Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘mom’

For the 21 years of our oldest daughters’ life, we have been contemplating the issue of our kids’ relationship with their grandparents. You see, our kids have grown up far away from their grandparents most of their life, but their relationships with one side of the family is stronger that with the other side.

To my surprise, the relationship to grandparents has nothing to do with how nice the grandparents are or what culture they are from, how nice you are, how nice your kids are or where you choose to live around the world. It is linked more closely to evolution – that survival mechanism of humanity to keep the dynasty and strengthen it. Grandparents invest in the grandchildren they are convinced are theirs.

In 1998, a researcher named DeKay came up with a theory to explain findings from researches conducted two years previously (Euler & Weitzel, 1996 and Boon & Brassoni, 1996) who claimed that grandmothers on the mother’s side invested in their grandkids the most. DeKay came up with a theory linking the relationship between grandparents and their grandchildren to certainty. His theory was that grandparents invest in the grandchildren they are certain are their offspring. In other words, the grandparent who has less doubt of being genetically related to the child and therefore to the grandchild, is more likely to invest in this relationship to support his or her “breed”.

Both my sisters were in their late thirties. One was living with her partner and was going through a very frustrating fertility treatment that took over two years without much success, while the other was slowly progressing in her relationship with her new boyfriend.

When someone tells you weird things, you think they are “psycho” or “mental”, but if you later find out what they told you was true, then you start questioning your “psycho” theory and allowing for the possibility there might be something there. When the weird things they tell you come true again and again, you start believing that the person (in my case, my mom) is psychic and has unusual abilities.

This is a true story, every word of it.

My auntie was about 40 years old when she got married. Everyone was very happy for her and my mom was the happiest of all, because her youngest sister and her only sister will finally have a chance to be a mother (at that time, my mom did not even consider having kids out of marriage).

I first suspected that my mom was psychic when I was 10 and she told me how my great-grandfather came into her dream and told her she would stay in my dad’s family forever. The second time was about 15 years later, when I came to visit my parents on one of our monthly visits.

I suspected that my mom was psychic when I visited my late grandparents’ house and saw a photo of an old man, with a long gray beard and a special turban on his head. It was a black and white photo that stood proudly on top of my grandparents’ TV.

It was the third birthday our daughter had refused to celebrate with friends. For her 17th birthday, she invited a couple of girls to go out for a movie. For her 18th birthday, she spent the day crying because it was her grandmother’s funeral (and her dad was away to attend). When she approached her 19th birthday, we had the same discussions about a party all over again.

When I was kid, most of the kids wanted to have a party, at least on their birthdays. Only the “rich” kids could have parties every year. Some rare kids had parties more than once a year and those were obviously the most popular.

A couple of clients came to me for parent coaching because of a problem they had with their teen boy, and were very surprised when we went through Pink Elephants. They said, “We tell him every day NOT to hang around bad kids, but saying it only puts the focus on those kids we want him to stay away from”.

If you want to understand the influence of the groups on our life, put yourself at the center of a circle and draw bigger and bigger circles around you for your family, friend, work colleagues, acquaintances and so on. The closest the circle to you, the more influence you allow this group to have on your life.

Single-sex schools originated during the 18th century, when rich families sent their sons to “special” schools. Only later, in the 19th century, when the awareness of the value of education increased, were girls also sent to study. Single-sex schools were very popular in England and now also in Australia.

Today, the single-sex schools are popular among religious populations and even more during high school.