How is the role of parents different from the role of grandparents ?
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
Almost on a daily basis, in our clinical practice we meet parents who are helped in bringing up their children by their own parents. We also meet children who share their experience, play and activities with their grandparents. We should bear in mind that most children experience their first relationships and connections in their families with their primary carers or persons who take care of them. Such experience is very important because the child transfers it to his/her future experience in adolescence and adulthood. Thus parents transfer their own parents’ experience into their relationship with their children.
Parents’ support
The role of grandparents is especially important in those families where both parents work out of home, in families with single or divorced parents, if the child is sick or has special needs. Supporting parents is extremely important in such families, because they not only cope with usual parenting challenges and care for the child, but with additional care in bringing up the child and with additional life stressors. In some situations it may cause some specific difficulties and deteriorate relationships.
Studies have shown that emotional attachment of grandchildren to their grandparents ranks second to their attachment to their parents, as the strongest and the most intensive emotional relationship children develop (Buljan-Flander and Karlović, 2004).
Grandparents can influence the development of their grandchildren in several aspects:
• Grandparents are a connection to the past and ancestors. Talking about them and about their own experience, grandparents transfer knowledge and can help the child in building his/her identity and sense of belonging
• Grandparents often transfer knowledge about customs and culture of their time, by telling stories, giving recipes, talking about the family tree, thus helping children understand their own origins and their family history, but also the old times
• Unconditional love and support significantly benefit children in contributing to their development of self-esteem
• Grandparents can show that it is possible to learn and have a good life at any age
• Grandparents can be a source of stability and safety by giving advice in various situations
• Grandparents are an “inexhaustible source of knowledge and wisdom” and can teach children various skills
• By being an example of positive values, ideals and beliefs, grandparents can be role-models for their grandchildren, teaching them important values.