Parents love their kids spending time with their grandparents. It’s a win-win for everyone concerned, with parents getting some timeout from kid-wrangling, the grandparents getting to enjoy the grand kids they adore, and the kids having a blast.
But it seems there’s a few rules that grandparents follow that are a COMPLETE turn around from their days as parents.
A few decades out of the main game apparently makes room for a new perspective when it comes to raising kids…
1. As a grandparent, you are confounded by the rules of modern pregnancy. No ham? No chorizo? No feta? You absolutely ate feta in rural Australia in the 1970s when you were pregnant, where it was obviously readily available, and your kids are fine. Not to mention all the casual smoking.
2. As a grandparent, bedtimes are merely suggestions. Those two-year-olds only really get going around 9pm anyway.
3. As a grandparent, you know it’s absolutely fine to give kids chips, lollies and ice cream when they haven’t touched a bite of their healthy, homecooked meal. There’s a time and place for steamed kale and it ain’t at Nana’s.
4. As a grandparent, you are duty-bound to only remember the most outdated and potentially unsafe parenting advice, like, “Put some whiskey on his dummy, he’ll calm right down.”
5. As a grandparent, you know it’s no biggy if kids watch more than their government-sanctioned twenty minutes of television per day. Gimme a break. Twenty minutes?! How are they ever going to get through all those Disney Princess movies their parents won’t let them watch on twenty minutes a day?
6. As a grandparent, you’d never make your grandchild wear Kmart clothing. No sir. Your grandchild will know the pleasure of walking into a kindergarten and saying, with confidence, “Dressed by Seed Heritage, fellas.”
7. As a grandparent, you know that your grandkids are the best of all your friends’ grandkids. Susan’s grandchildren don’t sing Let It Go for 30 minutes straight. And I think we all know Barry’s grandkids couldn’t wash their own hands if soap was made of high-fructose corn syrup.
8. As a grandparent, you use Facebook for one thing, and one thing only: to brag like posts of and about your grandchildren, and occasionally – and more broadly – brag post about the joys of having grandchildren.
9. As a grandparent, you’ll forgive your grandchildren for anything.
Spilt milk on the new lounge? No use crying over it.
Smashed window? Oh well.
Pen on the walls? Kids’ll be kids.
Rockstar-at-a-hotel-style-meltdown? Oh my God it’s getting hard to be a cool grandparent about this.
10. As a grandparent, you’re officially signed up for a lifetime of ballet recitals, soccer finals, athletics carnivals, school assemblies, Easter hat parades and fetes. And you know what? It rules, because there’s nothing you love more than seeing your grandkids kick arse.
