood with your children so they feel they understand their grandparents better. These may provoke them to ask direct questions of your parents and get them to engage. If your kids tend to misbehave or are excessively reserved around Gran and Gramps, set reasonable performance expectations for the next visit and see if it helps. It takes a hard heart to be cold to someone small who treats you politely and affectionately.
• Don’t read too much into short-term observations. Relationships change over time. A child who is quite uninteresting to Grandma or Grampa at one-and-a-half may be mesmerizing to them at six. A child they don’t spend much time with while they are slaving away at a five-day workweek may get much more attention when they have retired and can relax a bit.
• Recognize the limitations of family gatherings for fostering intimacy. If most of the interaction between your parents and your children takes place at Thanksgiving or Christmas, with a plethora of cousins and other relatives buzzing about and drawing attention, think about scheduling visits when your parents have no other obligations or distractions around.
• Don’t push. There are limits on what any third party can do to bring others together. When you are dealing with immaturity, unspirituality or chronic obliviousness (at either end), sometimes drawing too much attention to a problem makes it worse.

Accepting Reality

The reality is we all prefer some people to others. Some personality combinations absolutely hit it off; others lend themselves to cautious reserve. This is as true across generations as it is in choosing a life partner. Love, time and increasing understanding of one another can bring unlikely pairs together, but we’ve all known people for whom that sadly never happened. The Bible teaches it may take movement from both sides to bridge relationship gaps. If the situation in your family is not actively adversarial, I wouldn’t worry about it too much.