Grandparents

[Phoebe]

Curious: how often do your kids visit their grandparents, if you have any available? I ask because my extended family puzzles me exceedingly. I used to stay on my grandparents farm a great deal in the summer. My other grandparents were dealing with health issues that prevented much overnighting, but I used to go hang out with them all day long, frequently. Granted, I was an easy kid to watch, but there was so much babysitting of this kind! And I think these are important experiences for the child, who develops other kinds of relationships with adults, who have their own different rules, values, interests, and personalities. My parents try to be involved with and seeing our kids as much as health and schedules permit, and back when it was easier for them, they were here all the time! So I'm truly puzzled about this. If I had grandkids I'd want to see them all the time. Fully half of Chloe's friends spend most all their summer days with grandparents. But the real kicker is that my kids' cousins see their grandparents about twenty times as much as ours do. This is... odd. The unfortunate consequence is that it makes me, formed as I was by pragmatic people, have zero concern about whether I'm addressing the whims of such people when it comes time for things like holidays and birthdays. Yet others have feelings and emotions that must be accounted for. I don't get it. For me relationships are a matter of action, not idle concept.

[Tahlvin]

We live 6+ hours away from my wife's and my hometown, where our surviving parents live (both of my parents and her mother). We see them a few times a year, usually around Thanksgiving and a couple other times throughout the year. My wife's mother isn't healthy enough to travel anymore, but my parents will drive up to visit us about once a year, and we'll drive down to visit all of them a few times a year. We used to try to have each of the kids spend a week at "Camp Grandma" over the summer, where each kid would spend time with the grandparents without the other kids around, so they could have some special bonding time. But the older kids have outgrown that, and we may not be able to do that with the younger one much longer, either, due to schedules on both sides of the equation and health on the grandparents' side of the equation.

We like having the grandparents involved in our kids' lives. But we absolutely do NOT want to live close to the grandparents. We used to live all the way across the country from them, and we liked having our space. When we moved back to the Midwest to be closer to the grandparents, after our first two kids were born, we drew a circle around our hometown with about a 400-mile radius and refused to move anywhere within that circle. We like that the grandparents need to plan ahead to come visit, rather than popping in unannounced. And we like being away from some of the family drama that has occurred on my wife's side of the family. So for us, seeing them a few times a year and talking to them on the phone a couple times a month is fine.

[Mike]

When I was young, my dad was in the air force, and we were generally never closer than about 1000 miles from either set of grandparents, and we saw them about once a year. For one year when I was 10, we lived about four hours away from my dad's folks, and we saw them twice a month for that year.

My own parents live 1000 miles away from me, and my kids see them once a year. My wife's parents live 6 miles from us, and we see them 1 to 3 times a month. When we were first married and the kids were little, they spent much more time with her family, because they were free babysitting. My wife has siblings that are 12 and 16 years younger than her, and we babysat them quite a lot when they were little. My in-laws returned the favor when we had our own kids. That's what family does. I believe that it is useful for people to have that sort of support system close by. Not required, of course, but very useful.

Just out of curiosity, how many of Chloe's friends who spend so much time with their grandparents over the summer have parents who both work and don't get summers off? When it comes to how often your kids see the grandparents compared to their cousins, how much difference is there in the time and effort required for them to get together with the grandparents vs how much time and effort it takes for YOU to get together with same? There were some bitter feelings in my wife's family, because Great Grandma spent sooooo much time with X's kids and grandkids and not with Y's. And when everyone got together Great Grandma was always bragging on X's kids and telling stories about them, but not so much anyone else's. But that's because X lived only a few miles away from Great Grandma, and everyone one else lived a minimum of 30 miles away. It was easy for Great Grandma to see X's family 2 or 3 times a week. And Great Grandma didn't have a cell phone back then, so X was a local call and no one else was. People were very resentful, but there were good reasons for all of it.

Not saying any of that applies to your situation, but it's the first thing I'd examine before I started ascribing anything to weird motives or personality flaws.

[Bluedevyl]

My kids are fairly young, but we live about a 20 minute drive from both sets of parents (they live in the same neighborhood). We see them on average about once a week, give or take.

My brother in law and sister in law live on the opposite side of the country and so they see my wife's parents about 3 times a year... my MIL has commented MANY times about how it would be almost too much for her if we were to move away.

My sisters don't have any kids at this juncture, so my kids are my parents only grandchildren. We've never really entertained thoughts of moving too far away, but the local gravity would likely be too much to overcome.

[Phoebe]

This is all very interesting, thank you. There is definitely a good reason for disparity in the amount of visiting with the various grandchildren. However, there are kids who live way further out of town then we do who see the grandparents more often. And that seems weird to me.

[Phoebe]

This is all very edifying and interesting, thank you. There are some good reasons why there might be a disparity in the visiting time for various grandchildren. The problem I have is when people who live even further out of town see the grandparents much more often than ours do. I find that odd.

[Mike]

Well then... with very little info, I can imagine plausible scenarios both benign and nefarious that could account for the disparity. Hopefully it's nothing that worries you overly much.

[Phoebe]

It doesn't worry me; but I do feel bad for my husband because that's not really fair to him. It gives me a bad attitude about holiday arrangements but that's really out of my hands anyway. I did what I could do to make that work for me and that's about all I can manage.

[Iantha]

My father-in-law lives with us and my parents love about 45 miles away. We see my parents about 2 or 3 times a year, and Paul's dad is absent more than he's home despite sharing the same physical address with us. I grew up spending very little time at all with my grandparents and I've never had much support of my parents once I had my daughter. Paul's family is... a little rough around the edges, so o speak, so we haven't seen them in over four years (other than his dad) and we have no intention of initiating contact. We've learned to be pretty self-sufficient and we've built a family of friends who have helped immensely over the years. Earl, Josh, my friends Daphne and Jordan, they've been our extended family that Cecilia has grown up around.