A video clip of clinical psychologist Alan David Dell espousing the myriad benefits of grandparents living near and interacting regularly with their grandchildren went viral on social media recently.
“There has been a huge amount of research out of Harvard about what it does for grandparents to have proximity to their grandchildren,” he said.
“If you’re a grandparent and you see and interact with your grandchild more often, you are likely to live longer, you are likely to have higher levels of a sense of purpose and meaning and connection, you are likely to laugh more. You are even more likely to recover from illness more often.”
Dell said he has seen this up close and personal in the eyes of his in-laws and his own parents when they get around his daughters. “It is unmitigated joy,” he said. “There is something about proximity to grandkids that is literally medicinal for grandparents.”
Do grandkids give grandparents unmitigated joy?
Dell lost me – a grandfather of five living in relatively close proximity to my grandchildren – at “unmitigated joy.”
Joy? Yes. Unmitigated joy? I’m not sure that even exists for adults. For adults, even the greatest joys are always tempered by some mitigating factor: worry, the realization that it is fleeting, a bad rash.
I’ll give an example. Last week, The Wife and I were blessed with the opportunity to take all our grandchildren – whose fathers are once again in the reserves – to the Ramat Gan Safari. In theory, it was unmitigated joy: spending unfiltered time with the five little ones – aged 20 months to six years – the heirs to our empire, the fruits of our loins.
In practice, there were lots of moments of pure joy, interspersed with some moments of less joy – like when one of the little guys started crying for five minutes, or when another started wandering off, or when I had to take them to the restroom, or when walking in loops looking for the elephants in the thick humidity and sweltering heat became just physically uncomfortable.
And who are these experts Dell cited? Who are those anonymous Harvard researchers making these claims? A split-screen image post that made the social media rounds soon after Dell’s words circulated provided the answer. On one side of the spoof were the “experts,” a young couple sipping cocktails by the pool, while on the other side, their haggard-looking parents – The Grandparents – were seen chasing after small children.
THERE WAS something a little suspicious about Dell’s video showing up in my Facebook feed right around August, that “what-the-hell-do-we-do-with-the-kids” time of the year – at least in this country – between when school is out, day camp frameworks end, and a new school year begins.
My first thought when I saw the clip was that my daughter, the mother of my two precious granddaughters, sent this to me as a not-too-subtle message: “You think you are doing me a favor by taking the kids once in a while. Ha! I’m doing you the favor. Watch my kids and your ailments will be cured, the spring will return to your step, a gleam will reappear in your eyes, and you’ll live longer.”
Of course, that’s if watching her two girls and my son Skippy’s three boys doesn’t kill me first.
And why would it kill me? Why would watching the beloved grandkids we just love to smithereens have any harmful effect on me whatsoever? Simple. Because it’s just freaking exhausting.
I’ve forgotten how physically taxing it is to run after the kids all day. To get them into their pajamas at night and out of their pajamas in the morning. To bathe them. To dress them. To get them into the car seat, out of the car seat, back into the car seat, and then out of the car seat again. To open the stroller, and then to close the stroller.
That final task – the stroller – is as mentally challenging as it is physically tiring. The Wife had to stop strangers in the Safari parking lot (I was too embarrassed and proud) and ask for help figuring out how to open, and then again how to close, the strollers. And that’s after my daughter-in-law patiently demonstrated how it is done.
My mistake was not filming her tutorial, meaning that the various buttons she pointed out on the stroller melded into one – one that I couldn’t find. About $150,000 worth of college tuition between The Wife and me, and we couldn’t open a baby stroller in the zoo parking lot. “Ace,” I heard my late father’s voice saying in my head, “maybe you should have studied engineering instead of political science and journalism?”
AH, AUGUST. As a parent, I used to absolutely dread that month – dread it. The kids were home, The Wife and I had to work, and we had no parents in the country upon whom we could foist our little darlings – it was a period of atomic stress, of constant plate-spinning.
And then one day, seemingly out of nowhere, it all changed. The kids grew up, got independent, and left the house. Then August became a month like all others – like March and October, just a lot hotter and frequently with a fast day (Tisha B’Av) interspersed therein. It was liberating; it was as if an additional month was added to the year.
Becoming a “senior” has disadvantages – your basic aches and pains, sleep issues, navigating all that new technology. But it also has some advantages – getting choice seats at the front of the bus, getting yelled at less by strangers, not having to fret about August.
Or so we thought. I’ll be as glad as my children when August ends and their kids go back to school. Hey, we love ’em, and – as Dell said – do laugh around them and walk away from their visits with a sense, by virtue of their very being, of having done something meaningful. But it’s tiring, it’s noisy, it’s stressful, and there is a lot of commotion. I’m thankful they are close by. But I’m also thankful they live in their own homes.
Proximity is great. Unmitigated proximity? Well, that’s something else entirely.