Friends & Relations
Grandparents and grandchildren tend to get along well with each other, it’s said, because they have a common enemy.
That’s the easy answer. It seems at first to make sense, and it has formed the basis for several books, plays and films: the prickly, rebellious child, misunderstood by frustrated parents, who discovers that Gran and Gramps aren’t such old poops after all.
Yes, said Vern Bengtson, grandparents do form close bonds with their grandchildren. But it is less likely that such cross-generational pairings are formed because of a shared distaste for the middleman than because of shared ideals, outlooks and hopes.
In a sense, said Bengtson, a professor of sociology and gerontology at USC and the principal investigator in a 27-year-old study of multi-generational families, grandparents and grandchildren are both in rebellion against the same things--things often held to be true and good by the parents in the middle.
“We found that grandparents and grandchildren were generation gap allies,” Bengtson said. “They were more similar to each other in their values of humanism than they were to the middle-aged parents. Each thought that it was important, for instance, to have a world at peace, to contribute to the benefit of all mankind, to look out for the human race, not to be selfish--more collectivistic values. Often our stereotype of older people is that they’re quite rigid in their beliefs, but our study suggested quite the reverse.”
The USC-sponsored research, called the Longitudinal Study of Four-Generation Families, began in 1971 and includes about 2,000 individual family members. Data has been gathered every three years from the families, who began in California but who now have members who have grown up and moved throughout the country. The current crop of grandparents came to maturity during the Great Depression, while the latest generation of grandchildren were born to the members of the prosperous baby boom generation.
Bengtson called the generational alliance a “cohort effect.”
“There’s something about these kids who are the children of baby boomers,” he said. “That fact may make them more humanistic throughout their lives than their parents. And of course with the older generation, they went through the Depression era, and during those times people pulled together. They had to. But their children came along after the war, during a period of prosperity, and they tended to be more materialistic. The cynical observation is that the middle generation may be supporting both the young and the older generations, so they have to be more materialistic.”
They also, routinely, have to exercise power, particularly over their children. And this is something growing children often resent. Grandparents, however, often offer a kind of sanctuary for the grandchild, an environment in which the exercise of power and the existence of a pecking order have no place.
“We’ve found that often grandparents and grandchildren have a high level of affection for each other, even without much face-to-face contact,” Bengtson said. “Grandparents don’t have much power and control over their grandchildren, and they don’t want to. They don’t have the same responsibility the parents do. Therefore, the relationship can be based more on affection than on any other dimension of human relationships.”
Also, he said, grandparents can afford to be more doting and less punitive because, “they don’t face societal sanctions for the misbehavior of their grandchildren. It’s much more a voluntary relationship.”
Does this mean that the parents in the middle will find themselves in the position of fifth wheel in three-sided family relationships--a true “common enemy”?
“We’re not finding that at all,” Bengtson said. “The parent generation is often the hinge between the grandparents and the grandchildren. It depends a lot on whether the parent has a close relationship with the grandparent. How much a grandparent and grandchild see of each other is in part a function of that relationship. Parents are gatekeepers, but they’re not rivals.”
However the relationship manifests itself, Bengtson said, closeness between grandparents and grandchildren can be beneficial in several ways.
First, he said, “there is a sense of family connections, of bonding to a group in a fast-changing society. To feel like you belong to an enduring human group that cares about you is one of the most precious things in contemporary society. Even if your parents divorce--and there’s a 50-50 chance of that--it doesn’t necessarily cast you adrift if you have a good relationship with your grandparents.
“Also, there’s a sense of personal identity. Kids need all the help they can get to figure out who they are as individuals in a society where there’s so much pressure to conform. To have a grandparent who can tell you where you came from and what your family is about provides a sense of personal identity that’s very important.”
And, as always, grandparents provide a living link to the past, with all the errors and successes that went along with the times in which they lived. They are both a yardstick and a barometer by which to measure the progress of the latest generation.
“We will make mistakes in the future if we don’t learn from the mistakes of the past,” Bengtson said, “and grandparents are wonderful repositories, both in a personal and a collective sense, of the mistakes that have been made and the lessons that have been learned. They are our history.”
