What to do if your grandson is a mermaid
Subtly and artfully, this picture book depicts the bond between a boy who’s questioning his gender identity and his steady, open-minded grandma.
Why does Trump want to keep children and their grandparents apart?
Many immigrant parents seek to bring their own parents here to help with childcare while they toil in grueling jobs, two sociologists recently wrote in The New York Times. President Trump wants to stop them.
The best movies about kids and their grandparents
Most movies put grandparents on the sidelines, when they put them anywhere at all. Here are some great ones that give them their due.
The best picture books about kids and their grandparents
These books aren’t just stunningly written and illustrated. They also perceptively observe the complexities of the new American family.
The woman with 10,000 grandkids
Many kids in India are growing up far from their grandparents, so a grandma in Bangalore is using her smartphone to tell them bedtime stories.
A grandmother and her Girl Scouts
All the Girl Scouts troops in her California town were full, so Kathy Richardson started a new one for her granddaughter and her friends.
What do your grandkids call you?
I’ve been asking grandparents around the country what they’re called and why. Here are a few of their stories.
“Children should not bear the burden of unfinished grudges”
Grandparents and grandchildren need one another, so parents shouldn’t stand in the way, says grandmother and journalist Connie Schultz.
The very best books about the very best season
For kids, summer means freedom. These books beautifully capture that.
Five generations of blueberry pie
Nancy Schatz is famous in Maine for the blueberry pie she learned how to make from her mother, who learned how to make it from hers. Here’s the recipe, which Nancy’s granddaughters have begun to master, too.
Boys, grandparents, and “the best week ever”
A picture book about what happens when parents get out of the way.
How to interview your grandparents
“Imagine it: During the holidays, instead of using gadgets to ignore each other, we might use them as an excuse to look each other in the eye and listen.”
Help a child to wonder
It’s not important that children know about nature, Rachel Carson believed; what matters is that they delight in it. But they won’t unless they’re shown the way, she warned.
Why stepgrandparents matter
“Standing at one remove from the new partnership, and all the hue and cry the blending of a family can involve, they have the potential to play a unique role for the stepgrandchild—part grandparent, part wise, trusted confidante.”
The art of love
There’s not enough good art about the bond between kids and their grandparents, so I asked Rebecca Layton, an illustrator based in Austin, to create some.
A grandmother and her granddaughter graduate side by side
Cathy Williams, 62, and her granddaughter, Chelsea Washington, both earned bachelor’s degrees this spring from the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in Tallahassee.
First they were playmates. Then they were soulmates.
Lisa Drayer got 40 years with her grandmother. They were never closer than at the end.
How can parents help children and their grandparents connect?
Happiness expert Gretchen Rubin has some ideas.
Lamentations of a long-distance grandmother
“I think there should be legislation that keeps children and their offspring in the same town, but it didn’t work out that way.”
Calvin Trillin, grandfather: He babysits. He spoils. He turns the kids into movie stars.
When he’s not writing some of the best humor and journalism of our time, Trillin spends a lot of time grandparenting.