The importance of grandparents

How important is it for a child to maintain a relationship with their grandparents and great-grandparents? In a word, very.

Grandparents and great-grandparents represent the grandchild’s personal connection to the past, the link to their family’s history. They educate and care-give in ways that the grandchild’s parents simply cannot. They have learned the value of patience and they understand fully the value of time. Looking through the elders’ eyes, they want to be with the children of their children and get to know them well.

They want to be influential, and provide guidance and support of the emotional kind and the financial kind. They contribute stability and security to the grandchild’s life. That family connection should be nurtured whenever the circumstances allow. They are indeed both grand and great.

All of us know grandparents as symbols of wisdom; they speak from experience and tell us how to go where they have been.

Grandparents have lived through three stages in their lives, childhood, adulthood, and grandparenthood. Through every stage, we learn new things and gain wisdom and knowledge. As we learn more, we know ourselves more and the world as we know it. This wisdom needs to be passed on to future generation, and this is why grandparents are so important.