They are so adorable. Of course we want to share the photos of our Grands on Facebook, Instagram and everywhere else our friends may follow. Only maybe we shouldn't--unless we've asked the parents first. There are, it seems, all kinds of ways photos can be misused.
Take this Ask Amy letter from a distraught mom whose mother-in-law has been sharing on Facebook photos she (the mom) has posted of her children. The problem, as the mom tells it, is the way in which the shared photos can get posted, re-posted and spread around to who-knows-what.
Here are the specifics from the mom:
A widowed aunt has been speaking to men over Facebook, and one of these men shared a photo of my daughter to his Facebook friends! This was truly alarming.
I immediately asked this person (whom I’ve never met) to take the photo down. After a day I was still so shaken that I deleted my account. My mother-in-law was heartbroken."
I don’t want [my mother-in-law ] sharing so many pictures, because others in her circle seem to think that by her sharing, they are welcome to do that as well.
There you have it. Inadvertently we may cross a social media line--making the parents of our grandchildren uneasy about the safety of their children. So we're stuck with keeping those photos to ourselves to enjoy--unless we clear the share with our Grand's parents. It can be a dangerous world out there. The tech-safety challenges weren't around when we were bringing up our children, but they are here now, and we may not understand all the ramifications.
Just in time for the Holidays, here's a way to think about the gifts you'll be giving friends and family--especially your grown kids and their kids. It comes via the Sketch Guy, a financial columnist and blogger for the New York Times.
In a recent column the Sketch Guy (aka Carl Richards) raised this provocative question: Is your spending aligned with your values? The Sketch Guy's point: It pays to look at the things we spend money on (invest in, in his terms) and see if the spending furthers our values or if there is a better way to invest (spend) on that value. (His example: Two men meet for lunch once a month; it costs them $40 each. What they really value is getting together to talk, not eating a lavish meal. They've switched to taking a hike together once a month.)
Does value spending apply to how we handle gifts for our grown kids, their kids and our disposable income?
You bet. The first friend I asked about it told me this story.
Two years ago, when the oldest of her daughter's daughters was having a Bat Mitzvah, she and the GrandPops went up to her daughter's home in Connecticut a few days early. Her son-in-law asked her to take the Bat Mitzvah girl and her younger sister to a particular beauty salon to get their hair styled for the big event. The bill: $140--not something my friend couldn't afford but she resented it. She did not see the value in spending that much money on hair cuts for young girls. So this year when the younger daughter was having her Bat Mitzvah, she and the GrandPops once again went up to Connecticut for a few days. This time when her son-in-law asked her to take the girls to the beauty salon, she asked him for the cash to pay for it. She wasn't going to spend money on something she didn't value.
That was a lesson she started to apply to gift-giving. When one of her granddaughters wanted a GoPro video camera for her birthday, my friend thought about it carefully. She was wary at first. GoPro is not inexpensive (around $200 for a simple one) and it seemed like a fad but that didn't drive her decision. "She's interested in photography and film-making. It was something that furthered her interests." my friend says. "I didn't mind buying it for her." When the younger daughter wanted a floppy, fuzzy floor chair for her birthday, my friend applied her value reasoning. "It wasn't something I would chose, but she loves books and I could see this as a cozy place for her to read."
Another friend says she and her husband applied the value-spend test to a family vacation to celebrate their 50th Anniversary. Where some of their friends have taken their families to luxury resorts to celebrate, they took a different tack, As scientists who've supported a host of environmental causes, they booked a trip for ten--their two adult sons, their wives and four preteen and young teen Grands--to the Galapagos Islands for a week. They saw it as a chance to introduce their grandchildren to the natural wonders of the world. Expensive? Very. But a worthwhile investment: Who know where the exposure to natural habitats and Darwinian change might lead. To say nothing of an introduction to blue-footed Booby birds.
Paterfamilias and I are not quite as rigorous as some of our friends. We have been known to indulge American Girl Doll requests (Value? Her interest in a particular point in history was piqued) and a Lego car racing set (Value? Putting it together is problem solving). But we have drawn a personal spending-value line: Jimmy Choo shoes, no; soccer boots, always.
Every family vacation has its theme, inside joke or something that becomes a means to remember the time spent together. On one Vermont vacation, we couldn't eat enough country-made peach pies. They were the treat--every evening and some afternoons. One year our Grands put on a magic show that was, well, magic and memorable, down to the finale of all them running around the lawns of our condo with sparklers. Last year was the year of Pride and Prejudice --the full BBC version. We would watch an hour or two every night--everyone rushed through dinner to take their seats in front of the TV for the next episode or two--and that included the 7 year old, the teenagers and the adults.
This year, unlike our previous family vacations in Vermont, our daughter and her family were not with us. Sigh. They had obligations elsewhere so this was the family summer vacation with just one set of adult kids and Grands.
It was also the vacation I fell into a pattern of reading the New York Times on the porch of my condo every morning and then wandering over to Uber son's unit armed with a scintillating article to share. The idea of a news bite from PenPen did not necessarily bring cheers from my Grands, ages 8, 13 and 15. I could almost hear groans. But once I read key parts or summarized the issue, they sat up and took notice--well, they paid some attention.
One day the story was about the attempt to do unto This Land is Your Land, Woody Guthrie's anthem, what had been done to Happy Birthday. That is, lift the copy right and make the song available to anyone who wanted to use it. My Grands of course knew the song--they sang a line or two before we got back to the facts--and even the 8-year-old knew what "copyright" was (her dad has written several books. Must have been a word that came up from time to time.)
Another story that drew interest: A recent dig in Hungary where anthropologists were hoping to unearth the "heart of gold" of Suleiman the Magnificent, an Ottoman warrior and leader, that was buried in a small village in Hungary when he died on the eve of battle. What's not intriguing about a dig into the past--a 16th century battlefield bunker--and a story about a warrior leaving his heart buried in a casket of gold?
Another day it was the news report that French President Francois Hollande had spent $10,000 a month on haircuts. Shocking to all (hashtag #CoiffeurGate) and lots of jokes by my Grands on hairstylist spending--especially by une homme with not that much hair on his head.
Bottom line: It didn't matter if my arrival with news story in hand became a running joke. Actually, it never dawned on me that my Grands wouldn't enjoy my news clips--nor did I care if they didn't. They could always walk away or return to whatever it was they were doing. It was more important to me that the news stories led to lively conversations--about why Arlo Guthries' heirs wouldn't want to give away the copyright (It wasn't the money; they didn't want politicians with whom they disagreed to use the song for their own purposes.) and why copyrights are important to artists. We also theorized about Turkish Suleiman the Magnificent and what he was doing so far afield in Hungary and why his entourage left the great warrior's heart behind.
The vacation of the New York Times stories might not have been as tasty as the peach pie vacation or addictive as Pride and Prejudice but it was a reminder--to me at any rate--that Grands like being part of a grown-up discussion. It is also reminder that we leave a legacy with our Grands, not just in the material things that may come their way but in little discussions, bits of advice, sharing of memories.
Who knows if my Grands will remember the summer of news story discussions or look to newspapers like the New York Times for the wide range of stories they have to tell. But they might. The daily news briefings this summer undoubtedly meant more to me than to my Grands. Newspapers are my passion. How else would we begin to understand other cultures. I can only hope they picked up a little of my enthusiasm and stay curious.
There's nothing quite like an upbeat ending to a family vacation to make you smile whenever you think about the time together.
You never know where those moments are going to come from, but we stumbled into one--and almost let it get away--on a three-day mini-vacay with our grown daughter and her daughter.
Weeks before we convened for a planned get-together in Williamstown, Mass., I had spotted an ad for the Pirates of Penzance at a theater in nearby Pittsfield. Pateramilias and I are Gilbert and Sullivan enthusiasts. During our hands-on-parenting days we had converted our daughter to an appreciation of their pointed silliness. The hope was to pass the baton to the next generation, specifically to an almost 14-year-old currently enthralled with the score and lyrics for Hamilton. (Can I note here--yes I can, it's my blog--that there is a similarity in the cleverness of the rhymes of both lyricists.) For all I knew, though, this show in Pittsfield would be an amateur production that might be more of a turn off than a turn on.
That was one of the reasons I did not advance-purchase the tickets. Another was that there's many a slip 'tween the cup (vacation plans) and the lip (actual arrival of all parties at a given place and time). In our case, our daughter and her family would be getting back from a business/pleasure trip in Europe two days before our scheduled get-together. Would they be too jet-lagged to drive the nearly three hours from their home to Williamstown?
I may have put off the purchase, but theater was very much on my mind. Our Grand has an interest in it and what better place to be than Williamstown, which has a first-rate summer theater. So when daughter and Grand showed up as scheduled on a Tuesday, I bought tickets to a show at the Williamstown theater. We weren't terrifically interested in the play (The Chinese Room)--Paterfamilias went so far as to refuse to have a ticket purchased for him--but on Tuesday nights, the director and cast stay around after the show to talk to the audience about the production. I thought my Grand would love a glimpse of the inside story.
No doubt she would have, except that by 6:00 p.m., as we picked our way through a pre-theater dinner, it was clear neither mother nor daughter would be able to stay awake for the show. Jet lag was upon them.
I tried to turn the tickets in for a refund but that was a no-go. After some polite pleading and the addition of a $3 a ticket fee, the theater let me exchange the tickets for the next night--upping my investment in seeing this show to nearly $200 for three of us. But Wednesday night would be our last one together--we had to make our separate ways home on Thursday. There would be no time to see Pirates, which both PF and our daughter expressed a great preference in seeing.
What to do? I knew when to fold 'em. I am usually very conservative when it comes to parsing out my entertainment dollars. But the $200 for The Chinese Room was spent whether we saw it or not. Wednesday morning I called the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield and snagged four of the last tickets for Pirates available that night. We were double booked, so to speak.
What a great decision that was. This Pirates of Penzance was like a bubbly tonic. The director and cast milked it for every bit of nonsense in it--even some that was not. (The NYTimes reviewed it a few days later and called it "exhilarating.") But more than that, it made PF and I deliriously happy: we were all together; our daughter laughed out loud all the way through it and so did our Grand, who , even as she enters her teen years, retains "a capacity for innocent enjoyment." We came away from the show feeling light of heart and exhilarated.
We talked about nothing else on the ride back to Williamstown and through breakfast the next morning. By the time we parted for our separate journeys home, we had gone over almost every bit of scenery, choreography and song we could remember. Since then, PF and I have clicked on YouTube and heard many another version of the songs. Every time we hear the trumpet's martial sound (Tarantula, Tarantula) we smile at the remembrance of the show and how much fun we had together--even though the three-days of togetherness had its ups and downs.
Is my Grand a new G&S fan? The music, she allowed, was not to her taste but she found the show "really funny." She was delighted with the policeman's lot, despite it being "not a happy one," and with the swaggering of the Pirate King. "It is, it is a glorious thing"--not only to be the Pirate King but to end a vacation on such a high note.
On vacation in Vermont with paterfamilias plus one grown child and his family, I take a yoga class. The yogi (a woman who also teaches paddleboard yoga--yoga on a board that's bobbing in a lake. I'm just saying....) starts class with thoughtful time. She talks about the integration of inner independence with outer-world dependence, about how feeling the quiet of the inner self connects us to others.
It's a lot to take in before a round of Vinyasas, but her words come back to me that afternoon. I was at the swimming pool observing my three Grands and their parents at play in the water. The teen-aged boy (15) likes testing his dad--who can throw the pool-drenched tennis ball harder, dive deeper for a stone, make a bigger splash. The two girls (13 and 8) are young enough to spend inordinate amounts of time practicing their underwater handstands and challenging each other to one silly game after another. Then while everyone's attention was at maximum outer-dependence, the 8 year old was in water just beyond her swim abilities. Thinking she was in trouble, her brother rushed over and whisked her up. She hadn't been floundering, she insisted, and there was much ado about who did what to whom against their will. Family relationships can be as shaky as yoga on a paddleboard.
These mundane bits and pieces of their day-to-day lives are for us--their grandparents who live far from them--a rare moment of pleasure. Sitting still and enjoying the simple act of watching, we see how the parents (our grown kids) and kids (our grandkids) push and pull toward and against each other. Lucky us to b part of these moments of integrated inner independence and outer dependence that keep them (and us) connected.
One of the hardest parts of parenting grown children is keeping our advice to ourselves, unless asked. It's hard because we've stored up a lot of real-life wisdom. We know a thing or two. Why shouldn't our children have the benefit of our experience-informed opinion?
That was a question raised by a dad whose 25-year-old daughter had a master's degree, was living abroad (self-supporting via small jobs) and had a history of churning through one romantic relationship after another. Now she was involved with a Frenchman and the dad felt her life was "centered on guy-security." He was worried, he wrote to advice-columnist Carolyn Hax, "that she isn't seeing the long view and that each new guys is an emotional crutch, helping her defer a future." His question to Hax: "Should I bug out? Should I ask her to defend her choices?"
Hax's answer was one we usually don't want to hear: "Bug out. She's 25, self-supporting and hasn't asked your opinion." Readers also chimed in with a bug-off message: "As long as she's taking care of herself and safe about it, let her live her life."
I'm in total agreement. And then I went out to dinner with a friend who was still reeling from his son's negative reaction to the dad's attempt at advice--advice on the verboten subject of grandchildren.
Here's the back story, according to my friend, the grandfather: The son, who was adopted at birth, developed attention deficit problems--ADD--when he was in the 4th grade. The parents had him tested, made efforts not to have their son labeled as ADD and worked with the schools and special teachers to help him make his way through school successfully. Which he did. Now the son's son--my friend's grandson--is in 4th grade and showing the same signs of ADD that his father had shown. His report card at the end of the year told the story devastatingly--at least it did to the grandfather. So he pulled together all the reports and tests that they--the grandparents--had on their son that their son had never seen and suggested the son read through them and have his son --their grandchild--tested.
That's when he was told to butt out, that it was none of his business.
So, like the Hax-writing dad, here's a dad whose son and family are self-supporting and haven't asked their dad for advice. And yet, the grandfather sees his grandchild in pain and has information the son and the son's wife don't have--a whole file of data about a problem that is likely inherited.
Is there a difference of degree here between the Hax dad and my friend? If there is, does it matter in terms of bugging out or butting in?
Maybe there's a middle ground. It's one thing to withhold advice ("bug out"); it's another to withhold information that might be helpful. Maybe the answer is to share an observation and hand over the file so that the son and his wife can digest it and either use it to make an informed decision or toss it aside as irrelevant to their son.
Bottom line: it's not easy to sit by and believe something can be done to ease a grandchild's pain--and not have the parents act accordingly. But the child is, after all, his grandson, not his son. The parents may have a very different perspective on their son's behavior.
It makes me sad when my teen-aged Grands bury their faces in their smart phones. I find it eerie when I get in an elevator or am walking down a street and everyone around me is peering into or tapping on their cell. I'm uncomfortable when a friend takes a call on the cell while we're chatting over lunch--or just a cup of coffee.
So much for me and my generation, stuck with our sense of the world that doesn't seem to apply to the digital age.
Comes now a Pew study that assures me that it isn't my generation. No one is quite sure what's right, what's wrong when it comes to cell phone etiquette. Calling their report "Manners 2.0: Key findings about etiquette in the digital age," Pew offers these observations on the social norms for what is rude and what is acceptable behavior when we gather together but still feel the call to stay connected to the wider world.
The key finding: Across the generations, most of us see cellphone use as OK in certain public spaces, but not in more private or intimate gatherings. Here's the Pew chart on the where's of public space .
Most of us--82% in the survey--view cellphones as harmful and distracting to group dynamics, but a growing number (and this probably applies to the younger generations) say cellphones are used more often to make social gatherings more social, not less. Here's the data on that finding: 89% of cellphone owners say they used their phone during their most recent social gathering with friends, though they also said they were more likely to use their cellphone in a manner tied to the social gathering than in an antisocial way.
So, does taking selfies or photos at group gathering count as using the cellphone? Sort of. Pew's survey reports that people who used cellphones at private gatherings used them to post a picture or video of the gathering (45%), share something that happened in the group (41%), get information they thought would be interesting to the group (38%), or connect with other people known to the group (31%).
Another chart from Pew spelling out some of those findings.
As to a generation gap, it's there but you can almost see the convergence from here: 98% of young adults used their cellphone for one reason or another during their most recent get-together with others; 69% of those over 65 did. Almost all age groups, however, frowned on usage in quiet or more intimate settings.
My friend Ann and I are having coffee, catching up on the state of our semi-retirements, vacations and grandchildren. Hers live near her; she sees them all the time. Mine are far away; vacations with them and their families are my only chance to see them up close and personally for more than a day or two.
I mention a big change in our family vacation dynamic. Last year when we were all in Vermont at our usual vacation retreat, our then-13-year-old grandson would pop by our condo at odd times. He'd walk or bike over, plop down, talk soccer or baseball with his BaPa, do a crossword puzzle with me and finish off the peaches in the bowl on the kitchen counter. This year, he was 14. He dropped by our condo only on request--a text message, say, to ask him to bring us something from his parent's condo. He'd chat when he arrived but he didn't linger or even look around for peaches. When we stopped by his condo, we were barely acknowledged. Instead, he'd have his iPhone in hand, thumbs tapping away while, presumably, he stayed in touch with friends.
Don't take it personally, Ann says. She, too, has a 14-year old grandson. His grandfather (Ann's husband) has been driving his grandson to soccer practice for eight years now--to fields all over the county and some beyond. They'd talk soccer (the grandson is a gifted player) in the car, tell each other jokes and sometimes muse about math homework (grandpa tutors him to make sure he keeps up). That was then. Now that he's 14, his thumbs do the talking. He's much less communicado even when the texting stops. If they're giving a fellow player a ride, grandpa is not usually included in the conversation.
Ann finds her grandson similarly withdrawn from her. Like mine, he's a nice child and polite. She doesn't take the behavior personally. She assumes it mirrors her son's behavior when he was young and living in her house. "I should have paid more attention," she says. What she means is that when her kids were growing up, her life was so full--what with being a wife and mother, pursuing a career, keeping house, driving kids to various activities. For most of us, our kids grow up so fast we don't necessarily notice all the little changes along the way. Our kids evolve--there's no Aha! moment; we just absorb the way they are at any given moment. Whereas, as grandparents, we have the time to step back and take notice and note.
In our family, since we see our grandchildren for a weekend every few months or, on vacation, for a week, it's no wonder that we're on super-alert: paying attention to everything at every minute. Changes don't slowly evolve; suddenly they are here and now.
In a recent column financial planner Carl Richards asked, What Is Our Attention Really Worth? He'd been thinking, he wrote, that attention is a currency that we choose how to spend "just like we spend our time, energy and money. Unlike money, however, there’s no way to store attention for later use. It’s a bit like time in that way; we use it or lose it."
His point is that we can spend time on something--or someone-- and still not pay attention to it or them. Attention "might be the most in-demand asset we have to offer....So given the value of our attention, shouldn’t we pay more attention to how we spend it?...We think of certain things as being free, but if it requires our attention, we’re paying a price of sorts."
For most of us, we spend our attention on our Grands when our Grands are available, and on their various steps in growing up--much more than we were able to when they were youngsters and we saw them every day and they were at the heart of our busy, everyday lives. We now have what is euphemistically called "perspective" and the golden opportunity of time to pay attention--and share our insights about (not criticisms of!) our Grands with their parents (our grown kids). The parents seem to enjoy hearing how their kids are or are not like they were when they were that age--even if we couldn't pay much attention back then and if, by necessity, our observations are in a pre-texting context.
We've been spending summer vacations in Vermont with our grown children and their families for about ten years now. Every year seems to have a theme or a high point that defines the vacation. One year it was the magic show our Grands put on for us and their parents--not just the show itself but the hours they spent practicing their tricks and helping each other. And then there was the year of the farm stand peach pies. We couldn't eat enough of them.
This year was marked by binge watching--in three nights--all five hours of a DVD. Who would admit to binge watching on vacation? Sounds awful. Besides, what would keep a 14-year-old boy, one seven and two 12-year old girls intrigued--plus the parents and grandparents --and asking all day when the viewing of the next episodes would begin?
We watched the PBS version of Pride and Prejudice--the one with Colin Firth as a dreamy Mr Darcy and Jennifer Ehle as the spirited Elizabeth Bennet. We had to take occasional breaks in the action--wee pauses to explain some details, such as what an entailed estate entailed and for those among us who were romance-challenged, why some of the characters did or did not pine for others. But everyone loved the tale of the Bennet sisters, their sensible father, their hysterical mother and the balls and dancing of the era, plus the lushness of the scenes--horses riding across meadows, characters walking through wooded estates or into town on rutted roads. We were all intrigued with the way life was lived some 200 years ago--at least as re-created by the producers of the program.
The evening binges led to daytime discussions--on the lot of women at that time and now, on the importance of live music and muscianship, how mail was delivered, on how people traveled to visit friends and relatives in other towns and cities, the role of servants.
And then we followed it up with peach pie--some traditions live on from one vacation to the next.
I had written a condolence note to a co-worker. One of her Grands--a 3 month old twin--had died suddenly in his mother's arm. There is not much we can say to relieve the unbearable heaviness of such a loss except to say the family is in our thoughts and prayers. I wrote quickly--not caring so much what I said as making sure I sent my sentiments when comfort was most needed.
In her note back to me--a note of thanks for taking the time to think of and pray for her family--she made a comment that mirrored my own thoughts. "As parents and grandparents I know you understand the anguish of our loss. We grieve for ourselves, but even more for our children, [the baby's] parents."
I understand. A few years ago I flew to Boston to be at the hospital bedside of a grandchild who had been hit by a car when out walking with her mother, my daughter. She had a concussion and fractured pelvis, and in those first 24 hours neither our family nor the team of doctors treating her knew had bad the concussion was nor what the long-term repercussions would be.
We were lucky. Two years later, my granddaughter--my daughter's child--is thriving with seemingly no major after-effects from the accident. But I remember the double pain I felt that day--for my granddaughter who at that moment was in unknown danger and for my daughter, who saw her child hit by a car and who had thought--for one dreadful moment--that her child was dead.
My co-worker's note was also, in its way, a reminder that there are, thankfully, two sides to that double feeling. The joys a grandchild brings are also experienced twice--in the wonder of whatever the child did or said that delights us and in the pleasure we see in the faces of the parents--our children.
