Six Stories to Share with Your Grandchildren

Sharing family history through stories provides children a positive connection to the generations before them, vivid anecdotes to cherish and recall about those they love, those who love them in return. Though each family has unique experiences worth passing along, here are six stories we all have to share:
How you met your partner in grandparenting. This story serves as the genesis of your family, the reason for all stories that follow, making it the natural spot to begin sharing family history. Were you and your spouse school chums? Was it love at first sight? What made you nervous, made you laugh, made you know it was meant to be? Grandchildren will appreciate not only your words but the nostalgic gleam in your eye as you recall young love.
The day the grandchild’s parent was born. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the grandchild’s Mommy or Daddy in the baby carriage. Tell your grandchild all about the glorious day her parent arrived in the world – minus any frightening tales of being in labor, of course. Considering Mommy or Daddy as a wrinkled and wailing yet oh-so adorable infant will surely make any child smile.
The day the grandchild was born. Talk about adorable! This is the day that matters more than any other to a child. Sure, they likely heard the story from Mom’s and Dad’s perspective, but what about Grandma’s or Grandpa’s? Were you in the room when the grandchild entered the world? Or were you miles away, the phone close by your side as you anxiously awaited news that would forever rock your world? Did you laugh or cry with joy? And how did that first cuddle with your newborn grandbaby feel?
School days, school ways. Once a child begins kindergarten all the way up through the college years, school makes up the bulk of his experiences. Share your own experiences related to teachers, classmates, beloved (and detested) subjects, extracurricular activities, and more. Why was your favorite teacher your favorite? Did you walk to school or ride a bus? And as lunchtime continues to be a favorite part of the school day, what was the midday meal like for you? Some things were likely very different back in your school days, others very much the same.
Your first job and your favorite job. Early work experiences provide far more than money for movie tickets or coveted clothing parents can’t provide. First jobs help teach responsibility, new skills, a sense of purpose, an understanding of the world outside our homes and, more often than not, provide some of the first non-family role models in a young adult’s life. Grandchildren who will soon seek employment – from babysitting and lawn-mowing jobs to post-college careers – will especially relate to stories from Grandma or Grandpa on how they navigated the business world, for better and for worse.
Your proudest moments. Pride in oneself is a powerful and positive tool, and there’s no easier way to encourage that in children than by sharing anecdotes of pride-filled moments from your past. Are your proudest moments tied to creative pursuits or related to service to your family, your community, your country? Perhaps it was a moment of realizing your personal power when resisting peer pressure, accepting responsibility, overcoming a challenge? Sharing such moments leads a child to consider similar moments she should – or could – be proud of.
Reading books with little ones make for treasured story times. Next time your grandchild requests a story, though, share a personal tale from the heart instead of from a book. Such family narratives engage a grandchild far beyond just bedtime; they entertain and enlighten your grandchild for a lifetime.

Source: Grandparents.com, 6 Family Stories to Tell Your Grandchildren Again and Again, By Lisa Carpenter

Troubled or Normal?

While any negative behavior repeated over and over can be a sign of underlying trouble, it’s important for parents (and caretakers) to understand which behaviors are normal during adolescent development, and which can point to more serious problems. The chart below (from HelpGuide.com, Help for Troubled Teens) might help you sort it out.

When Typical Teen Behavior Becomes Troubled Teen Behavior
Typical Teen Behavior	Warning Signs of a Troubled Teen
Changing appearance. Keeping up with fashion is important to teens. That may mean wearing provocative or attention-seeking clothing or dyeing hair. Unless your teen wants tattoos, avoid criticizing and save your protests for the bigger issues. Fashions change, and so will your teen.	Changing appearance can be a red flag if it’s accompanied by problems at school or other negative changes in behavior, or if there’s evidence of cutting and self-harm or extreme weight loss or weight gain.
Increased arguments and rebellious behavior. As teens begin seeking independence, you will frequently butt heads and argue.	Constant escalation of arguments, violence at home, skipping school, getting in fights, and run-ins with the law are all red flag behaviors that go beyond the norm of teenage rebellion.
Mood swings. Hormones and developmental changes often mean that your teen will experience mood swings, irritable behavior, and struggle to manage his or her emotions.	Rapid changes in personality, falling grades, persistent sadness, anxiety, or sleep problems could indicate depression, bullying, or another emotional health issue. Take any talk about suicide seriously.
Experimenting with alcohol or drugs. Most teens will try alcohol and smoke a cigarette at some point. Many will even try marijuana. Talking to your kids frankly and openly about drugs and alcohol is one way to ensure it doesn’t progress further.	When alcohol or drug use becomes habitual, especially when it’s accompanied by problems at school or home, it may indicate a substance abuse issue or other underlying problems.
More influenced by friends than parents. Friends become extremely important to teens and can have a great influence on their choices. As teens focus more on their peers, that inevitably means they withdraw from you. It may leave you feeling hurt, but it doesn’t mean your teen doesn’t still need your love.	Red flags include a sudden change in peer group (especially if the new friends encourage negative behavior), refusing to comply with reasonable rules and boundaries, or avoiding the consequences of bad behavior by lying. Your teen spending too much time alone can also indicate problems.

Benefits of the Long-Term Grand Relationship

Grandparents and older grandchildren who have good relationships with each other are less likely to suffer from depression, according to a study presented at the American Sociological Associations 108th annual meeting.
Researchers from Boston College analyzed data from a long-term study called the Longitudinal Study of Generations. The study is a survey of US families consisting of three or four generations, compiled in seven sets of data between 1985 and 2004.
The researchers analyzed 376 grandparents and 340 grandchildren. The average grandparent was born in 1917, making them 77 years old at the midpoint of the study in 1994, while the average grandchild was born in 1963, making them 31 years old.
Sara Moorman, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and the Institute of Aging at Boston College, said of the results:

"We found that an emotionally close grandparent-adult grandchild relationship was associated with fewer symptoms of depression for both generations.
The greater emotional support grandparents and adult grandchildren received from one another, the better their psychological health."

Source: MedicalNewsToday.com

How will your grandkids pay for college?

 By Veronica Majerol, grandparents.com

With higher-education costs far outpacing inflation, it's becoming harder for many families to see an answer. Scholarships — free money that can help defray the expense — can make the difference for some teens. But competition for that money can be fierce, especially in a deflated economy. Your college-bound grandchildren must capitalize on every resource available to them during their scholarship hunt. That's where you come in.

How You Can Help
"I'm a huge proponent of working with grandparents to get scholarships," says Kimberly Stezala, author of Scholarships 101: The Real-World Guide to Getting Cash for College (AMACOM). Who you are, what you've done, and where you've been can make a difference for your grandchildren in the race for college cash. Many universities, for example, offer scholarships to grandchildren of alumni. Ancestry-based organizations set aside scholarship funds for kids who share their ethnicity. The Order of Sons of Italy in America, for example, offers scholarships to candidates who have at least one Italian or Italian-American grandparent. And if you’ve served in the military, your grandchildren may be eligible for scholarships from groups like The American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, or others.

Update Your Résumé
A good first step is to brief your grandchildren on the extent of your associations by creating a grandparent résumé. Stezala advises making a list of all your past and present memberships and affiliations, as well as hobbies and interests, and specifics about your race and ethnicity going back several generations. Once you share this information with your grandchildren and their parents, you can all begin researching scholarship possibilities. Start with the major online databases, like fastweb.com and scholarships.com, and start early, Stezala says, preferably when your grandchildren are freshmen in high school.

Cast a Wide Net
Thousands of dollars in scholarships go unclaimed each year because people don't know about them. That's why researching, and keeping your eyes and ears open, are so important. Carol Cunningham, 83, of Rochester Hills, Mich., helped her grandson land a $2,000 college award last year through her employer, Avon. Cunningham made her first doorstep pitch for the cosmetic line nearly 37 years ago as a single mother, and she still sells its products. Though the Avon scholarship put only a modest dent in her grandson’s $27,000-a-year tuition at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J., he won other scholarships for his singing talent, and the family believes every dollar helps. “I thought for all of the years I sold Avon products that the scholarship was a great payback,” Cunningham says.
Harry Culler, 74, and Georgia Culler, 72, grandparents of eight in Swanton, Ohio, have been members of the Elks National Foundation for 38 years and so they were well-positioned to help two of their grandchildren win Elks "legacy" scholarships of $1,000 each. (The foundation has since increased the award to $4,000.) But their connection was only one factor — the foundation also asks candidates to demonstrate four core values: knowledge, charity, community, and integrity. One of the couple's grandsons, for example, took a bus to Louisiana with his church youth group to hang drywall in homes destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, and his brother volunteered with burn victims at a local hospital. "Their grade-point averages were good, they play sports, and then there were the humanitarian things," Georgia says. "It all adds up."

Hands-on Help
Community service is a requirement for many scholarships, so volunteering alongside your grandchildren, starting when they're young, is a great way to position them for the competition — and to model strong values while spending time together. Scholarship applicants often have trouble distinguishing themselves from their peers because their experiences are nearly identical, Stezala says. "They've all played soccer for eight years, and they've all participated in a food drive at school.” But if your grandchildren have also volunteered with you for five years at a veterans' hospital, for example, their applications are more likely to stand out.

Realistic Expectations
Scholarships are great, but winning a prize that covers a student's entire tuition bill is unusual. In all, about one in 15 applicants wins a private-sector scholarship, averaging about $2,000 each, says Mark Kantrowitz, director of Advanced Projects for FastWeb. He advises families to plan for college expenses using the one-third rule: One third from savings, one third from loans, and one third from current income and student aid. In this formula, Stezala says, scholarships are "the wild card. You should not count on private scholarships to fully finance their education, although you sure can try.”

Your own high-school years may be long behind you but grandparents can win scholarships, too. Larry Meredith, 69, of Gunnison, Colo., has already started planning for the higher education of his grandchildren, ages 7 and 10. In addition to setting up 529 accounts for them, Meredith was a 2006 winner of the CollegeInvest Grandparent Scholarship Contest, administered by the Colorado Department of Higher Education, which invites grandparents to write essays describing their hopes and dreams for their grandchildren. CollegeInvest placed the $5,000 winnings in a savings plan, which Meredith divided equally between accounts for both of his grandkids. In his winning essay, he wrote, "May [they] live in a country that so values education that every qualified student will be able to attend the college of his or her choice without worrying about the cost."

New Family Board Games

WHAT'S It? for team of 2-6 players, ages 8+  - Flip the doodle card, flip the timer, then guess what the pre-printed doodle looks like.

Boom Boom Balloon for 2 or more players, ages 7+ - Players take turns carefully pushing sticks into the slots around the balloon until they click into place, watching as the balloon squishes and squeezes. The first player to pop the balloon is out.

Snake Oil for team of 3-10 players, ages 10+ -  And in this modern card game, players must convince a "customer" to buy the fake product they make up from combining word cards. Laughter erupts as each player attempts to persuade the other that their item is the best! The Customer picks his or her favorite item and that player is awarded the Customer Card. The player with the most Customer Cards wins.

Draw Something Party for team of 4 or more, ages 10+ - Based on the popular Draw Something app, this game is played on a double-sided, glowing drawing screen. Players draw clues, while their teammates shout out guesses -- correct guesses earn coins. If time runs out, the other team gets to guess.

Pass the Popcorn for team of 2 to 8, ages 12+ - Movie-guessing game featuring 250 of the biggest box office hits, award-winners, fan favorites, and film classics. Players are given a movie detail, and each player competes to turn over his or her tiles and name the movie before any other player. Bonus: The unique tile format eliminates the need for a gameboard, so the game can be played anywhere.

Never Have I Ever for team of 2 or more, ages 6+ -  To play, pick a card and read the Never Have I Ever statement aloud. Everyone answers with “I Have” or “Nope, Not Me.”  Players can keep track of who has done what, but most people just have fun talking and learning new things about each other.

Twisterz Story Starter for team of 2 or more, ages 2+ -  The curious child...made a discovery...and peeked inside...That's just one of 10,000 creative story introductions inspired by Twisterz Story Starter. Designed for shared use with young children and their caregivers, the tube consists of four twistable rings of story components -- simply line them up, and your story is off and running! Story Starter engages creativity and imagination, strengthens language skills, and builds better readers and writers!

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The Best "Smart Toys"

In the past, grandparents may have chosen toys based on their function or durability, but today many decide which toys to purchase based on their perceived educational value. After all, everyone wants to help make their grandchildren smarter, or at the very least, boost their cognitive, social, and emotional development.
Unfortunately, we often go about this in the worst possible ways. We seek out educational toys and so-called "edutainment" — media that purport to teach as they entertain — but much of it is sold under a misleading premise. Companies eager to capitalize on our hopes, fears, and worries dress up products in smart-sounding packages, with brand-names like "Brainy Baby," "IQ Baby," and "Baby Genius." Subtle, they're not. But while it may seem counterintuitive, grandparents can actually avoid electronic toys labeled with buzzwords like "interactive" when shopping for young children, because electronics on their own don't necessarily make a toy smarter or more interactive.

So-called "smart toys" are, for the most part, traditional toys souped up with computer chips that are supposed to "stimulate" kids. But here's the catch: Babies and young children don’t need that much stimulation. In fact, one could argue that in our attention-deficit-era, our grandchildren are already overstimulated into distraction. The truth is that the best kind of stimulation still comes from human beings, not electronics. Conversing, singing, touching, holding, and exploring beat a "Play-and-Learn Activity Table" any day. Many children today are squeezed into overstructured days even as toddlers. The best gift a grandparent can give them is unstructured playtime, preferably outdoors or around the child's neighborhood.
When you're toy shopping for your grandchildren, here’s a good rule of thumb: The best toys are 90 percent child and ten percent toy. It’s all about what a child does with a toy, not what the toy can do on its own. If a child stacks two plain wooden blocks, he is interacting with them, learning something about the physical properties of objects, and developing fine motor skills. No electronic, musical block can improve on that lesson. In other words, good toys don’t shout — there’s no need for them to make music, chime, buzz, ring, or burst into Mozart.

So you can pass on the Baby Einstein line without guilt — it has no proven pedagogical benefit. You can eject the Beethoven CD if you like; classical music is no better for a child's intellectual development than rock and roll is. And you can skip the infant computer software, too — the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends zero screen time, PC or TV, for kids younger than 2 years old. In fact, that plain old plastic truck will do just fine. Add a grandchild and an afternoon of free time, and you’ll be amazed at everything a child can do with it
.
Source: Make Your Grandchild Brilliant, grandparents.com