One friend who works part of the week from home has a regular standing date every Friday to spend the day, and share the load, with her mother, on top of other regular weekly grandma visits. Another friend tells me the only way she has continued her career is because of her mother, who packed up and moved from South Carolina to Atlanta to help her raise her two toddlers, born a year apart. Yet another set of friends have parents who are there bright and early at 30th Street Station once a week, making the trip up to Princeton to spend time with their granddaughter, who they kept even more often than that when the family lived in Center City.
And let's not even talk about the friends who see their parents every day, as they drop their kids off for granny day care. In all these cases, the generations are able to bond. And my friends know, when the baby is too sick for daycare or school or they need a break, they have a pair of arms, loving and true, to regularly fall back on.
For a variety of reasons, this arrangement doesn't work out for me. And as I've discovered recently, that makes snow and sick days - especially when then topple on top of each other for days on end - very trying.
But a new study raises questions about what happens when kids are regularly in the care of Grandma and Grandpa. Researchers at University College London studied 12,000 kids born in 2000 and 2001. They found the kids cared for by their grandparents were 34-percent more likely to be overweight as toddlers.
Interestingly enough, the researchers also found a correlation with affluence. Kids from more well off families were more likely to be heavy.
The lead researcher told the BBC the team didn't have exact reasons for this, but guessed the kids were overindulged and under exercised. In other words, I posit, less wealthy grandparents were more likely to use that tried and true phrase of parenting "Go outside and play" while richer grandparents were able to indulge DVDs and video games, all of which mean inactive couch time.
As well, grandparents across all backgrounds are all probably doing what grandparents are supposed to do: allow fifth helpings and a liberal dose of candy, cookies and ice cream.
Amy Goyer, of the AARP Foundation's Grandparent Information Center, tells the website Parentdish.com, some of this may be cultural. Grandparents most likely grew up in times when children were told that to not clean their plates was wasteful and before our health conscious era, when candy as a reward became taboo.
But Goyer emphasizes that despite this study, grandparents remain an amazing and preferred source of child care, not to mention parental peace of mind.
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