Grandparenting: When is stepping in, overstepping?

Grandparents have only the best intentions, but sometimes, make executive decisions that prove to be unknowingly controlling.

By Alex Brooks

Most grandparents learn the intricacies of their role on the hop. There’s no on-job training, no operations manual or proficiency test to pass. You are automatically hired.

We grandparents have only the best intentions, but sometimes, without realising it, we make executive decisions that prove to be underappreciated, or we may be over-zealous in our role, or even unknowingly controlling.

These well-intentioned but negative behaviours can produce unexpected and even unhappy consequences. In this article, we explore that confusing line between taking our grandparent role seriously, and over-stepping.

Grandparenting in a nutshell

Grandparenting can be a physically tiring business. As well as being chief cook and bottle-washer, grandparents are chief of security at the play-gym, master story-teller, team coach, perhaps even partners in crime, and regardless of any extra aches and pains they will endure as a result, nonetheless, they soldier on, doing anything and everything required.

Psychologists claim than an over-protective grandparent is one that is generally overly involved in their grandchildren’s lives and that this can have negative effects on children’s development and independence, even ultimately on their mental health.

Finding the line between being a loving life coach and cheerleader for your offspring’s offspring, but not being seen by the children as a spy or micromanager can be a tricky navigational exercise. You want to keep them safe, and you want to influence them to make wise decisions, but you will also want them to work out all the stuff of life for themselves.

Much is in the eye of the beholder. You might feel that you’re providing sensible advice from years of experience and wisdom, but the children’s parents might see your ready input as interference.

What is a grandparent worth?

Times have changed since we were raising our children. The proportion of stay-at-home Mums in 1966 was 66%, whereas this figure had decreased to 36% by 1996, and to 23% in 2020. Increasing living costs now mean that very many families rely upon both parents having paid employment. Added to that is the spiralling cost of childcare.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data shows that the average weekly cost of formal childcare for children aged 0–12 years in 1999 was $46.00. According to the Productivity Commission, the average weekly cost in 2019-20 had risen to $223.90. Assuming an annual growth of only 2%, this implies a cost of $242.60 in 2023, a 427% increase since 1999. Regrettably, wages have not kept pace with childcare costs. If only! So what is a grandparent who provides childcare support worth? The answer? Plenty! And therein lies a major reason why grandparents are more hands-on with their grandchildren now. It’s a financial necessity for many families.

Grandparents are valuable assets to children’s lives for many more reasons than purely finances of course, providing extra love and care, especially so when both parents work, and for single parent families.

Guardians of the kingdom

Grandparents are often retirees with time on their hands and in search of a new project. Children are a lovely project, and grandchildren are a perfectly lovely project. We can flood them with love and even a little spoiling, and we can do a better job of nurturing the second time around with the wisdom of hindsight. We have time now to get it right.

We will not only get it right, but we’ll mould these little darlings into perfect humans. We will protect them and keep them safe. We’ll indulge them and buy them gifts when we go shopping. A cream bun and a chocolate milkshake won’t hurt, just this once! We’ll even do their homework. Because we spend so much time with our grandchildren, we see their needs. We might sometimes inadvertently – albeit with good intentions – undermine some of their parent’s decisions and inject our good advice into the decision-making. Oops… have we violated some boundaries here? Probably.

The elephant in the room … helicopters

Like it or not, the millennial generation has adopted the word helicopter for parents they consider were overprotective, and now that they’re parents themselves, they have extended that to helicopter grandparents. Well, we can work with that.

Helicopters need operating instructions. Above all, they must be reliable and trustworthy. They need to transport everyone on board safely. Helicopters are fun. With proper care and attention, they will buzz around the place, and ultimately deliver their cargo to the helipad, with no paintwork scratched. And there you have a perfect story for a young children’s picture book about helicopters. Okay, if the shoe fits, the metaphor can extend to grandparents… have fun, don’t scratch the paintwork, and deliver your darlings safely back from whence they came.

Parents should provide clear expectations to any carers of their children, and carers should respect parents’ wishes. Respect and quiet wisdom will go a long way to delivering happy, safe, reliable, trustworthy and fun times. The children should also know what the rules are, and make no mistake, they’re clever little possums. ‘I always have a can of Coke before bedtime, Granddad’. A firm ‘No’ will settle that, and you‘ll need to hide your chuckle.

Safe landings

Knowing the difference between keeping the children safe while allowing them to explore, the difference between involvement and intrusion, between the wisdom of silence, and the wisdom of offering advice to a parent but out of earshot of the children. It’s about knowing and accepting boundaries. These are the elements required for soft landings.

Any child’s growth and security will be enhanced by the presence in their lives of loving grandparents. Your devotion and happy times together will be laying down memories for the children throughout their lives. When they become parents and grandparents themselves, the wisdom and care they remember in their fractured flickers of childhood will be their guiding role models.

Share your experience

There's no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to being a grandparent. In fact, it's the diversity of these experiences that makes them so invaluable.

We invite you to share your own unique perspective in the comment section below. Whether you've been a grandparent, parent, or grandchild, your story matters. No two family dynamics are alike, and by sharing your take, you contribute to a rich tapestry of intergenerational relationships.

Have you faced challenges and found solutions that worked for you? Maybe you cherish heartwarming moments that brought you closer together. Your insights can be a guiding light for others who might be navigating similar paths.

Remember, there's no judgment here, only open hearts and minds eager to learn from one another.