It’s important for kids to grow up with a healthy respect for their elders and this is especially true of the elderly. It’s becoming more and more of a rarity for children to be close to their grandparents due to an expanding age gap and lack of understanding of each other’s generations. Even though many of the elderly stay relatively tech savvy and are in fact in tune with the latest releases children often feel disconnected from their grandparents. You’ll be delighted to hear that there are a couple of simple things you can do to help solve this problem and forge connections where before there were none.
Increasing Togetherness
The first step towards befriending anyone is getting to know them and you can only do that by spending time with them. Find an activity your child enjoys and send their grandparents along with them. Perhaps going to the park or going out to eat, it doesn’t really matter. What’s important is that your child starts to associate enjoying his/herself with spending time with grandparents.
Sharing is Caring
When you kids and your parents spend time together, encourage them to share personal stories. Keep them light-hearted and go for the funnier side of them, look for common ground and make sure that grandparents share stories from their childhoods with your kids. It can often astound children that their grandparents were ever kids themselves!
Common Ground Leads to Firm Foundations
As I touched on earlier, finding common ground is very important when forging relationships. If your children can find similarities between themselves and their grandparents they’ll find it a lot easier to respect and interact with them. An example would be football; a common interest here can lead to plenty of long conversations or even the occasional kick about in the park!
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