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Parenting

01st Aug 2021

A survey has revealed that grandparents are cooler than ever before – and we well believe it

Trine Jensen-Burke

today's grandparents are cooler

My children are nothing short of obsessed with their grandparents.

And I don’t blame them – my parents are great. And equally obsessed with their grandchildren.

Grandchildren, according to my dad, is ‘life’s dessert’ – and they are loving every second of this new stage in their lives.

There are five grandchildren in total, and my parents love nothing more than spending time with them. From movie nights to bedtime stories and sleepovers, water parks, holidays, museums, adventures, baking, biking, skiing, camping – you name it, my parents have done it with their grandchildren. And once one adventure is over, they set out planning the next one.

And it seems this is the case for so many other families too.

According to a new survey, grandparents are cooler than they ever have been before.

And just like we all remember time spent with our own grandparents, where everything seemed magical, and they seemed a lot nicer and cooler than our own parents, our children now see this about our parents.

Now our parents are those grandparents, and our children are looking at them the same way that we looked at ours.

Except – are grandparents today’s getting even cooler than ours were?

According to Good Housekeeping, grandparents may be cooler as they looked to take a dive into modern grandparenting and what that means. To do this, they completed a survey of more than 1,500 people about being a grandparent in today’s world. They also included parents in their survey to look at the differences.

The researchers asked about childcare to social media and they discovered that many parents don’t see their parents as being “full of wisdom” and a lot of them think that their opinions are outdated and should be kept to themselves.

However, that is not how grandparents see themselves.

In fact, the survey found that 68 percent of the grandparents consider themselves “cooler” than their own parents, and feel that their generation is adaptable and open to change, something that the previous generations struggled with. They also found that they were more embracing of different cultures.

The results from this research match those of another US survey that was completed by AARP that found that a third of grandparents have children of a different race or cultural background.

They also reported that they would be fully accepting of a grandchild who was part of the LGBT community.

The survey found consistency between this generation of grandparents and the ones that came before in that they all have the same urge to be close to their grandparents.

It seems understandable that the face of grandparents would change as the generational change happens.

And as us millennials start to become grandparents in a decade or two (!), we may also see a generation of grandparents who are able to interact more with their grandchildren, be that through technology and may even be in the game room playing video games with them.

And how’s that for cool?