It's typical for grandparents to worry that they may not be developing normally. To help reassure you, below are a set of skills most grandparents should acquire, and the typical age for acquiring them. Try not to be anxious if you have not yet met all the benchmarks for a certain age. Remember, each grandparent is different and may learn and grow at a different rate.
By the time your first grandchild is three months old, you should be able to:
- Sleep through the night without calling your daughter to ask her to check if the baby is still breathing.
- Let your daughter or daughter-in-law be the first to pick up the baby when it cries, even if you're sitting closer, you already sense that you and the baby have a special bond, and you believe that only you know how to support an infant's head properly.
- Accept that your grandchild's mother does not want to put her new baby in her old wooden crib, even though you've lovingly saved it in the basement for just that purpose all these years. (An especially precocious grandparent will be able to nod and smile when the vintage stroller she presents the new parents is pronounced to be a "death trap" by her son-in-law, who has Googled all the new standards for baby transport and is probably right.)
- Get through a visit without saying, "Well, we never did anything like that, and you kids were just fine."
By the time your first grandchild is 18 months old, you should be able to:
- Allow a car seat to be switched from another car to yours without muttering, "We're only going three blocks, for Chrissake."
- Cheerfully reprint any important financial papers that have been scribbled on with crayons.
- Play "I'm the puppy, and you come to the pound and take me home," over and over, without hanging yourself from the light fixture or "forgetting" the child awaiting in the cardboard-box "pound" while you check vacation exchanges in France online.
- Say with a straight face, "Yes, he was asleep by eight."
By the time your first grandchild is 5 years old, you should be able to:
- Recognize and properly interpret the frozen smiles on parents' faces when you arrive at their cramped apartment with a seven-foot-tall, fully furnished dollhouse with its own tiny septic tank.
- Put an adorable tiny dress back on the store rack because you already bought her three and, really, your granddaughter just doesn't have that many formal events coming up.
- Respond cheerfully to the name "Boopsie" after all your attempts to have a grandchild call you "Baroness" have failed.
- Buy a children's book without first explaining to the store clerk that it is for "an unusually gifted child."
We know you're an off-the-charts grandparent. Read more about the perks of the job:
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