What makes a grandmother’s love so pure?
If you’ve checked out my other posts on this topic, you know I feel pretty strongly that raising kids near their grandparents is the best gift you can give them. Our parents just have a different way of interacting with our kids than we do, and sometimes they need that.
Maybe it’s because grandmothers literally have a lifetime of experience raising kids, so they just plain have more knowledge and patience than we do. We’re pretty awesome, too, but until our kids are fully grown and starting families of their own, we’re still basically “learning on the job.” Our moms, on the other hand, completed their training!
Speaking of jobs, if you think about it, when we’re in the process of raising kids, we have SO many of them. We’re our children’s teachers, nurses, personal assistants, taxi drivers, chefs, and accountants. We’re the people who make the rules (I guess you could call us Congress?) and enforce them. When kids break them, we’re the judge and the jury! The list goes on and on.
Grandmothers, on the other hand, basically retired from the majority of those jobs when we grew up and moved out. So, they just get to be grandma, period. Their sole duty is to love our kids unconditionally, and they definitely excel at that!
Research shows that grandmothers deeply empathize with grandchildren
Before we move on to the study that inspired this post, I just want to share one that proves that ALL grandmas have a special and unique relationship with their grandkids. Researchers at Emory University showed 50 grandmas pictures of their grandchildren and studies their brain’s responses. According to James Rilling, the lead author,
What really jumps out in the data is the activation in areas of the brain associated with emotional empathy. That suggests that grandmothers are geared toward feeling what their grandchildren are feeling when they interact with them. If their grandchild is smiling, they’re feeling the child’s joy. And if their grandchild is crying, they’re feeling the child’s pain and distress.
In other words, ALL grandmothers are basically made of pure empathy. It doesn’t matter if they’re maternal, paternal, or heck, even “honorary” grandparents. They ALL deeply love their grandkids, plain and simple.
If you need more proof, check out my post about why a grandmother’s presence is really the best present. For now, I want to move on to the second part of my response to that quote: why maternal grandmothers specifically? We’ll look at a few studies and also talk about how each of those factors can easily be flipped around in favor of paternal grandparents.
Kids of divorced parents spend more time with their mom’s parents
While the overall rate is lower than ever and divorced parents are more likely to share equal custody of kids, in general children still end up living with their moms more than their dads. In fact, out of the 25% of families headed by a single parent, 80% of them involve a single mom. One study found that this played a major role in determining just how close kids were to their dad’s parents.
If we go back to the original study that I mentioned above, though, we find that while researchers found that maternal grandparents played a more active role in a child’s life when the child lived only with mom, the opposite was true for the 20% of single-parent-household kids that live only with their dad.
Researchers were also very clear to emphasize that “it is important to consider mothers as well as fathers when explaining matrilineal advantage because either parent can create advantages and disadvantages favoring maternal and paternal grandparents.” In other words, regardless of which parent a child lives with (even if it’s both), parents ultimately play the largest role in determining just how much time that child gets to spend with either set of grandparents.
How can we help ALL grandmothers bond with our kids?
If we work together- parents and grandparents- we can help remove the barriers that keep one set of grandmas from forming closer bonds with their grandchildren. For example, if you’re a divorced mom and your kids live with you, actively arrange for your ex-mother-in-law to spend time with your children. If you’re a paternal grandmother, remember that the road goes both ways. If your ex-daughter-in-law doesn’t reach out to you, then call her. Make the first move.
If your kids’ grandparents live on the other side of the country- or the world even- then you’ll have to work harder to help them bond. Facetime, Zoom, and such are the best inventions ever for this. Technology in general has made it easier than ever for kids to form close relationships with both sets of grandparents, no matter how close or far they are.
I know this all took a few unexpected twists and turns for a post that started out talking about why maternal grandmothers give our kids the purest unconditional love. But as we clearly saw, the same is also true of paternal grandmas! Heck, grandfathers, too! Let’s not leave them out! ALL grandparents bring so much love, support, and empathy into our lives, and we’re lucky to have them.