A Grand(parent) Vacation
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Visiting day at sleep away camp took place several weeks ago, but I am still thinking about the fact that according to my friends, most children had visitors on two days. It’s not because divorced parents came on different days, although I’m sure that happened plenty. It’s because grandparents visited on one day, and parents on the other.
I don’t remember any grandparents visiting anyone at camp when I did the sleep-away stint for five summers in Maine in the ’80s. Nor do any of my friends.
A friend whose son is away for his first summer in New Hampshire said she felt badly for the boys who didn’t have two sets of visitors. “My parents never would have turned down the chance to visit, but it did seem a bit much. Visiting day is emotionally draining, who needs visiting days? I’m sure the kids who didn’t have visitors both days felt crummy. And what about the grandparents who weren’t up for the visit? They must have felt pretty bad, too.”
According to an Upper East Side psychologist I spoke to, grandparents today are no longer the white-haired duos that used to rock on porches, knit sweaters, and talk about the good ol’ days. Those were your grandparents’ grandparents.
“A certain kind of grandparent looks younger these days than a certain kind of parent,” she told me.”The grandparents might be in their 60s and 70s, but a lot of them look like they’re in their 50s.They have tons of energy and often more time to pal around with grandchildren than the parents do.”
In fact, one of the fastest growing trends in travel is what has become known as “grandtravel,” the practice of grandparents and grandchildren taking a vacation together — without those pesky parents.
According to a 2006 University of Florida study, there has been a 60% increase in this kind of vacation in the past 10 years, and it now accounts for 20% of all trips taken with children.
“The key to the popularity of grandtravel may be that it offers something for everyone, even the parents who are not involved,” the author of the study, Catherine Palmieri, wrote. “Grandparents and grandchildren are able to spend quality time without interference from the parents, and the parents are able to relax, knowing their children are with someone they know and trust.”
Savvy New Yorkers rave about the benefits of this kind of travel. “We go away with our grandchildren for 10 days each August,” a grandmother of six said. “They need to be 9 years old — that’s our minimum age requirement. And we take away the grandchildren who live in New York with the grandchildren who live in San Francisco. All year long the cousins know they’ll have this time together. However badly the kids may behave at school or at home, they are so well mannered on these trips. My children also get to have a break. It’s a win-win.”
Another set of grandparents takes each of their grandchildren, separately, away on a special trip. “We rotate our grandchildren and try to do two trips each year. This way we can really tailor the trip to the kid. One of my granddaughters loves birds. So we took her to different parts of South America to study the flora and fauna. Another granddaughter loves the theater and shopping; we had a ball in London.You can’t imagine how close these trips have brought us,” a grandmother of four said.
A 20-year-old company called Grandtravel (800-247-7651, www.grandtrvl.com) designs tours specifically for grandparents and their grandchildren. It offers calligraphy lessons in China, dinosaur digs in Colorado, sea kayaking in Alaska, trout fishing in Wyoming, and night game drives in Kenya, to name a few.
Almost everyone I spoke to about this subject mentioned the age-old joke that explains why grandparents and grandchildren get along so famously. The punch line, of course, is that they have a common enemy.
One such enemy, a mother of three, responded: “I’m normally the wet blanket on all the fun that goes on when my in-laws are around. I’m the one who says we have to go home to do homework. I’m the one who has to remind my mother-in-law that one of my kids can’t eat dairy food. I’m the one who gets dragged in when the kids are killing each other. Guess where I’ll be when they’re killing each other in Ireland next week? Three-thousand miles away, blissfully reading a book.”
