Grandchildren

As you probably guessed, I am now a grandmother, and I wanted to share how I feel about this glorious event in the life of my son and his family via a letter I drafter to my grandson. Have you written letters to your baby grandchildren?

I first became interested in teaching small children how to write during my undergraduate work as I trained to be an elementary teacher. In the 1980s, the teaching of writing was shifting in a new direction. Influenced by educators like Donald Graves and Lucy Calkins, the focus moved away from rigid rules, drills, and worksheets and toward a child-centered approach.

Have you tried travelling with grandchildren? If you haven’t, we heartily recommend the experience! In recent years, multigenerational travel has become a growing market. An emerging subset based on this is grandparents and grandchildren are taking trips together, leaving the parents at home…

Who gets grandma’s yellow pie plate? At first glance, this seems like such an innocuous query. However, the possible answers to such questions are sparking small inter-and-intra-generational conflicts all over the country…

When my son Richard was six, a trusted uncle molested him, whispering, “This is our secret.” The abuse continued for years. Young children’s brains spend long stretches in theta waves – a dreamy state where adult messages slide in unfiltered, making warnings like “Never tell” burrow deep…

Oh, if we had only known then what we know now! We can say that about many things in life. August is Wellness Month, so I want to share some thoughts and a challenge for you about financial wellness. It’s a topic we have yet to embrace…

For many women over 60, becoming a grandparent is one of life’s greatest events. You get the joy of watching little ones grow (and giving them treats, doing crafts, and taking them places) without the stress of day-to-day parenting. But what happens when your adult children…

Did you have an allowance when you were a child? Did you put an allowance in place when your children were young? Or perhaps you didn’t have children but watched nieces/nephews and friends’ children learn about money, or not? It’s kind of scary to realize, but super…

We do not usually identify ourselves by what we are not. We do not say I am not blonde or not good at knitting or I do not come from a large family. Nor do other people think about these things when they think of us…

I clearly remember the day the job of grandmothering started. My daughter walked in from the kitchen, carrying a dish of lasagne. She put it down on the table. She stood up and cleared her throat. ‘We have some news for you,’ she said…