I once wanted no part of grandchildren.  Indeed when my daughter and son-in-law announced that our first grandchild was in the works I toppled into despair.  Did I look like I was old enough to be a grandfather?  My hair was still red, well sorta but otherwise I was in every sense a vigorous guy.  So I made the next nine months a misery for my wife.  How dare your daughter do this to me!

And on the big day I walked into the hospital room leering a Dracula grin.

My daughter was in bed holding the baby and when I shuffled over she surprised me by simply holding the tiny bundle out for me to take.  Reflex took over and I did, looked at this brand new little  girl and immediately put her down -- in my heart.  I was in love.  Transported.  And in later years I was  carried off by every other one which came along in much the same way.

Now with some eighteen years experience in the role, I’ve come  realize that they fall in love with you too.  But just as your feelings for your grandchildren differ in certain very important ways from those you have for your children, they return the favor.  Seeing you as more trustworthy in some regards.  Often more relaxing to be around.  Less inclined to be critical.  This is because there’s so many things a grandparent doesn’t care very much about.  You don’t care about how soon they’re walking and talking, where their small motor skills test out against some cohort, you don’t care about what time they go to bed or whether they’re eating vegetables.  You just care about playing with them, watching them learn how to put a puzzle together, watching them wrestle with their uncle on the living room carpet, or in my wife’s case, watching them laugh along with her in a cloud of pie flour the night before Thanksgiving.

Yet there’s more there because grandparents also have a unique ability to teach those fascinating creatures two levels down in the scheme of things how to sit up and bark, or bite.  Recently the international flower power (FTD here in the States) Telefora commissioned a study about the peculiar bond between grandparents and grandchildren in which they surveyed 734 grandparents, 1,000 parents, 1,000 children and the Daily Mail reported on it.  Long story short: three quarters of 6-16-year-olds wish they saw their grandparents more and tend to “respond well to a grandparent’s experience and wisdom.” 

Yes “wisdom.”  When was the last time you heard that word?

Yet while we grandparents, especially us Conservative grandparents, often complain about the nation having gone to hell in a handbasket, out of a misguided sense of delicacy about our relationship with their parents, we’re reluctant to proselytize.  Among the very young people who’ll pay any attention at all?

“Every time I volunteer some opinion or other to the child I wind up having to defend myself and so from bitter experience I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut,” many grandparents explain their silence.  And I’ve felt some of that myself, but eventually realized that if you imitate the patient jaguar hunting the unwary javelina at the waterhole and wait, sooner or later the child will ask.  Then the defensive role is reversed:  “Hey she asked me what I thought – what  do you want me to do?  Lie to the child?”  I also found that when you push back in that manner enough times the parents always give up.  Usually rationalizing their surrender with some remark like, “I don’t think she really understands what Grandma is saying,” or “Hey there’s nothing I can ever do to change Dad, I survived those opinions I guess he will too -- besides he does so love going over there.”

You’ll also find that once they figure out the dynamic grandchildren tend not to rat you out.  They are, after all, extremely situational little creatures.  Their parents might belong to the modern children should understand and accept the reason for certain guidelines school of thought while the grandparents are much more the do it because I say do it and now let’s go give the dog a bath authority figure and children get it.  Effortlessly split their own personalities.  Indeed you reach a point where the moment the parents walk out the door, they stop demanding the reasons for being told to do something and laughingly comply with anything you ask.  Which I might add parenthetically is why parents will often return and remark, “Wow I can’t believe you guys got so much done together in only two hours.”

Now I’m not suggesting Conservative grandparents turn their grandchildren against their Mom and Dad, I’m only asking you to remember how you once mastered difficult subject matter yourself.  In college or at work.  If you wanted to really learn, you never just took the course did you?  You also did the recommended reading.  Got a different view of the material from somebody different, and so acquired what you might call a stereoscopic vision of the subject.  Which is a good way to sum up your relationship with your grandchildren.  That you’re the 3D glasses which enable them to see life with some depth.

It’s easier than you think because grandchildren, assuming you’re an integral part of their life, routinely take what you have to say and play it forward.  “Mommy is making dinner now” my daughter once told the two year old playing with her dolls.  But not wanting to be interrupted, her sweet little princess glared back up at her and in a perfect imitation of my wife’s voice and tone told her to “Knock yourself out.”  Then went back to what she was doing.  That sort of stuff happens all the time.

But grandchildren also put the stories you tell them to good use.  Backing up people who would feed them a line or assume they’d march along with the group’s opinion on something.  I once heard a granddaughter tell a shocked group of classmates who had been laughing at Duck Dynasty that she loved the show because it’s all about the “values of family and family friends.”  I’ve heard them quote from books I gave them to read, come back and argue with me about moving an adverb to the end of the sentence for effect and many times laugh at a joke I made which their mother or father didn’t get because he or she and I had shared a story together. 

And working with grandchildren in that way, telling stories about yourself, the nation and our history is not only the greatest adventure you’ll ever undertake it’s more than likely the greatest good you’ll ever do.  Indeed one can equate the mass migration out of the cities after the Second World War, leaving Aunt Rose in Corona and the grandparents to move to Florida, with the accelerating leftist bend the nation has taken.  Because several generations of our grandchildren have by now been left alone with parents still trying to figure out what’s right and wrong and so very much at the mercy of peers, K-12 public school teachers and leftist anti-American college professors convinced that they themselves, do know.

Think about it.

Then “Knock yourself out.”

Richard F. Miniter is the author of The Things I Want Most, Random House, BDD.  The father of six and grandfather of six he lives and writes in the colonial era hamlet of Stone Ridge, New York, blogs at richardfminiterblog.com and can also be reached at miniterhome@aol.com