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Unfortunately, sometimes family generations don’t interact much with one another, especially when senior loved ones live in an assisted living or nursing home facility and not in their own homes. Younger generations may not even know much about their grandparents, even though grandparents may very much wish to form a bond with their family members.
Something you can do to help foster meaningful interactions between your kids and their grandparents, or with other younger family members and their grandchildren, is to create fun activities and other situations that allow them to be around one another more organically. This allows your kids and their grandparents to get to know one another and their interests and hobbies. Learn why it’s important that your children and their grandparents have a stronger bond as well as ways you can foster these meaningful relationships more easily.
Why Are Meaningful Interactions Between Kids And Grandparents Important?
There are several reasons why it’s essential to create meaningful interactions between kids and grandparents. Here are the key ones to consider, and they can help motivate you to encourage these meaningful bonds with your younger kids and their older counterparts.
Interactions Boost Senior Morale
Interactions between youth and seniors can help seniors feel more engaged with normal life outside of themselves and can boost their morale. Often, loneliness is something that seniors deal with regularly, and this can lead to losing interest in activities they used to enjoy or can cause them to have a lack of appetite or otherwise not care for themselves. If you see other signs your elderly loved one is not doing well, such as having recurring bed sores, poor hygiene, or severe weight loss (or weight gain), especially when they live in a nursing home, pay attention.
It’s wise to seek legal counsel to see if elderly abuse or neglect is at play, in addition to encouraging your younger family members to spend time with them.
Interactions Are Good For Kids, Too
Children should know who their grandparents are and learn to have patience and acceptance for their elders. It’s a great way to have kids think beyond themselves and to get them out of their comfort zones while entertaining and spending time with their loved ones. These meaningful interactions may be awkward at first, but will settle into a good place where even children start to look forward to their visits with their grandparents.
How To Foster Meaningful Interactions Between Kids And Grandparents
There are many ways you can encourage meaningful interactions between kids and their grandparents, and it starts by not being pushy about the subject. Forcing kids to spend time with their elderly family members (or vice versa) may make the experience negative for everyone involved. Here are other ways to foster these meaningful interactions.
Blend Hobbies
Try to find hobbies that have similarities to what both your kids and their grandparents like. They don’t have to be entirely the same, just similar. For example, if your kids like to go on hikes and their grandparents like to go bird watching, combining these hobbies into one fun activity can be a great way to encourage bonding. Other activities include watching family movies together or listening to audiobooks.
Encourage Togetherness Through Memories
Your children and their grandparents have people in common — you. Allow both generations to learn how to bond by sharing memories or encouraging the sharing of memories related to you when you were younger or as you were raising young children yourself. Grandparents may relish sharing memories of their past and grandchildren can be enthralled hearing about their parents through a new lens.
Let Grandparents Take Charge
Grandparents may feel more in control and more able to be themselves if they are allowed to set the rules for when and how they interact with their grandkids. Rather than try to organize activities and interactions for them, allow grandparents to determine how they interact with their grandkids. If they are unable to organize activities on their own, offer them suggestions they can choose from.
Create Routine Visits
Routine visits are beneficial in multiple ways. Kids and seniors alike can thrive on routine so they know when to expect interactions and can grow to look forward to them. Pick a day of the month or week to have routine visits and outline to kids especially what will happen during these visits, whether they’re going out for an adventure for the day with grandparents or a simple stroll around the park.
Make sure the routine visits are visits that both grandparents and kids look forward to and aren’t too strenuous or time-consuming. The interactions don’t have to be repetitive, they just simply have to be engaging and regular in consistency regarding dates and times they occur.
Encourage Various Forms Of Contact
There are multiple ways your loved ones can communicate with each other. Email, handwritten letters, virtual calls, in-person visits, and texting can all be ways your kids can keep in contact with grandparents (and vice versa). Kids can be especially excited and intrigued to receive a letter in the mail from grandparents as a novelty, and grandparents can enjoy sharing their lives with their younger family members in old-fashioned ways.
Enjoy The Interaction
It may take time for your loved ones to become comfortable creating these meaningful interactions, but once a routine and bond are formed, they will become more and more enjoyable. Stick with it and you can help foster great relationships between your kids and their grandparents that last.
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