Grandparenting: The Gift, the Circle of Life Brings Back to You

Grandparenting: 
The gift the circle of life brings back to you. 

Written by:  Robyn Mills

In this blog, I ask you to reflect on your family, in particular your grandparents influence in your life. I came home from hospital a week after the birth of my first child, an excited and proud first mum. As night fell, my daughter began to cry and cried all night long.  I realised then, that even though I was a trained nurse with many years experience, I was unprepared for the task of being a parent.  My husband who had never been around children was in the same dilemma. Luckily, my motherinlaw was there to help.

There is nothing like experience in any area of life to help those who are novices in their field. Parenting too can savour the wisdom of those who have gone before and be bolstered by the hands on experience that our mothers and fathers had. Experiences that have been handed down from the generations before, each tweaking the information to suit the moment at hand. 

However, in this modern, fast paced society, with multitasking at its fore, how valuable is the experience of the past generation. I know that the world has changed dramatically since I was a young mother and so have I.  The current dilemma for parents is one of “expectations vs time” and this seems to be at a  greater dissonance now than it has ever been.  Often grandparents have more time than parents and less expectations.

Grandparents have valuable years of experience whereas the current generation of parents has a wealth of knowledge and advice available to them at a mere click of their fingers. On face value, it would seem that the two positions are miles apart. The most prominent tool that my parents used was to whack us across the backside and send us to bed without our tea. When pushed to his limit, my father would hit us across the face. In his later years, he came to regret this when his son lost his life to a brain tumour, he was riddled with guilt as he thought that the regular whacks to the back of his head may have caused this. My father and brother were heavy smokers and this was much more likely to be the cause, but nevertheless my dad felt he had let Harry down.  As a young mother, I never slapped my children across the face, so deleted this parenting reaction from my list of possibilities.  I did however hit my children, rarely I might add, across the bottom, in my earlier years of parenting.  I stopped doing this overnight when I realised it was a sign of me being totally out of control and that I was repeating a pattern that I did not want to be part of. I certainly wouldn’t send my children to bed hungry either, a threat often made by my parents.  

It would seem that each generation has had to adapt to the trends of parenting that are resonating in society at the time.  My parents adopted the view that children should be seen and not heard. In my time, I decided that my children should have a voice, even if I struggled many a time with the noise of three girls in one household.  Everything has changed in parenting for the current. 


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Other  Blogs Written by Robyn Mills

1)  Change
2)  Who You are Really Matters
3)  Grandparenting: The gift the circle of life brings back to you. 
4)  What Does it Mean to Love?
5)  Inspirational Mentor

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