When Grandparents Are the Significant Attachment Figures of Children
In the TICP Scientific Meeting last week, Dr. Ruskin reviewed the role of grandparents in contemporary life. He also pointed out that psychoanalysis needs to pay more attention to the second half of human life.
Dr. Ruskin, based on his personal experience and his patients' experience and from a psychoanalytic perspective, mainly talked about the benefits of the supportive role of grandparents in a person's growth process. In Western culture, grandparents are not heavily involved in grandchildren's lives, so their involvement is considered precious. It is precious indeed, and the supportive involvements are indeed precious in all cultures.
There is a saying, supposedly an African proverb, "It takes a village to raise a child." It implies that raising a child requires the involvement of the entire community. Even though Chinese culture is collective instead of tribal, it is quite common for grandparents to participate in the care and parenting of grandchildren. In China, it is commonly accepted that it is necessary for grandparents to help with childcare, which allows parents to focus on their career development or making a living. And the children seem to take it for granted.
While my grandparents were the primary caretakers when I was a child, I remember, in our school, two boys (likely twins) lived with their grandparents when their parents lived and worked in a faraway unknown city to me. They are naughty and somewhat shy at the same time. They are different from other kids. They wore military-green clothes, often stained with soil colours, and spoke with a known accent. Perhaps their elderly grandparents lacked the energy to care for and discipline them. I often watched them from far away with curiosity but never spoke to them.
To be fair to all their children, some grandparents would take on the responsibility of raising all their children's (sons and daughters) kids. Two persons care for several children, usually until they reach school age. In my psychotherapy practice, children living with their grandparents from childhood to college are not rare, either.
For these children, grandparents are their earliest attachment figures, their "real" parents of childhood. The emotional bond with grandparents is deep; the bond provides emotional support throughout their lives. When they feel lonely, frustrated, or depressed, the love of grandparents becomes a source of strength and comfort. They tend to turn to their grandparents for support and advice instead of their parents. These children are commonly grateful to their grandparents for the care, companionship, and guidance that grandparents provide. Grandparents become their most important attachment figure, integral to their sense of life's meaning.
However, children raised by grandparents face unique challenges. Over the years, I have encountered various problems related to such people.
For example, these children often have to leave their grandparents before reaching adulthood because either the grandparents are no longer able to take on more responsibilities for caring for and educating the children due to their old age or the parents want to "provide a better learning environment" for their children, so they bring them back, separating them from their earliest attachment figures. The negative impact may be less if the grandparents live nearby if they can move in with the child, or if the parents are loving and understanding. It can be very helpful if parents actively build and repair relationships with their children, compensate for the lack of parental love in the early years, and cultivate new attachment relationships. However, in most families, the children are left with grandparents' care because parents are too busy to take care of the children. When children return, the parents are not less busy or even busier. Therefore, some parents entrust their children to the care of nannies, teachers, and tutors (many patients lived at the teacher's or tutor's homes) or send them to boarding schools. Children move from a familiar environment (grandparents' home) to a strange one (parents' home, boarding school, etc.), and the people they interact with are not stable because their parents frequently change nannies or change the children's living places due to the adaptation difficulties of the children or the parents, who are narcissistic or perfectionistic, want the children to have the "best" teachers, tutors, or schools.
Seeking relationships is a child's nature, a survival need. Some children establish deep bonds with their nannies. Some patients told me they were very sad when their favourite nanny left. However, at a young age, they don't know how to express themselves and don't have the power to change their parents' or the nanny's decisions. Some other patients encountered mean nannies, which became their traumatic memories.
In summary, many children face difficulties establishing new stable attachment relationships after their grandparents. From a psychological perspective, they become psychological "orphans" after this point.
Moreover, children who form deep attachment relationships with grandparents may encounter the loss of attachment figures earlier than others. Usually, when they are still young and have not stably established themselves in life, that is to say, they may experience the death of grandparents at a young age, and it often is a significant blow to them. The symbolic presence of the attachment figure is lost. After that, they become the rootless duckweed existing in the world. I have met many international students who come to therapy due to the grief of losing their grandparents or the depression caused by the loss and the guilt for not being able to provide filial piety care to their grandparents at the end stage of their grandparents' life, or they are not informed by their family in order not to affect their study, or not being able to attend the funeral of their grandparents. A lifelong regret and self-blame left to them.
For many children raised by grandparents, both the child and the grandparents have deeper feelings for each other than the children and grandparents who have not had such experience. Typically, the grandparents want to continue to be involved in the child's growth. However, their wishes and opinions may conflict with the parents. Some parents dislike the grandparents intervening in their parenting style and decisions for the children. Some parents think that the grandparents' educational philosophy is outdated; they want to raise their children in their own way, without the grandparents' instructions. Unconscious competition, criticisms, and rebellions may be involved in the process. The children often feel caught between the conflicts between parents and grandparents and are bewildered.
Additionally, some grandparents would prefer not to take on the responsibility of caring for their grandchildren; they are forced to do so for different reasons. They see the children as burdens and troubles. They may show their grievances and complain to their grandchildren, which may cause difficulties for the children, who feel abandoned and non-loved, to form a secure neither to their grandparents nor to their parents; the early insecure attachment patterns can affect people for a long time, sometimes even a lifetime—for example, anxiety tendencies, inner feelings of insecurity, loneliness, and more.
I have also encountered some issues that are more significant for female patients. There is a tradition of boy preference in Chinese culture, which is more significant in older generations. Some female patients experienced gender discrimination while under the care of their grandparents, especially when there was both boy(s) and girl(s) were under the supervision of grandparents at the same time, and they were treated differently by their grandparents.
During the one-child policy years, some grandparents bring girls back to their hometown to live to let their children have another child, hopefully a boy. The girls' existence was hidden; they had no identity (户口), they were non-registered children, and they could not call their parents father and mother. How would such an arrangement affect the girls psychologically? They would feel themselves are unwanted, unloved, and abandoned. They hate their gender and resent their parents, or they would do their best to please their parents or grandparents in order to be loved or recognized. Some also feel guilty for the trouble they caused to their parents----if I were a boy, they would not have so much trouble. So many complicated emotions of anxiety, tension, fear, anger, compliance, endurance, wish, desire for love, etc., exist! Even if these emotions are managed through efforts and lead to a relatively good adaptation to life, such as independence and career success, their experiences would still haunt them, especially when various factors trigger them. During therapy, they often demonstrate contradicted emotions and desires.
I had a young female patient who had depression and anxiety disorder with panic attacks. She is such a hidden girl as a child raised by her grandparents in a small town. When she was in grade 5, her parents decided to let her go to the big city where they lived to go to a better school. However, because she has no city identity (户口), she had difficulty finding a school to accept her. When finally a school agreed to accept her, she still could not live with her parents because she already had a younger brother, if her parents' workplace discovered her existence, her parents would be punished; they would have to pay fines or even lose their jobs. Her parents rented an apartment for her; she started to live alone when she was ten years old, and her parents only came to cook for her occasionally until she came to Canada to attend high school; without the identity (户口), it would be even harder to find a high school to accept her.
Therefore, while many grandparents play supportive roles in their grandchildren's lives, problems may also exist due to personal (personality, personal life circumstances, unconscious factors, etc.), economic, cultural, and political factors. Some issues are caused by the exact fact that the grandparents are the patients' supportive and significant attachment figures.
(FW)