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Hi there,
My in-laws live twelve minutes away. We go over regularly, and there's usually a puja (prayers) or some other tradition to sit through.
My kids wouldn't say it out loud, but they don't enjoy the puja anymore.
Mostly because it runs for a couple of hours. None of it is translated, so they don't follow a word, and they have to sit quietly through it without asking what any of it means.
When they were small they loved all of it. They joined in with everything and their grandparents thought they were marvellous. Something changed, and it wasn't the grandparents but the kids, they just grew up.
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POLL: When you visit the grandparents, your teenager is:
NOBODY IS IN THE WRONG, WHICH IS WHAT MAKES IT HARD
Their grandparents are exactly the same people. They adore the kids. spoil them. They've never once said anything critical about either of them, or about how we're raising them.
My older one just turned thirteen and a thirteen-year-old finds almost everything excruciating- being seen with you, being asked how school is, being told to say hello properly.
So two things are true at once. The grandparents aren't wrong to want the tradition kept. My kids aren't wrong to find two untranslated hours long. There's nobody here to be annoyed with, which is exactly what makes it hard to fix.
MATERNAL AND PATERNAL GRANDPARENTS AREN'T EQUAL
My parents live in Texas, eight hundred miles away. My kids are closer to them.
I used to think that was a coincidence of personality. It's one of the most consistently replicated findings in family research: the matrilineal advantage. Across cultures and decades, children end up closer to their mother's parents. One study of 37,000 grandparents across 29 countries found they do roughly a third more grandparenting when the adult child is a daughter.
Mostly it's plumbing. I speak to my parents constantly, so my kids hear about them constantly, and the relationship stays warm without anyone trying.
So if the grandparents your kid has gone cold on are on your partner's side, that is the single most ordinary outcome in all of this.
THE WINDOW IS SMALLER THAN IT LOOKS
Interestingly, a Dutch study of 1,231 grandchildren found that face-to-face contact with grandparents roughly halves in early adulthood from about ten visits a year at eighteen down to five and the single biggest reason is simply that the grandchild has left home.
The years your kids live with you aren't most of the relationship, that’s nearly all of it.
My older one is thirteen. We have maybe five years of easy proximity left. Their grandparents are in their seventies and eighties. So they go!
I'm a fairly laid-back parent and I let a great deal slide. This isn't one of them.
Some things in a family aren't a negotiation. Not everything you do is going to be enjoyable, and you're coming, because that's what this family is doing today.
I don't dress it up as a choice when it isn't, and I don't bribe them. I've also stopped expecting enthusiasm.
Showing up is the whole ask. Everything else is a bonus.
SIX THINGS THAT MAKE THE VISIT SURVIVABLE
What I've changed is the visit, not the rule.
Shorten it rather than skip it. An hour they're present for beats three hours they resent.
Give them a job. Carrying something, setting something up, helping in the kitchen. A teenager with a task is a different person from a teenager on a sofa.
Send one kid, not the whole family. Group visits are where teenagers disappear. One grandchild and one grandparent in a room is a conversation. Six people is an audience.
Don't make them perform affection. Forced hugs or anything will result in nothing.
Let them bring their own thing in. Whatever they're into, let them show it and explain it. It gives them a way to be a person in that room rather than a guest in it. My teen loves making vidoes - so he’s in charge of recording things.
Tell the grandparents what's happening. This is the kind one, and the one I nearly missed. If nobody explains that the kids are like this with everyone, they'll quietly conclude they've gone off because from where they're standing, it looks personal.
THIS WEEK'S READS
01. Contact Between Grandchildren and Their Grandparents in Early Adulthood: Journal of Family
Where the halving figure comes from. 1,231 grandchildren, and the main driver is simply moving out which is the argument for using the years you've got.
02. Reciprocity and the Matrilineal Advantage in European Grandparenting: Review of Economics of the Household
The 37,000-grandparent study. Dense, but it settles the question of whether the maternal tilt in your family is a coincidence.
03. The Lasting Impact Grandparents Have: Psychology Today
The readable one, including the finding that attitude predicts closeness better than distance does.
A NOTE FOR MY FELLOW LAID-BACK PARENTS
I know how this reads, coming from me.
I'm the parent who lets the forgotten trumpet stay forgotten and the bad week be a bad week. I'm not usually the one arguing that you should override your teenager.
But most of what I let slide is stuff they can fix later. This isn't. The people in that room are on a different clock to the rest of us, and a relationship that goes quiet at thirteen doesn't automatically start up again at twenty-two.
They're allowed to be bored. They're allowed to find all of it pointless. They're going anyway and in fifteen years I don't think they'll remember being bored.
I think they'll remember that they went.
See you next Thursday,
Lakshmi 💛
P.S. If you've got the reverse problem: grandparents who don't make the effort and a child who'd love it if they did, that's a harder issue and I don't have a clean answer.
ONE THING TO TRY THIS WEEK
Say the sentence out loud to whichever grandparents are getting the cold shoulder: they’re like this with all of us at the moment; it isn’t you.
It costs nothing, and it has probably been bothering them for a year.
NEXT THURSDAY
I gave the mental load to a robot
What actually came off my plate when I handed the family calendar to an AI and the thing it reminded me about that I'd completely forgotten.
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