Grandparent care. . .

If that’s true I will eat my hat (if I had one) what rubbish.

It's not ok to just slam grandparents. I have witnessed first hand so-called 'good parents' slam a grandparent (not me) for daring to offer treats, yet serve the same children pure crap in the way of smiley faces and jam butties. Or worse still those fancy big name fruit pouches, which by the way I had the need to point out the very high sugar content of. DIL was horrified and in fairness to her, she said she had not checked the ingredients but had just presumed that this huge brand was the best for my GD. I have also come to recognise that some of the modern day parents feel the need to be in complete control unlike maybe our parents who relied on any advice given and accepted that it was just that 'advice'. However, grandparents do overcompensate and feel the need to have the grandchildren like them when all it takes is a simple 'is it ok'. Having dealt with 2 wonderful DIL's who are complete opposites and who were brought up very differently, I now go with the flow. 1 DIL would never dream of making a fuss if I gave the GK's a treat, she would see that as my role and entitlement, whereas the other DIL prefer's much more of a controlled situation and you know what that's fine. She has eased up a little bit since I casually pointed out that me and her mum was once modern-day mums and we've been there with the GP's thing.

Elegran lol Glasga grannies

As an expat Glaswegian grannie I think I'm allowed to say that in IMHO that the people doing the survey deliberately targeted Glasgow and already had an outcome in mind.
If Glasgow was the only city to be targeted then
1, The survey result can only be applied to Glasgow.
2 if the survey only targeted a certain area in Glasgow, then surely the results only apply to that demographic.

My Fathers Glasgow grannie looked after all the bairns,
she sent them oot we'a jelly piece to play in bomb wreckage.
Oh what a wicked woman.

So......we are ingulgent with the dgc, and spending time doing things with them is good for them. Surprise, surprise! This is hardly news is it!

Load of rubbish...generalisation and grandparent bashing...we don't smoke...we take our dgd to lots of places in the fresh air national trust properties...bike rides...walks..and yes we treat her to a drink and cake sometimes at Costa....shoot us now...grr

56 case studies in Glasgow is hardly the basis to make such a claim!

cherrytree - Glasgow Uni is mentioned in all the media reports, (well, obviously, the grannies of that city are known to reporters to eat a lot of sweets and smoke a lot of gaspers) but the survey had nothing whatever to do with Glasgow! and only a few of the bally reports that they studied were even done in the UK. The authors of it were a bunch of theoreticians sifting other people's work and coming up with a nice newsbite that they knew would be seized on by the uncritical papers. Very good for their CVs.

Pamaga just shows how misleading the newspapers are. It was a mishmash of 56 past reports from 18 different countries - many of them from China, Japan, South Africa etc etc. where tobacco and cancer still don't seem to be linked in people's minds.

This is about to be discussed on Jeremy Vine, Radio 2

merlotgran

Mother of two young children here.
I know your heart was in the right place but
1. Children are encouraged not to take sweets from strangers
2. If they were all running around then giving them sugar is simply going to hype them up more
3. You have no idea of the back story. Perhaps the children are dreadful eaters and the sweets would have taken the edge off their appetite for the wedding breakfast
4. If that’s how the parents wish to raise their children, not to have sweets, who are you to judge?

I don’t think we should get het up about this. It was a standard systematic review which is an ordinary practice in research. It was for Cancer REsearch UK.
All it does is examine in some detail, the various studies from around the world (in this case 18 countries). It was looking at known risk factors only. It doesn’t seem to have been looking to “prove” anything predetermined.
All the media hype is off the point.

Bbbface If you had read my post properly you would have seen they were family, not strangers.

I'm going to ask for the post to be deleted as it was meant in a fairly light hearted vein.

And to put it in your own words, 'Who are you to judge?'

DH and I have never once been told/advised what to feed our DGC (11,9 and 7) by my DS or DDiL. They just trust us to use our own common sense with regards to treats.

Like paddyann said in an earlier post, we have a sweetie stash (a large Tupperware container) and now and again the children are allowed to help themselves to something from there.

And we could really do without Maureen Lipman’s fatuous comments(from the BBC website):

‘But actress Maureen Lipman said there was a big difference between grandparents who looked after their grandchildren everyday compared to those who see them at the weekends.
"If you're seeing them once a week you're going to overindulge but if you work with them every day, you're going to treat them as your own children," she said.
She keeps turkey dinosaurs in the freezer for her grandchildren Ava and Sacha and likes giving them ice cream with jelly.
"I try with the vegetables and fail," she said. "You can't train other people's children."
"The grandparents' job is kind of to be in cahoots with the grandchildren against the parents.”
She said being a mother could be "quite challenging", but being a grandmother was "just pure pleasure".
Ms Lipman said: "It's a walking miracle that you've brought something into the world that's brought something into the world."
She's also conscious of an "unspoken rivalry".
"There are two sets of grandparents - and you don't want to be the one that isn't giving them the nice piece of cake.”’

Speak for yourself, Maureen.

I particularly dislike the bit about rival grandparents.
I’m really glad she’s not one of my co- grandparents.

Is this anything to do with the media request on here this morning?

I ignored it had to go out so could not help.

I disagree with so many of Maureen Lipman's comments I don't know where to start.

This news seems to fall into the endless game of setting one generation against another.
Yes, another nail in the coffin of good relationships between the generations

Sorry missed this as out with grandson running, playing and taking in all the delights of the Museum Of Welsh Life.

"The grandparents' job is kind of to be in cahoots with the grandchildren against the parents.”

!!

How stupid!

Ooh, I haven't been there for ages BearandCardigan.

Next time I am paddling a canoe round a lake for two hours with my grandson, or scrambling around on some gritstone edge in the Peak District, before setting before him a plate of chicken, bacon and vegetable risotto, I will ponder “do people actually pay these people to produce this kind of rubbish?” Of course, none of them will have had indulgent grandparents, or will be grandparents themselves.

What a lot of tosh - I look after my grandchildren full time, we walk to school (grandson gets a lift from his Mum as his school is on her way to work) and home again, they go to after school clubs and play outside (which seems to involve teasing the boys until they get fed up and chase them). They get sweets after school on Friday but I do sometimes buy them at other times - none of them are overweight, in fact my grandson is a long thin streak of a boy having suddenly grown about a foot in a short space of time! When I go to school it is the parents I see in cars, those kiddies being collected by grandparents are the ones who walk home!

It is all perfectly simple, the authors of this analysis of a complicated mixture of variously valuable/invaluable/valueless studies should do some direct hands-on research themselves and settle it once and for all. No variables of country of research, background of researchers, design and objectives of experiments, funding of work, selection of subjects, recording of method and results, to be allowed to confuse the issue.

They should run a straightforward and unambiguous experiment. All grandparents in the UK would have zero to do with all grandchildren for a year, the essential child care that would then be needed would be organised and funded by the research team (of course using only the most rigid standards of feeding, exercise, and smoking, and not rewarding good behaviour with treats or correcting bad behaviour by witholding treats. All demonstrations of love and affection would be standardised too, the exact number and intensity of hugs, kisses and cuddles to be prescribed by the researchers) At the end of the year, the child subjects would all be euthanased and thoroughly autopsied, livers, kidneys, hearts all weighed and measured, and samples taken of all vital organs and cell types and examined and tested for suspectibility to disease.

The media would love to report on that!!!

I am now just waiting for the DM version of my previous post. Any bets?

At least when children are with their grandparents they probably get some one to one 'chat time' and individual attention rather than being ignored as I have seen by some parents who seem to spend their life on their mobiles! As a generation who grew up before this obsession with phones and computers, grandparents can often represent the simple things in life which can be sometimes overlooked. I take my granddaughter blackberry and litter picking, we do crafts together and play make believe and I try to infuse some general knowledge and common sense too. I don't ever buy sweets but sharing the odd cake and packet of crisps etc. is fine in moderation.