Round table activity

1. Activity A12 Workshop with
Grandparents “How do you spend time with
Grandchildren?” – Filmed Round Table talk

2. Psychologists Angle….
While a great deal is written about parents, relatively little is written about
grandparents, and their relationships with grandchildren. Yet some three-
quarters of adults will become grandparents, and the mean age of becoming
a grandparent is currently about 54 years in Ireland (Dench & Ogg, 2002).
Thus, most people will be a grandparent for around a third of their lifespan.
With falling fertility and the demographic ageing of Western industrialised
societies, family networks are changing from broad/horizontal to
narrow/vertical structures or ‘beanpole families’, in which grandparents
arguably have an increasingly important role to play (Hagestad, 2000).
And it’s a role that should interest a wide variety of psychologists,
particularly developmental, social, clinical and educational.

3. Changing viewpoints…
Grandparenting over the years
Nowadays, grandparents generally get a good press. That was not always the
case. Clinical case studies from the 1930s to 1950s, berated the adverse influence of
grandmothers who interfered in old-fashioned and didactic ways with the mother’s childrearing.
There is in fact some supportive evidence: Staples and Smith (1954) found grandmothers to have
stricter and more authoritarian views than mothers. But child-rearing opinions were changing
rapidly in the 1950s, and on interviewing older people in the UK, Townsend (1957) reported that
‘the grandparents were notably lenient towards grandchildren’. This leniency and spoiling may
have been a reaction against the perceived earlier stricter role of grandparents.
As one grandparent put it, ‘I used to slosh my children. But I don’t like to see my grandchildren
walloped.’
Today’s grandparents will have had a much fuller education, far fewer live directly with the
grandchild, and their role is commonly seen as helper rather than family disciplinarian.

4. The Filming
• March 1st 2017 in All Saints’
Nursery Unit
• 9 children, 1 principal, 8
grandparents and 4 adults
over the age of 55 who live or
work in Annaclone
• 3rd time this year that The
Annaclone Young at Heart
group came into the school to
work with the project.
• Questions – bravo Italia!
• Solidarity with partners
• Focus….

5. • Grandparents and
grandchildren have a special
bond. Grandparents may have
old-fashioned values, but
they’re admired by their
grandchildren
• Both see a ‘softness’ and ‘fun’
in each other – wonderment.
• Grandparents love sharing the
stories of their grandchildren
with other grandparents. Two
mobile phones!!!

6. Development of Questions
• Background research
into relationships.
Simple, clear & open
ended…humour &
humans!
• Sneaky-peak at
partners!
• Questioning skills & fear
of stage fright. The
setting was key!

7. Questions Themes

8. Findings
• Participation Levels of
Grandparents – hugely
impressed
• Participation Levels of
Children – after initial
embarassment…
• Other adults vital too as
they added impartial
and balanced focus
• Reactions – nostaligia
brings snowballing
effect
• Loved when either
generation took the
conversation away from
me the facilitator
• Lessons learned…x3
impasse broken and
pardigm shift in
learning.

9. Conclusion