Emma Soames The association estimates that as many as a million grandchildren in this country do not see their grandparents. Some of the stories of split families are truly heart-rending. There are examples of grandparents expected to bring up their grandchildren after a parent’s divorce – until a new partner arrives on the scene, when the grandparents are cast aside and refused access.
The reason can be simply one of geography, or worse, when a new step-parent either can’t be bothered to indulge their new stepchildren or is determined to wipe out their partner’s past.
This results in bewildered children and forlorn grandparents, who feel like disposable relatives.
There is, as ever, another side to this story. There are those adults who were so badly treated by their own parents that they do not wish their children to be allowed near them at any price. The psychology behind this is complex: the children’s safety is no doubt uppermost in their minds, but also present is, sometimes, a desire to punish the parent. Both sides tell compelling and devastating stories. But what about the effects on the children?
Recent research by the eminent developmental psychologist Professor Judy Dunn examines the impact of family change on them. Instead of talking mostly to parents or grandparents, Children’s Perspectives focuses on the thoughts and feelings of children during periods of change in their parents’ relationships.
As well as demonstrating that children suffer terribly in later life from having no relationship with their real father, the research is compellingly in favour of children having an ongoing relationship with grandparents. According to the research, gained initially by asking young children to draw the people most important to them, it emerges that many grandparents are important confidants for children going through family stresses, that the relationship with the maternal grandmother is particularly important and that, in single-parent families the relationship between child and grandparent is key in providing stability for the child during potentially traumatic changes.
Taken one step further, Professor Dunn’s research strongly suggests that parents should do all they can to allow and encourage their children to have regular access to their grandparents – whatever their own feelings towards them.
I am thrilled by the appointment of Dame Joan Bakewell, who at 75 has been named the Government’s own Voice of Older People. She is a role model for how I want to be at that age. For a start, she is having to fit this new (unpaid) job into an ongoing career: she has her first novel coming out in March, she is working on a new series of Radio 3 interviews called Belief and she often writes for The Times. Apart from earning a living, she is chairman of the National Campaign for the Arts and also of the brilliant theatre company Shared Experience.
“I’m not very good at saying no,” she explained ruefully, having just returned from a dayin the studios to talk about her new role.
“I’m rather amazed at how much reaction there has been to the news,” she said, “but everything that makes people consider older people is a good thing.” When people ask her if she minds being old, her reply is, “Well, the sun still shines for me and I get as much if not more pleasure out of the world and music.”
I asked her what issues she is particularly taken with. “I’m very hot on post offices,” she said. “There must be a solution other than closing them. Churches are underused during the week and they are supposed to be the beating heart of the community, particularly for older people, so it would make sense to move post offices into churches.” When she wrote about this recently she had letters from six vicars who have allowed and encouraged this to happen.
So why don’t you support your post office, contact your vicar and see what he or she has to say about it? It would be a very neat solution to save a local post office and re-establish your church to where it belongs – at the centre of community life.