Miriam Weinstein, author

Tag Archives: grandmothers

Grandma on Campus

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Take a bunch of teenagers with no families, and a bunch of grandparent-age people with extra energy and love. Add sunshine and a lovely campus. Blend.

That is the successful recipe of San Pasqual Academy in southern California. A public-private partnership in operation since 2001, which bills itself as “the first residential foster campus for foster youth in the nation,” it has served more than 700 young people from ages 12-18.

The youngsters live in home-like settings with house parents. And senior citizens also live in their own homes on the campus. In exchange for paying a reduced rent, they act as mentors. The kids go to school at the facility, and
come home for vacations when they are in college. The seniors act as surrogate grandparents. They tutor, hang out, garden, cook with the kids; whatever grandparents normally do.

When a massive wildfire destroyed 17 buildings in 2007, they were all rebuilt. When you have something good, you want to keep it going.

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.

The Buttoned-Up Lip

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It starts as advice to the mother-of-the-groom: wear beige and keep your mouth shut.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if you have a tendency to spew unsolicited opinions and pronouncements, and if beige is your color. Lesson one: this is not your wedding.
It continues as a grandmotherly truth universally acknowledged: Do not give guidance of any kind. Butt out. Say nothing. Hold your tongue. Lesson two: this is not your baby; not your family.
But could anything so uni-dimensional tell the whole story?
Let’s assume that, after all these years, you have some modicum of self knowledge, an ability to read a situation, modulate your behavior. You might just notice that, although this is not your nuclear family, it is your extended family. And the poor beleaguered new parents (and hopefully they become somewhat less-beleagured as time goes on) are wolfing down mommy blogs, parenting books, and parenting get-togethers both in person and online. They are looking for advice. They are aching to commiserate. They are hungry for ideas, inspiration….on subjects which you know only too well.
If you are a controlling person who does not get along with your children, go back to the part of this column that talks about wearing beige and saying nothing. Stop there. But if you have some distance, if you have some control of your actions, remember that you have the perspective and the memory that is not available to parents who are in the thick of it.
Luckily you are available to them. But only in limited doses. Just because you can open your mouth does not mean that you should not shut it as well.

Enlisting Grandmothers To End Female Genital Mutilation

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There’s a Senegalese proverb: “The grandmother’s heart is the school where one prepares for life.”

But what if westernization has made that heart less available to young people, especially girls?

The standard practice for health and development workers looking to change unproductive traditional behaviors, like female genital mutilation, teenage pregnancy, and forced marriage, is to focus on the younger generation, which distances them from their tribal culture.

But in Senegal, The Grandmother Project has taken the opposite tack. It might seem counter-intuitive to enlist village grandmothers, the people responsible for FMB/C (female genital mutilation and cutting) but this approach has been very successful in a series of programs.

They begin by helping all members of the community to talk together about what has gone right, and then to decide what practices they want to end. When grandmothers understand the long term effects of some traditional practices, it is they who become the agents of real change. They use their storytelling, dancing, and singing to teach their lessons and reclaim their legacy — strong, nurturing communities.

One local teacher put it this way: “Culture for a people is like water for a plant.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EufwaX39d_M

Breaking News in the Style Section — Grandmothers as Flower Girls

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Who knew that the concept even existed, let alone was a recognized style trend. But that uber-arbiter of approachable hip, the New York Times Style Section, has alerted us to the possibility of grannies walking down the aisle as bridesmaids or even flower girls.

And these are not the “young old” either. The sensibly-shod but formally-dressed women profiled in the Times range in age from their 70s to their mid 90s. And we thought that flower girls were supposed to be about fecundity!

You never know what a toddler will decide to do on that long walk under the eyes of strangers. But Grandma? She sort of defines known quantity.

As you might guess, the grandmothers chosen for this spotlight moment are women who have remained close to their granddaughters-the-brides. Other requirements? Flexibility in relationships and role shifts, as well as an ability to actually make it down the aisle.

Clearly, these women have produced granddaughters who think for themselves. As one of the brides who tapped her grandmother to be a bridesmaid said, “Who would be better than Nana to stand by my side, to protect me as she has dutifully done my whole life?”

http://www.nytimes.com/video/fashion/100000002874114/grandmas-a-bridesmaid.html?playlistId=1194811622182