The Grandmother Hypothesis with Alison Gopnik

Alison Gopnik The story that’s the favorite story of my now five-year-old was a story, you know, the way those bedtime stories just sort of emerge. And this story was called “Silly Pa Boot”. So Pa Boot is grandpa, who is a very distinguished, you know white-haired, impressive figure. But all these stories were about all the silly things that he did that didn’t make any sense. He made pancakes, but then he went and he poured ink on the pancakes instead of syrup. And he decided that he wanted to take a shower in the fountain in the public park. So there’s this whole set of silly public stories and they’re absolutely the favorite favorite stories.

Michael Feigelson Pa boot, how do you spell that?

Alison Gopnik Oh, it’s Pa Boot because he was a hiker. So he always wears these big, enormous hiking boots, and he’s a big man in general. So when they’re little, the children are basically seeing the boots, that’s the first thing they notice.

Michael Feigelson There’s something very funny about watching a grown-up make a mess, especially when you’re four. But these stories are not only about Pa Boot and his mess-adventures.

Alison Gopnik What happens is grandmom says, “don’t be silly, Pa Boot.” And then grandmom and Thalo, who’s the grandchild, explain to Pa Boot about why all of this is silly. And it occurred to me these stories, part of the reason why they seem to be so appealing is they’re exactly about, here’s what the rules are. And Thalo can say, yeah, I know what the roles are, but you know that because you know that it could be different. That maybe you could take a shower in the fountain in the middle of the plaza. Maybe you could pour ink on your pancakes.

Michael Feigelson At first, these stories sound like they’re about a grandfather who doesn’t know how the world works. But listen closely, and you’ll see there’s something else going on. There’s a conversation about the rules and the fact that when someone doesn’t play by the rules, the result might be… funny?

This podcast begins with a simple idea: when a baby is born, a parent is also born. And in that transition, just like their babies, parents’ brains and bodies team up to help them learn and adapt at high velocity, developing a set of skills and perspectives valuable for their kids and for society as a whole.

This is Birth of a Parent, and our guest today is Alison Gopnik, cognitive scientist, developmental psychologist, philosopher, and one of the world’s leading experts on how children learn.

In this episode, we focus on one of the strangest features of our species: grandparents. But before we get to the question of why grandparents exist, I asked Allison to share a bit about her own birth as a grandma.

Alison Gopnik Becoming a grandmother was interesting for lots of reasons, but part of it is that when I describe that experience of being a mother, it’s one of those funny things where it’s kind of like a private club, especially among academic ambitious women, where you sort of say, “you know, when you had that baby, isn’t it just amazing?” And you kind of don’t want to say it too loud because it sounds like you’re, you’re you know I don’t know, being a tradwife or something, but it is amazing, it’s fantastic. It’s this incredibly deep experience. But of course, it’s also connected with being pregnant and having hormones. And the interesting thing about being a grandmother was there wasn’t any of that, right? I hadn’t given birth to the babies. I knew that they were my grandchildren abstractly, in some ways, I guess, more like a father, but I didn’t have wonderful oxytocin coursing through my veins. But very quickly, this relationship became just as intense and profound as the maternal relationship. And interestingly, I think the time that really consolidated it was, I was taking care of the baby. I was doing good grandmother babysitting and he was really fussy. And as he was fussy, I was having to try to get him to calm down the way you do with the baby, jiggling and walking. And he settled down and he put his head down on my shoulder and he fell asleep. And that was like the moment. That was the moment when it was okay, this is now I’m in this amazing relationship. I love this baby more than anything else. And it was that experience, I think. More than when he was easy, more, this was difficult, but I, you know, could calm him down. We could be in that relationship. I think that was really the moment they consolidated it.

Michael Feigelson I love this phrase you sometimes use, we don’t care because we love, we love because we care.

Alison Gopnik So exactly, you know, if you think about, this is part of our larger picture about trying to think about care and caregiving, I mean, ironically, you might think, well, okay, I was caring for my grandson because he was adorable and cute and smiled and had beautiful blue eyes, not the thing that really did it was when he was crying and fussy and had to be soothed, but I think that’s often the case. It’s true in lots of relationships that our giving, our caring actually is the thing that makes us love the other person, makes us want to be close to the other person rather than the other way around.

Michael Feigelson Okay, now onto the big existential questions. Why do grandparents exist?

Alison Gopnik So one of the really great ideas in evolutionary biology is something called ‘life history’. So what’s life history? Life history is how an animal develops. So how long a childhood does it have? How does it transition from being a child to an adult? How many babies does it have? How long are those babies dependent? How long does the animal live overall? Those are all features of the life history of an animal. If you think about an Alpha Centurion biologist looking at the creatures scampering around the veldt in the Pleistocene when humans were evolving, she might not have noticed enormous differences in how smart they were or what they did or how social they were, but she would have noticed that the humans have a very strange life history. So a general relationship that we see is between the length of childhood and related to that, the number of people taking care of those young animals and how smart the adult animal is, how flexible, how able to deal with different kinds of situations. And for humans, we really seem to be the most exaggerated version of that relationship.

Michael Feigelson What makes our life history so strange? Allison’s answer begins with a simple fact. Human childhood lasts a long time, a really, really long time.

Alison Gopnik So if you look empirically at chimp babies, by the time chimps are seven years old, they’re producing as much food as they’re consuming. That’s a simple measure of how dependent and mature you are. And humans, even in forager cultures, aren’t producing as much food as they’re consuming until they’re at least 15, until they are essentially not children anymore. And on top of that, humans have what are called smaller ‘interbirth intervals’, which means that we actually have babies more often. So. Chimps will have babies about every five years. Humans have babies every two years. So that means that you’re stacking up a lot of these very, very dependent children. And one of the things that goes with that is that humans have a much wider range of caregivers than our closest primate relatives.

Michael Feigelson In other words, humans have a logistics problem. Long before the first child can fend for themselves, there’s often already a second and then maybe a third. And at some point, one or two adults simply aren’t enough.

Alison Gopnik So we not only have biological mothers involved in caring for children, but we also have what the great anthropologist Sarah Hrdy calls alloparents, people who aren’t actually biological kin, but still are involved in taking care of babies. We have fathers taking care of babies often as much as mothers, which is unusual for primates. And we have my personal favorite, the post-menopausal grandmothers and elders in general, who are involved and taking care of babies. So, the old line about “it takes the village” really is true about humans. It really does take a village to raise these immature, long-lived children who are so dependent for so long. And then that raises a puzzle. Why do you see that long immaturity? You see that the more flexible the adult is, the more it relies on learning, the longer the period of childhood is. And if you think about it, that kind of makes sense. But if your strategy for dealing with your environment is to spend time learning about it, then you’re not really going to be able to act very effectively and learn at the same time. So having a long period of childhood gives you this period where you don’t have to make the decisions, you don’t have to act, you have to have resources, that’s what the adult does, and that means that you’re freed up to actually figure out what’s going on in your environment. And if your environment changes, you’re in a much better position to master it, figure out what it takes to live in that particular environment. And I’ve argued that childhood is really evolution’s way of resolving this trade-off. We get this early period where all we have to do is explore because, importantly, other people are taking care of us. But then that’s exactly the reason why we have the large brains and the high capacity for intelligence and learning that we do as adults.

Michael Feigelson Human children get something most young animals don’t. Years and years to just figure things out, to learn through exploration. And that only works because somebody else is doing the caring, which brings us to one of evolution’s most elegant inventions: grandparents.

Alison Gopnik Yeah, so here’s this real evolutionary puzzle. Why do we have this extra 20 years? And in particular, why do grandmothers continue to have this 20 years when they’re not reproducing anymore? And this seems to be complementary to that long period of childhood. So as I mentioned, those children are really needy, and the idea is that we have not just biological mothers, not just pair-bonded fathers, but also this other category of people, who are really devoted to providing resources to take care of those babies. Think about it. Since we have these babies every two years, the mom’s likely to have a new baby, but what happened to the first baby? The first baby is still two, and is still a toddler. And the health and thriving of the toddler really seems to depend on the grandmother. So the grandmothers really seem to be making a difference in allowing the toddlers and the preschoolers to thrive, who are still very dependent. Having a postmenopausal grandmother enables children to survive for longer, which of course means that indirectly that means that it’s giving you a reproductive advantage.

Michael Feigelson Basically, from an evolutionary perspective, grandmothers aren’t a footnote, they’re part of the infrastructure. These super long childhoods filled with learning and exploration, filling up these big, fast-paced brains, this is only possible through the support of generations.

Alison Gopnik But what I’ve argued and other people have argued is I think it goes beyond just transferring resources. Because another thing about grandmothers is they can transfer information. They can transfer the knowledge that they’ve acquired, and this is true for grandfathers as well. That extra 20 years gives you an extra 20 years of being in the environment, figuring things out, knowing about things. And transferring that to the young is also a really, really important function, especially for creatures like humans that depend so much on knowledge and culture. The very fact of grandmotherhood is a very distinctively human phenomenon. If you go back and you think about life history and you think of all those different animals, post-menopausal grandmothers, the fact that we continue to live for 20 years or so after we’re no longer fertile, is very distinctly human. And the only other mammal that we know of that this is true of is the orca, the killer whale, and some of the other whales.

Michael Feigelson ‘The grandmother hypothesis’ isn’t just a theory about childcare, it’s a theory about knowledge and how experience accumulated over many decades can be passed on to the young. And that’s where whales come in.

Michael Feigelson I wanna talk next actually about what’s special, maybe what the superpowers of grandparents are, but just before we go there, I don’t wanna miss the chance to hear about the orcas.

Alison Gopnik Yeah, well, this is actually very relevant to the question about what the superpowers are. So when I was giving this talk about grandmothers for a long time, I said, you know, orcas, like, go figure, why orcas? Why would they be the other species that has postmenopausal grandmothers? Well, it turns out that in parallel to that discovery, people discovered that orcas are one of the few cultural species. So one of things that’s really distinctive about human beings, is that we depend so much on cultural transmission, on information that we get from other people at other times and other places. So it turns out that we do this much more than any other creature, but orcas do a lot of cultural transmission. So for example, the orca diet, the diet of what you eat, depends a lot on what your grandmothers have shown you as a possible kind of food. And different groups of orcas, even though they’re genetically identical, you know, one of them will only eat krill and one of them will only eat dolphins and they’ll starve rather than eat the thing that is not the thing they learned to eat growing up. And now there’s some lovely work that shows that among the orcas, having the grandmother in the pod changes whether the pod survives or not, changes whether the grandchildren survive. And there’s even some evidence that the grandmothers – especially times when resources are low – will sort of lead the hunt to try and find new places to forage, for example. And it’s kind of like the grandmother saying, “oh, I remember like 20 years ago, over here in this other part of the ocean, there was a lot of krill. So why don’t we go and try that now?” So both in terms of information and just in terms of provisioning, it looks as if the grandmothers are serving the same distinctive function, a bit different from the mothers. And that is an idea that seems to apply to the human elders as well.

Michael Feigelson Culture can sound abstract, but for most of human history, it meant something very concrete, someone showing someone else how to do something important, something that would help them survive, like remembering 20 years later where the krill are.

Michael Feigelson Continue on that thread about the distinctive superpowers of grandparents, how would you unpack that? You just talked about sort of transmission of ideas, but could you elaborate a little bit more?

Alison Gopnik Yeah. So one thing is just being able to altruistically spend your time passing on information to the next generation. And a really beautiful study that Michael Gurven, an anthropologist at Santa Barbara did, which speaks to the grandparents, was about hunting, for example, in hunter-gatherer societies. Hunting is really hard. You don’t really become an expert hunter until you’re about 35. It’s a good example of something where you need to have some cultural transmission to be able to figure out how to be a good effective hunter. But of course, then there’s a kind of paradox, which is when you’re actually hunting, you’re not going to have the spare capacity to go and teach somebody else how to hunt.

Michael Feigelson Teaching someone something is often the least efficient way of getting it done. If you’ve ever cooked with a four-year-old, you know this.

Alison Gopnik In our family making the Sunday ricotta pancakes, right? It’s incredibly much faster when the grandchildren are not helping. When the grandchildren helping, it takes about twice as long as when the grand children are not hoping.

Michael Feigelson Is that the Gopnik family tradition?

Alison Gopnik That’s the Gopnik family, exactly, that’s the Gopnik family tradition, as I think it is for lots of families. I like the idea that the orcas and the humans are both passing on recipes as a very big part of what we do as grandparents. So how do you resolve that puzzle? How do you actually manage to both be an effective hunter and an effective hunting teacher? And it turns out that across many different societies that rely on hunting, the 35-year-olds go off by themselves hunting and then the grandfathers and the 14-year-olds, the teenagers and the older men, go off together to hunt. And they’re not as successful at hunting, the grandfathers have a lot of knowledge, but they’re not as strong as they were. But that’s the mechanism that actually allows the teenagers to become the 35-year olds who are going to be able to hunt, so that’s a nice example where passing on the information and the knowledge is something that’s really important and something that the grandparents seem to be really good at doing.

Michael Feigelson So, up to this point, the hypothesis has two components. First, we needed help with childcare. Second, we need to pass down knowledge, recipes, hunting techniques, family stories, and parents with babies and toddlers had their hands full. Without one and two, we wouldn’t have survived the Pleistocene. But then, just this year, if you can believe it, Alison came across an idea that completely changed how she thought about grandparents.

Alison Gopnik There’s a marvelous new idea that I completely credit to Polly Wiessner that across many, many different cultures, there’s something special about the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren, which is what anthropologists call a joking relationship, capital J, capital R. So what’s a joking relationships? A joking relationship is you sort of specify that these people are allowed to tease each other. They’re allowed to do things that would normally be against the rules. They are gonna act as if they’re being aggressive, even when they’re not really being aggressive. And grandparents and grandchildren are kind of like the case of a joking relationship.

Michael Feigelson Suddenly, Pa Boot made a lot more sense. Maybe he wasn’t teaching his grandson the rules. Maybe he was teaching him that the rules are made up, and if they’re made up then they can be changed.

Alison Gopnik So across a lot of different cultures, the grandparents and the grandchildren are teasing each other and playing in a way that the parents and the grandchildren aren’t. And one of Polly’s lovely examples of this is in lots of cultures, there are ‘trickster stories’. So a trickster tale is a story about somebody who kind of breaks the rules, kind of gets in trouble, but also shows you that there’s more scope for variation and variability than you might have thought. And Polly points out that a lot of grandparent stories are kind of trickster stories, and a lot of grandparent interactions are kind of this trickster interaction, these teasing interactions between the grandparent and the grandchild.

Michael Feigelson This sounded very familiar. It reminded me of my dad hysterically laughing while toddler Mila forced him to perform in her improvised cabaret in the middle of summer, dressed up like her, as a reindeer.

Alison Gopnik And I have to say just anecdotally, as soon as Polly said that and as soon as I’ve talked to other grandparents, like right away everyone says, “yeah, that’s exactly what makes the relationship different.” In my house, before I had thought about this with Polly, my own grandmother’s phrase said in a heavy Portuguese Latino accent was, “you go to grandma’s house, it’s Liberty Hall. Grandma’s house is Liberty Hall.” And that’s what the joke is with my grandchildren is, yeah, here’s Liberty Hall, which means that you can do all the things that you cannot do at mom and dad’s house, you can’t do at grandma’s house. And it hadn’t occurred to me until I talked to Polly, oh, that’s a joking relationship. That’s a trickster relationship. It’s a way of saying, here is a context where some of those roles, maybe you can play with them. Maybe you can bend them. Maybe they could be different from the way that they are now. And Polly thinks that this is a mechanism for social change, which I think is a lovely idea.

Michael Feigelson When Allison described Liberty Hall, I immediately thought of my own mom, Oma Linda.

Michael Feigelson Hello?
Mom Hi, Mike.
Michael Feigelson Hi, where are you?
Mom In the car, I pulled over to speak with you.
Michael Feigelson I’m talking to someone who says a grandparents’ job is to make jokes and break rules.
Mom It’s a nice job description, I like it.
Michael Feigelson And she calls her house ‘Liberty Hall’. Do you have a name for your house when Mila comes over?
Mom I call it the ‘Fun House’.
Michael Feigelson The Fun House?
Mom That’s one half.
Michael Feigelson Yeah, what kind of fun that goes on in the fun house?
Mom Games, baking chocolate cookies, whatever we come up with in the spur of the moment.
Michael Feigelson What about jokes? Any favorite jokes?
Mom No, I like to imitate The Godfather.
Michael Feigelson They’re like Don Corleone.
Mom Yeah.
Michael Feigelson For example.
Mom “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
Michael Feigelson Pretty good.
Mom I’m fine.
Michael Feigelson Do you say that to Mila?
Mom Yeah, I have. I have, sometimes.
Michael Feigelson And what’s her response?
Mom She says, “are you going to take me shopping?”

Michael Feigelson My mom calls hers ‘The Fun House’. Different name, same basic operating principle, which made me wonder whether Allison was onto something. Maybe grandparents aren’t just passing on traditions.

Alison Gopnik My first thought had been, well look, the grandparents, and I think this is true, the grandparents are establishing traditions. They’re telling you what’s happened over the long run, what’s happened over the last hundred years. This is how we do things. And then the children, and especially the teenagers are the ones who are saying, okay, that’s the background, now how could we change this to deal with the situation that we’re in now? But now I think it may be that the grandparents themselves are contributing to this idea that maybe things could be different. Maybe this isn’t the way everything has to be. Here’s different ways the world could be that I can tell you about as a grandparent. And it’s okay because we’re in a joking relationship. It’s not like a parent saying, “you can eat the lollipops,” for example. Right? If a parent says that, that means, yeah, you can’t eat the lollipops. If grandmom says it, “ah, grandma’s house, it’s Liberty Hall, you can have a lollipop,” that means, yeah, you really shouldn’t have lollipops, but maybe in some circumstances lollipops are okay. And it seems as if that’s a very general feature of these relationships with elders.

Michael Feigelson Are you saying that sort of grandparents have this role, both of passing down culture and tradition, but also conveying to the kids that they get to change it?

Alison Gopnik Exactly. That’s the idea. It isn’t just that the grandparents are telling you what happened in the past and what you should do. And it’s an interesting contrast with the parents, because of course, if you’re a parent, what you want is for the children to have the skills and the norms that they’re going to need right now, right? Right now in this circumstance or in this culture. But then the question becomes, how do you balance that ability to enculturate children and pass on the knowledge that’s relevant to them right now? And then also let them have the ability to change in what computer scientists have this great phrase, ‘the non-stationary environment’. The non-stationary environment is an environment that’s different, that’s gonna change in an unpredictable way where you don’t know what’s gonna happen tomorrow. It’s really different to say, yeah, but 20 years from now, things might be different. What do you need to survive in that other environment? And I think maybe the elders, in addition to saying, here’s the big picture, are partly saying, here’s a big picture so you can say, they can say, and you know what, if things change, well, everything you do is gonna have to be different, but you’re still going to want to preserve some of these big picture values.

Michael Feigelson For most of human history, grandparents weren’t a nice extra, they were woven into everyday life. And with that, so was their care, their knowledge, and their imagination. But modern life has a habit of separating generations. Parents and children in one place, grandparents somewhere else. So what did we lose as a result?

Michael Feigelson I’d like to focus a little bit on the future of grandparents. Mm-hmm. And I have a. A feeling through my work, but also through my life, maybe it’s a hope that grandparents are sort of poised for a major cultural comeback. But I also have a feeling that they’ve, at least in Western society, played a bit of a diminished role over the last period. So first I wanted to ask if you agree with that and why you think that’s happened, but would you buy into the idea that grandparents are poised for a a major comeback?

Alison Gopnik Well, it’s interesting because, of course, you know, we have this giant demographic shift that’s happening. You know, one of the things that I think is true is that we always overestimate technology and underestimate demography when we’re thinking about how things are going to change. And the shift is that, we are fewer and fewer children and more and more elderly people. And that means that there’s many more people over 65 and fewer, children. And I think we haven’t yet reckoned with. The significance of that. But it could also be an advantage because it means that there’s a population of people who could be grandparents for these grandchildren. And very definitely something that happened in the 20th century was that as we became more mobile, as we became more individualistic, people weren’t immersed in an extended family with grandparents. The parents are at work, the kids are at school, and the grandparents are in Florida. They’re really separated from one another. And something that I think lots of people are converging on is the idea that having closer proximity of different generations would be something that would be greatly to our advantage, that we really lost a lot by not having the grandparents and the grandchildren in the same place. And there’s lots of evidence that letting children and elders be together is very good for both parties, that these relationships. Instead of thinking about the elders as being just, oh, now we have this problem, that we could really be thinking of them as a resource, especially in relationship to the children.

Michael Feigelson The way Alison sees it, the challenge isn’t that we have an aging population. It’s that we’ve built a society that often keeps grandparents and children apart. This raises an intriguing possibility. What if the next great human innovation isn’t technological at all? What if it’s simply bringing the generations closer together?

Michael Feigelson I’ve heard you talk about a grandparent core. Could you talk a little bit about what that could look like or any other idea about how might this look in practice in the next 10 or 15, 20 years.

Alison Gopnik Yeah, it’s interesting that, you know, in California, one of the first ideas is what’s called ADUs, which are accessory dwelling units. But what everyone calls them are granny flats. The idea is that you could have an extra little house next to your house. It wasn’t like your parents were living in the house with you, but they could be close enough and be in a house that was kind of designed especially for them. And then you could come back and forth. So there’s an example of something that lets bring generations together in a way that the current housing situation doesn’t allow very well. My personal favorite idea is we’re about to have universal pre-k in California. That’s one of the proposals and it’s something that’s being proposed around the country. The problem with universal pre-k is the ratio. You know, it’s that when you have two-year-olds, not to mention infants, you need maybe four or five kids per adult, and you don’t want to have more than that, so you need a lot of adults. And one idea is that we could have a kind of grandmother corps where an elderly person in the community could get, you know, the equivalent of twice their social security to just be the grandparent, not be the trained teacher, not be the ECE graduate, but just function the way a grandparent functions. And I think it’s important that a lot of these relationships depend a lot on intimacy, right? They depend on being in the same place as the people that you’re taking care of. And that’s a really deep, important part of care, just the sort of physical, the physicality of being able to hold a baby or to have a, my great niece and I were reading yesterday and I was thinking about the way that she just sort of snuggles in next to you when you’re reading. It’s a fantastic part of reading to a grandchild. And you could do that if you have one grandmother per classroom. It’s pretty hard to do if you don’t have that kind of intimate relationship. Instead of the grandparents being put in what is sort of the contemporary equivalent of orphanages in these assisted living facilities and then the kids being somewhere completely different, trying to think of imaginative ways of having co-housing could be a really good solution, both to the affordability kinds of questions, but also to having close social contact.

Michael Feigelson Throughout this series, we’ve explored how parenthood changes the people who experience it. In this episode, we talk about the additional layer that comes when people are born as a parent and then reborn as a grandparent. But what happens when these experiences, which for 300,000 years have been so fundamental to humanity suddenly become far less common.

Michael Feigelson The experience of being a parent, doing infant care, doing toddler care provides us with a unique set of skills and experiences that are very valuable in society, not just for our kids, but at large. What does it mean to move towards a society where a much, much lower number of people have that training, have had that experience?

Alison Gopnik No, I think that’s a real issue. That’s a really problem that we face with this demographic transition. And you can hope that people will have that experience in different ways. There’s certainly plenty of people to have to be taken care of. Maybe some of it will be having that experience through taking care of elders, but that’s a much tougher case than the experience of having that experience through taking care of children. Or maybe what will happen is people will get it through taking care of other people’s children. God knows there’s still plenty of care that has to go around, but I don’t have a good answer to that but I agree with you that I think that’s something that’s potentially really problematic.

Michael Feigelson Do you think it’s the kind of thing that can change the species?

Alison Gopnik Well, I’m not sure if it can change the species, but these big demographic changes are things that certainly change societies in really important ways. So if you think about the, to take one example that people have thought about, the shift from having a forager culture, which seems to go with a lot of egalitarianism, for instance, to having an agricultural society that seems to go with much more hierarchy. Humans are tremendously flexible creatures. That’s part of the point about our life history, is that we have many, many different ways that we can function and organize ourselves. And these big demographic changes have led to big changes in the way we organize and deal with each other. So if you think about all the industrial revolution, the agricultural revolution, the information revolution, all those have really changed who we are in important ways. And I think this, I personally think the demographic revolution is much more likely to be important and transformative than say the AI revolution, which is the thing that everybody is worried about. I mean, the AI revolution will make a difference, but I think things like changing what we eat, how long we live, how many children we have, how long our children live, those are big, big changes. And you just hope that human beings will figure out a way to have the advantages of that. I mean it certainly is an advantage that not one out of five children are dying anymore and that we’re not, you know, dying of lightning strikes when we’re 20 or of infectious diseases, but that’s a really different regime than the regime in which we’ve functioned in the past.

Michael Feigelson Human beings have survived extraordinary change. Ice ages, agriculture industry, the digital age, because each generation found ways to prepare the next for the unknown. And when it comes to preparing for the known, well, that may be one of the most important things grandparents can help us to do.

Michael Feigelson You actually said that you find yourself helping prepare your grandkids for a future that you can’t imagine?

Alison Gopnik Right.

Michael Feigelson My first reaction to it was, how do you do that? Because we have these perhaps unfortunate cultural memes about elder people sort of not being able to figure out the technology and all of these things. And so at first glance, you’d say, well, they would be the sort of the least equipped to help these kids figure this out because they’re quote unquote stuck in their ways. Why do you think it is that grandparents in particular have this skill, this ability or this positioning that can help kids prepare for a future that they can’t even imagine themselves.

Alison Gopnik Well, if you think about this joking relationship, and also if you think about a lot of what grandparents do, which is tell stories, for example, that’s about imagination, right? The joking relationship is about, let’s imagine that things are different. Let’s think that things are different, that’s a way of exercising a kind of cultural and social imagination, thinking about the way that things could be different. And I think grandparents often have the luxury of being able to really emphasize here’s what real life is like and here’s what life has been like for 100 years, but here’s all the other ways that life could be. And sometimes even just telling the stories about what life was like 100 years ago is telling the children, oh, wait a minute, it was really different. This isn’t the way that everything is. In my family, my husband, AKA Pa Boot, grew up on a farm 70 years ago in New Mexico. And they actually, you know, raise their own animals to eat. And that’s something that the grandchildren are fascinated by and have no experience of now at all. And that tells you something about how things could be different. I have to say one of the reasons why I love this idea so much is that in my specific family as the grandmom, one thing that I’ve discovered is it is sort of striking how much of your interaction with the children is either. Jokes or songs or stories or recipes, like those are the things that seem to come very naturally when you’re interacting with grandchildren.

Michael Feigelson When we started this series, we set out to understand what it means to be born as a parent. We heard about brains changing, bodies changing, relationships changing.

We went from starfish to sea squirt and now to orcas. We explored the thesis that the birth of a parent is a metamorphosis, perhaps not so unlike the experience of the caterpillar in the chrysalis. The idea that care changes the parent as much or maybe more than it changes the baby.

And that’s why the first five years of parenthood feel so intense, which brings us to the theme of today’s episode: grandparents. Amidst the intensity, it’s hard for parents to step back and reflect.

Perhaps that’s where grandparents come in, a source of perspective through jokes, through stories, through songs, through recipes. And occasionally through a grandfather who pours ink on his pancakes.

This has been Birth of a Parent, an early childhood matters podcast from the Van Leer Foundation, hosted by me, Michael Feigelson. Produced, written and edited by Studio Becq, sound design and mix by Felix Richel, editorial support by Hannah Rothschild, and original theme music by Daniel. Thanks for listening.

If you’d like to support this series, the best way is simply to follow Birth of a Parent on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. It really helps more people discover the show. Thanks for listening.