Grandparenting The Next Generation By Stuart BriscoeSýnishorn

What Role Will You Play?

So what roles can we reasonably expect grandparents to exercise and what benefits should they seek to bestow? Here are a few suggestions:

• They can be a source of stability to their own children who are being shaken by difficulties and a source of comfort to their children’s children who, sensing their parent’s distress, are unsettled and fearful. 
• They can be on call if and when emergencies happen and sudden help is urgently needed.
• They can help their grandchildren to understand their parents and intercede carefully for them when parent/child troubles loom. 
• They can soothe broken hearts. Nothing hurts like a lost first love and grandmas remember their own early days long gone.
• They can encourage a burgeoning talent by positive words of experience and gentle words of correction predicated on endless hours invested in watching from the sidelines.
• They can instill a sense of family by teaching the youngsters family history. My grandsons came alive when I explained that there is good reason to believe we are descended from Vikings. They thought that was “cool.” And they loved tramping the hills and dales of my native England when I took them to the places I roamed as a kid. And they stood uncharacteristically silent at the places where their father was born and their great grandparents are buried. 
• They can be a powerhouse of prayer for young people who may lack the desire or the discipline to pray for themselves. And when the day comes that they recognize their deep need of prayer they know to whom they can and should turn.
• They can generate and promote a network of relationships among cousins who rarely see each other. I attempt to do this by means of a monthly newsletter to which all my grandkids are invited to submit a paragraph about their “beings and doings” during the last month. Their responses are collated, edited by Poppa, and distributed to all and prayer is encouraged by all for all. 
• They can live gracious, loving, understanding, supportive lives of consistency where the young ones can see in practice what they are being encouraged to live out themselves. 
• They can be the developers of generational bridges of understanding and moral integrity in a society that is in danger of dividing on dangerous issues such as racism, ageism, and generational-ism.
• They can speak wisdom to the inexperienced; teach history to the spontaneous; show compassion to the ostracized; encourage the defeated; pour comfort into the wounded; show acceptance to the marginalized; caution the reckless; console the distraught; restore the broken; applaud the successful; advise the confused; offer direction to the wandering; support the floundering; and simply… love. 

Grandparents are afforded the privilege of being character formers, people builders, relationship nurturers, peacemakers, vision casters, mistake correctors, suggestion framers, truth proclaimers, perspective enhancers, and nation builders. 

What an enormous privilege grandparenting is!