The full Nautilus archive
•
eBooks & Special Editions
•
Ad-free reading
- The full Nautilus archive
- eBooks & Special Editions
- Ad-free reading
Have you spoken with your grandparents recently? If not, and these family forebears are still around, perhaps you should consider giving them a ring. Not everyone gets a close grandparent—or any grandparent at all—but when these bonds exist, they may offer special sustenance for the elders.
That’s one finding of a recent study published in the journal Research in Human Development. Mary Cox, a researcher in psychology and brain sciences at Washington University, wondered how the far-flung nature of today’s families combined with greater access to video and phone technology would influence how grandparents talk to their grandchildren. She noticed that very little research has actually measured the content of these conversations, how they’re influenced by race and gender, or what impact they have on the well-being of the grandparents, so she and her colleagues set out to come up with some answers.
“Despite how important grandparenting is, this is one of the first studies to really ask what’s going on in these conversations,” explained Patrick Hill, a co-author of the study and psychology and a brain sciences professor at Washington University.
Read more: “How Big Is Your Family?”
Cox, Hill and their colleagues built on the work of the St. Louis Personality and Aging Network study, which launched in 2007 with a group of about 1,600 participants in middle age. It now follows 500 of them as they enter their grandparenting years. Most of the grandparents in the study—all of whom live in St. Louis—had about 3 grandchildren, and only 7 percent lived with a grandchild. About three-quarters of the study participants were white, and a quarter were Black.
The study found that grandparents who do talk to their grandkids, particularly about everyday subjects like school, friendships and leisure activities, tend to feel more socially useful, a greater sense of purpose, and more optimistic about society. The most surprising finding was that grandparents actually may talk to their grandkids more often today than a generation ago. The grandparents surveyed said they recall talking less to their own grandparents about almost every topic imaginable—including education, friends, current events, social change, identity, and romantic partners.
Perhaps this can be explained by the number of technologies available today for conversation across great distances—phone calls, texts, video chats—and because more subjects may be considered socially acceptable for conversation. But it’s possible memory bias also plays a role, the team points out: Grandparents may forget some of the conversations of their early youth.
How cross-generational conversations go is partly determined by race and gender, the researchers found. Grandmothers reported talking to their grandkids more than grandfathers did, and Black grandparents talked to their grandkids about identity and race more than white grandparents.
The study only surveyed grandparents, so the next step will be to talk with the younger generation. “We only have one side of the story right now,” Hill said. “What we don’t know is how the grandchildren are thinking of these relationships.”
Either way, the findings suggest that in our fragmented era, meaning still travels across the generations, conversation by conversation. 
Enjoying Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.
Lead image: Simple Line / Shutterstock
Kristen French
Posted on
Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing features and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, and New York Magazine. She has a masters degree in science journalism from Columbia University.
Kristen French
Read More