Family Values (part 1)

Grandparents tend to love their own children differently from their grandchildren. When we love our kids, we commit to the pains and pleasures, the duties and obligations, the time and patience needed in raising them to be good, upright people who will do good in the world and do the world some good. It is therefore not surprising that such a task as parenthood can throw us in a tailspin of conflicting emotions at different stages of our children’s growing years. We feel pride and guilt, empathy and anger, joy and suffering, love and fear as we try to do our best in raising them to adulthood.

With grandchildren, it is different. Not only can we do everything parents do, we can do even more — and less! We get to enjoy our grandchildren, love them, play with them, teach them, and even spoil them and feel no guilt or worry about it. Why should we? They are not our responsibility — at least not in the same way that we were responsible when we raised our own kids. We can have as much fun with our grandchildren as we want to and when they begin to get cranky, needy and difficult the way children tend to be when they are spent, we have the luxury of simply sending them back to their parents! I can’t think of anything neater! No wonder a pundit once said that grandparents exact revenge on their children through their grandchildren!