Raising Your Grandchildren’s Parents

I’ve been working to reconcile these two perspectives:

90% of mothering is showing up–getting married and having the kids and not getting divorced–everything else is gravy and probably only makes a difference at the margins.

vs.

The mother’s influence makes a tremendous difference in the life of each child.

Both of which I hold.  At first glance, being able to believe both is an amazing intellectual feat.  The contradiction doesn’t bother me that much–I am large, I contain multitudes–but it bothers me enough I’ve been thinking about it.

First, the reasons I believe each one.   We are pretty relaxed about our parenting (except for media) and its worked great.  We don’t let our children read until they are five, minimum, no early interventions.  They have quite a bit of free time.  There’s twin studies and a lot of other evidence saying that within the same broad social context (very broad, like the same country and the same decade), how you raise kids doesn’t seem to make much difference absent abuse, malnutrition, or divorce.  Except possibly in their level of religious commitment when they are grown.  (I made a big hit with the school board when I spoke against some proposed program on the grounds that probably nothing the school was doing made any difference).

G raising his kids —

But in a lot of ways when it comes to media and discipline and manners and dress and, I don’t know, gardening and stuff, we are that family.  Again, as far as I can tell, its working out great.  Everyone comments on how well mannered and happy our kids are, and our kids love being our kids, knock on wood.

Also G raising his kids–

Here are some possibilities.

1.  Its not that raising is unimportant, its that birth and having a home with father and mother is so massively important that everything else looks insignificant by comparison.
2. The times are a’changing.  It used to be when the culture was sane that most parent efforts didn’t matter that much.  Now the culture is crazy, and parent efforts do.
3. Most parent efforts appear to worthless because they are worthless.   The parents are doing the wrong techniques and using the wrong methods.
4. Related–the real differences to your children come in being that family.  The kinds of interventions that actually help make you look extreme, so very few people do them.  All the actual options that are within the Overton Window are all variations on the same flawed theme.
5. You are actually raising your grandkids.  This possibility is the one that has been intriguing me.  Maybe if you have a stable home environment but raise your kids on Disney and TikTok they will still be employed and reasonably put together in the long run, maybe with more vicissitudes than necessary, but still ok in the long run.  But they won’t have the commitments to marriage and having children and staying married that allow them to raise successful grandkids.

The thing is, most of these cash out in favor of having more kids.  Getting married and having kids is the single biggest predictor for kids to stay religious.  And the single biggest way you encourage your kids to believe that something is important is doing it yourself.