I am a huge fan of Olivia Gentile’s new website, The Grandparent Effect, a warm, wise, and highly informative resource for parents, grandparents, and caregivers. As she explains,

Grandparents are healthier, wealthier, and longer-lived than ever before.

What does this mean for us all?

On this site, I consider the growing importance of grandparents to their children and grandchildren.

I hope to entertain you.

And I hope to turn everything you thought you knew about grandparents upside down.

The site features all kinds of guidance and commentary, including the best picture books about grandparents and grandchildren and heartwarming thoughts by writer Lois Wyse on what it felt like when her first grandchild was born.  She reports on grandparents in the news, from Hillary Clinton’s #grandmothersknowbest hashtag in her tweet on vaccines to the grandpa who trucked in snow for his granddaughter to play with and the Congressman who is proud of his transgender grandchild.  And she welcomes the stories of families about their own experiences.

Olivia generously took time to answer my questions about what grandparents can give their grandchildren and about the challenges and conflicts in maintaining the relationship across three generations.

Where did the idea for the site come from?

My dad’s mother and both of my mom’s parents were hugely important to me, especially when I was a young adult.

My dad’s mom lived in Boston, so when I was growing up in Washington, D.C., she was a plane ride away. But I ended up at Harvard for college, and that’s when our relationship blossomed.

My college years were rough. Early on, I developed a horrible case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and it wasn’t properly diagnosed or treated until after I graduated.

I did try to get help during college, but no one at the campus health center seemed to know what to do with me. It was the early 1990s, and clinicians didn’t know nearly as much about OCD as they do now.

So I didn’t have a good psychiatrist, but I had my grandmother, who lived three T stops away from campus in an apartment building for senior citizens.

My grandmother didn’t really believe that there was anything wrong with me, so I didn’t discuss my problems much with her.

But she baked me wonderful lasagnas, took me downstairs to visit with her friends, and told me stories about the guy down the hall who had a crush on her. (It wasn’t requited.)

All that love helped me a lot.

And then, in my sophomore year, I began to realize that someone else in my family had a terrible case of anxiety: my mom’s father.

I’d only known my mom’s parents casually when I was growing up, even though they lived in Washington, too.

They were close to my mom, but I think by the time my sister and I came along, they weren’t too keen on spending time with screaming kids. And once we were more civilized, we got busy with school and friends.

But slowly, when I was in my early 20s and my grandfather was in his early 80s, he and I started opening up to each other about our respective problems. He probably had OCD, too, but his psychoanalyst, whom he’d been seeing daily for 40 years, called it “free-floating anxiety.”

It was such a relief to be able to talk to someone who understood what I was going through. And he had a great sense of humor about his anxiety and life in general.

Soon, he and my grandmother were two of the most important people in my life.

My dad’s mother, the one in Boston, died in 1997, a year after I finished college, but my mom’s parents both lived long enough to steer me through my 20s. My mom’s father died in 2005, at age 93, and her mother died in 2011, at 94.

I got the idea for The Grandparent Effect not long after that.

My grandparents had saved me. And I suspected that there were millions of people all over the country who’d been saved by their grandparents, too.

I wanted to tell my family’s story, and I wanted to collect stories from other families, too.

What are your most cherished memories of your grandparents?

My dad’s mother took me to Disney World twice when I was little, and I have vivid memories of the fun we had together, particularly on the rollercoaster Space Mountain.

My favorite memories of my mom’s parents are from my 20s. After college, I worked a newspaper reporter in New England, but I’d fly to Washington often to spend weekends with them, and we always had a blast.

They lived in Dupont Circle, so that’s where a lot of our adventures took place.

They really liked taking me to Restaurant Nora to eat fancy organic dinners. Other nights, we’d round up a bunch of my friends and take them to the Brickskeller, which served beer from around the world.

During the day, my grandmother and I would pop in to the Phillips Collection and Kramerbooks. And we’d always spend a little time at Secondi, a clothing consignment store. She had a great fashion sense, and she’d help me choose my work clothes and the dresses I needed for friends’ weddings.

Other times we’d just hang out at my grandparents’ house. My grandmother and I would read novels and the paper while my grandfather watched Court TV.

(more…)