Miriam Weinstein, author

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Love Your Grandkids: The Payoff

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You’ve got to hand it to academics; they have a way of expressing the most basic concept in the most baroque way.

Take a recent study out of Brigham Young University. It looks at what happens when grandparents who don’t live with their grandkids are close to them, either emotionally or financially, or both. (In this study, the kids are between the ages of 10 and 14.) This closeness is called affectual solidarity. And, as we old farts could have predicted, the kids who are close to their grandparents are  better off than the kids who are not. The lucky kids have what is called lower levels of emotional distress and higher levels of pro-social behavior: i.e. they are happier and they do better in school.

“This high quality emotional tie is an important microsystem influence.” Well, sure it is. By the way, this microsystem influence is important regardless of income, but seems to have more of an impact in single parent households. Uh huh. The beleaguered single parent is more likely to be stretched thin.

So here is yet another reason to keep your grandparent skills sharp and available when you are thinking about the good that you can do as you move towards, or settle firmly, into, your years of decline.

Of course, further study is needed.

 

 

Grandma’s Kitchen: The Restaurant Version

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Jody Scaravella grew up in a close-knit Brooklyn-Italian family. When several relatives died within a short period, he felt unmoored. So he moved to Staten Island. Soon, a storefront near the ferry spoke to him. “Restaurant,” it whispered; “Italian family restaurant.”

He had no experience in the restaurant business, so he sent out a call for Italian housewives to help him set the recipes. What he found was a gaggle of grandmas: nonnas in Italian.

With a core group of 10, from different regions in Italy, he opened Enoteca Maria, a restaurant named after his own mother. The nonnas each hold forth one night a week. They re-create the dishes they learned to cook from their own families. It’s an enterprise that is as much about tradition and family as it is about cooking. The nonnas link the past to the future.

Scaravella’s lead-from-the-heart enterprise was an immediate success. And why not: “If I had a choice between going to a five-star restaurant and going to Grandma’s house, I’m going to Grandma’s house,” he says.

Call In The National Guard

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Sure, we know how much good we do for our grandchildren. But it’s nice to have a study from Brigham Young University that lays it all out. For fifth graders who had grandparents living near by, those who were close to them had improved social skills, like kindness and compassion, and were more engaged in school. Grandparents who helped their offspring financially, especially single parent families, were able to make a real difference in their grandchildren’s lives.

But what struck me was something that the study’s author said in explaining the results: “Grandparents are like the National Guard,” according to Jeremy Yorgason. “if there is a problem, they come in and help out.”

This makes intuitive sense. We have the special training, the experience, the tools. All we are lacking is the camo suits. We are activated in a state of emergency. We keep the peace and restore order. We represent central authority. And when it is over, we get to go home.

Kayaking Granny Doesn’t Let Spine Surgery Stop Her Mission

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Wells, Maine — 07/23/14 — Deb Walters is kayaking from Maine to Guatemala, raising awareness and donations for Safe Passage. Ann Charlton | York County Coast Star

When Dr. Deb Walters saw women and children making their living picking through garbage dumps in Guatemala, she decided to raise money to help them improve their lives. She was inspired by the mothers of the community, and by the model school started by an American.

So the 63-year-old grandmother came up with the idea of kayaking from her home in Maine, down to Guatemala; more than 2,500 miles. Her plan was to publicize her mission along the way.

One small problem: before she started out, in July of 2014, she had had some numbness and tingling. And, with all that sitting in the kayak, the pain intensified.

So, in February 2015, she pulled up her boat in South Carolina and had emergency surgery to correct what turned out to be a massively herniated disk. Recovery from such a procedure is not exactly quick.

Walters has spent the intervening time talking about her project in the U.S., and then catching a ride on a sailboat to Guatemala, where she was honored by the community and the school.

So far she has raised more than $141,000 towards her goal of $150,000.

Her plan is to kayak the remaining 1,000 miles this coming year. But wouldn’t we all count her trip already an incredible success?

Learn more about Safe Passage.

Grandkids help keep Alzheimers at bay. Or not.

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This just in from an Australian study reported in the journal Menopause: Since everyone knows that keeping mentally alert and socially engaged are plus factors in staving off dementia, a team of scientists decided to look at whether or not caring for grandchildren made a difference in the health of post-menopausal women. After all, they reasoned, that caretaking was something that lots of p.m. women do. Why not factor it in?

The good news is that women who care for their grandchildren one day a week had better cognition and less dementia. The bad news is that women who care for their grandchildren five days or more a week did significantly worse on the test that measures working memory and mental processing speed.

The researchers thought that this might be linked to the fact that the women who were clocking the heavy caretaking hours felt that their children were more demanding of them. (No kidding!) Maybe the family tension contributed to the negative part of the equation.

Is this like the finding that drinking a glass of red wine is good for your health? More study needed, obviously.

Elephant Grandmothers, Giant Concern

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You have probably heard about the threat to African elephants: 17,000 slaughtered in 2011. And grandmothers are at the center of this crisis.

Elephants live in matriarchal tribes, headed by mature females. They are an extremely social species. The matriarchs know where the closest watering hole can be found, as well as who, or what, is the most potent enemy. Researchers have found that the older the matriarch, the more babies who survive.

Sadly, also, the older the matriarch, the longer the tusk: those pieces of ivory prized by poachers. So elephant grandmothers are valuable both to their own species, and to the humans who prey on them. And they seem to be aware of the genocide in progress. Scientists report that they are suffering from a form of ptsd, except that the danger is ongoing.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if human grandmother could help?

https://www.elephanttrust.org

Grandma Buddies

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One thing I hadn’t anticipated about grandmotherhood was the continuation of the girl buddy system. We lend and borrow porta cribs when the kids come to visit. We commiserate about distance and closeness. We marvel at the mix of personalities, and track them through time. We trade tips about playgrounds, parks; easy ways to kill time in the house with little kids; how to stay close as the little ones grow big.

Some of these things we know from our motherhood days. Lots of them reside in our bones. Others, like cellphone videos, we could never have imagined; likewise having to defer to your children, who somehow have become the ones who must be obeyed, except when they are not looking.

What has remained constant is the easy friendship we share. Some of the actual people are the same ones I knew when my own kids were little. Others are newer friends. A couple are not even grandmothers. But if they are my age, and if they were mothers, they  have the instincts at the ready.

The “What’s good to do?”; the “How can I ever….” the “Can you believe?” feel the same as when we were kids planning our own adventures for the afternoon.

This is bonus time, big time.

 

Grandmothers Saving Mother Earth

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In 2004, 13 indigenous grandmothers heard the cry of Mother

Earth. She was in agony, they said. She needed them “to help to heal her and all her inhabitants.”

Since then the women, who call themselves The International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers,  come together from their homes in North and South America, Africa and Asia. They meet at regular intervals to pray for Mother Earth and to bring attention to what can be done for her.

They have repeatedly petitioned the Pope. They have met with the Dali Lama. They have held a salmon ceremony in Alaska welcoming the return of the native fish. They have organized a seed temple in Mexico, linking the safeguarding of seeds with the birth of children.

“Ours is an alliance of prayer and healing for our Mother Earth, all Her inhabitants, all the children, and for the next seven generations to come.”

Their names are Aama Bombo, Agnes Baker Pilgrim, Beatrice Long Visitor, Bernadette Rebienot, Clara Shinobu Iura, Julieta Casimiro, Margaret Behan, Flordemayo, Maria Alice Campos Freire, Mona Polacca, Rita Long Visitor Holy Dance, Rita Pitka Blumenstein, and Tsering Dolma Gyaltong.

Grandma the Geek

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Don’t you just hate that phrase: it’s so simple, even my grandmother can understand it?

Rachel Levy hated it too; so she started a blog called Grandma Got STEM (which stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics, for you liberal arts majors.)

She called for people to write in about important scientists who just happened to be grandmothers, or vice versa.

You would not believe the response! And the photos! And the history! Women wrote in about themselves, their grandmothers, and famous female scientists. Such as:

Maria Goeppert-Mayer, the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics, generated a newspaper headline that read, “S.D. Mother Wins Nobel Prize.” She worked as a volunteer because, since her husband was a university professor, she could not get a university job.

Eve Sprunt, a geophysicist, showed up for a job interview wearing her infant son in a front baby pack and announced, “This is the question you are not supposed to ask.” The interviewer invited her whole family for an on-site interview, babysitting provided.

Neuroscientist Marian Diamond studied Einstein’s brain. But when she had arrived as the first female student in the anatomy department at UC Berkeley, years earlier, the first thing she was asked to do was to sew a cover for a large magnifying machine.

Ursula Franklin was a metallurgist who pioneered the field of archeometry, the science of dating archeologically discovered metals and ceramics. Her research about levels of radioactive strontium in baby teeth factored heavily into the U.S decision to ban nuclear tests.

When Franklin had a baby, in 1955, the committee at the research institution where she worked never managed to make a decision about what she could, or could not do. “The unpreparedness, administratively and legally, to recognize that women, when you employ them, have needs, and require an administrative framework that takes that into account was totally absent. So that the task, then, for women like myself who were feminists, was to know that you had to have laws that gave maternity leave; you had to have provisions for flexible work; and the struggle from there on was not for us, but was struggled for all women to have decent working conditions and safe wages.

“And that’s how it starts.”

The Grandmother Food Challenge

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A 20-something Australian journalist decided to spend a week eating the way her grandmother did in 1964: eggs and bacon for breakfast, white bread and baked beans for lunch; and, for dinner, meat, three veg (one always potato) and dessert.

At the end of the week, she was glad it was over. She was also down a kilo (2.2 pounds.)

What she learned: Her grandmother never snacked. She cooked and baked all her own food, ate smaller portions, and smoked.

And what did Grandma find when she spent a week trying sushi, red velvet cake, constant snacking, and mega-portions? “By the end of the week, I’m relieved to have finished,” she reported.
But she did enjoy the red velvet cake, which she added to her baking repertoire.