UCI Conference to Focus on Importance of Close Relationships : Grandparents Fight to Restore Traditional Family Role

Today’s gramps and grannies seldom resemble the revered figures in Norman Rockwell illustrations.

But as their traditional role fades, grandparents are developing a different kind of clout, according to a sampling of doctors, researchers, attorneys, lawmakers, and a “professional grandma” who will be speaking at UC Irvine’s first “Grandparent’s Rights Conference,” held, appropriately enough, this Sunday, Grandparent’s Day.

The prevailing message at the daylong conference will be that society cannot afford to view grandparenting as a dusty old notion to be tucked away in some national attic of antiquated Americana.

‘Becoming an Epidemic’

“According to the (U.S.) attorney general’s office, 28 million grandparents are not allowed to see their grandchildren--it’s becoming an epidemic,” said Gary White, 44, a grandparent himself and president of Human Rights for Grandparents and Grandchildren, the group which is co-sponsoring the conference with the department of psychiatry and human behavior at UCI.

“People need to know how critical the extended family is to the development of a child,” White said. “Some statistics (from the attorney general) show that only 4% of children in the United States today have extended family relationships.”

With almost half of all marriages in America ending in divorce, with families moving more frequently, with the generational conflicts that were born in the ‘60s, grandparents have been squeezed out of many family portraits. Like many of the 1,000 or so members of the grandparent’s group, White, a San Dimas accountant, got interested in the emerging grandparent’s rights issue when his own daughter remarried and decided he and his wife should no longer see the grandchildren they had helped raise.

“If parent and adult child can’t get along, that shouldn’t be taken out on grandchildren,” he said.

Intense Bonding

Dr. Justin Call, a UCI professor, and chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at UCI Medical Center, agrees. Call, who has been studying families for 30 years, says his research has confirmed that an intense bonding often occurs between grandparents and grandchildren.

“The growing and very special nature of the relationship between a grandparent and grandchild is interesting and significant from infancy and throughout life,” said Call, 63. “In the normal situation, the child learns to identify the grandparent with a difference in generations and a difference within time or history. This helps the child sharpen his own sense of place and time and prepares him for a deeper and longer look into the meaning of his own life.” Children who enjoy a good and “unbroken” relationship with their grandparents from early childhood through adolescence generally do better in school, have fewer problems with delinquency, and have higher feelings of self-esteem than children who don’t have grandparents around, Call said. When these kids grow up, they tend to be better parents themselves, he added.

“Because they have a better long-term perspective on the meaningfulness of life, they’re better able to pass on the best of one generation to the next--attitudes, values, a sense of responsibility about themselves and the world. Whereas an individual who has no meaningful connectedness with the past generation has less perspective and understanding of what it means to assume responsibility and care for the new generation,” he said.

Some of Call’s colleagues at UCI are in the midst of a five-year study which seems to be proving that grandchildren are good for grandparents as well.

Dr. Curt Sandman, vice chairman of the department of psychiatry at UCI and chief of research for the state Developmental Research Institute heads a “foster grandparent” program at Fairview Developmental Center in Costa Mesa. In the study, each senior citizen involved has been spending four hours a day, five days a week with a developmentally disabled person at the hospital. Sandman’s team is putting these guinea-pig grandparents and control groups through a battery of tests and hooking them to computerized electroencephalographs to get “a multi-disciplinary view of the act of grandparenting.”

Sandman warns that his findings are preliminary. But so far his study indicates that these foster grandparents sleep better, are less depressed and “show vigorous electrophysiological responses of the brain”--they have “a little better memory and their attention function is better.

The data also supports the “semi-radical” conclusion that “the brain retains a degree of plasticity--that the old brain can still learn,” Sandman, 45, said.

Sandman’s own grandmother was the most influential person in his life, and he has fond memories of traveling the country with her as a child--an experience his parents couldn’t afford to provide. “She gave me a real healthy perspective on life. I’m aware of it all the time,” he said. “Maybe that’s why I’ve found this such a tempting area of research.”

“My suspicion is that biological grandparenting would be even more rewarding . . . ,” he said. “My totally unsupported speculation at this point--and an interesting area for study--is that the more intense bonded relationship (between natural grandparents and grandchildren) would provide a stronger stimulus for arresting age-related decline.”

Even without scientific studies, grandparents know the value of maintaining strong family ties in this era of divorce and remarriage. As a result, many are moving out of their proverbial rockers and into the streets, banding into groups to fight what they consider an abridgement of their rights.

“We’re not militant, we’re broken-hearted. We fight because we have a close attachment to these children,” explained Yvonne Young, 65, who in 1983 helped create Human Rights for Grandparents and Grandchildren, which she said is widely regarded as “the hardest-fighting group. We’re considered the instigator of the best laws.”

Landmark Bill

The first law her organization pushed through was a landmark 1983 bill which compelled the courts to take grandparents into consideration when establishing visitation rights in child custody cases. Just last week Gov. George Deukmejian signed into law a bill that requires social service agencies to give priority to qualified grandparents or other relatives over unrelated foster parents when deciding where to place a child who has been made a ward of the court.

“We had found that 85% to 90% (of children) were not being placed in relative’s homes,” said Assemblyman Wayne Grisham (R-Norwalk), whose district includes Cerritos and Santa Fe Springs. Grisham, a grandfather himself and a speaker at the conference, added that grandparents proved themselves aggressive letter writers and “extremely effective” lobbyists.

“Who doesn’t like grandparents? They eliminated all opposition,” he said. “This has been such a popular and good law that I’ll be looking at more legislation next session.”

Gary White and Yvonne Young already have a couple more laws in mind. They are working with Rep. Mario Biaggi (D-New York) in hopes of getting a national uniform visitation law passed. And they hope to expand California’s 1983 visitation law to include the right for qualified grandparents to visit the illegitimate children of their sons and daughters.

The ultimate goal of activist grandparents, White said, is nothing less than to curtail the disintegration of the extended family in America.

In the meantime, some innovative stop-gap measures will be discussed at the conference. For instance, Lanie Carter, 59, is a “families consultant” at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla. Carter, who has no formal training in counseling, brings life experience to the job. “My degree is in ‘grandma,’ ” she said.

“Because the extended family doesn’t exist as it used to, we felt it was important for new families to have a surrogate grandparent they could ask questions on all aspects of parenting.” So nine years ago, she and Scripps set up a 24-hour “warm line.”

“Over the years I’ve grandparented 13,000 children,” Carter said. The professional grandma concedes though, “Nothing is as good as the original, the real thing.”

Sees Trend Changing

Call, for one, thinks the trend away from extended families may be turning around. As evidence, he cites the “slight decrease in divorce rate and the greater planning that goes into having children.”

“One thing that’s happening is that the marketplace is becoming more concerned with integrity of family and is offering child care and things of that sort. And people are becoming more cautious about casual sex as well. All this has had a sobering influence on people.

“I think people are becoming more aware of setting priorities that observe more traditional values in our lives. Those trips to Europe . . . and unending acquisition of material wealth is being put in perspective.”

Call credits the change, at least in part, to “new attention to the role of older people in society, especially grandparents,” and to the increasing political power that growing segment of the population wields.

“With improved health (among older people) there will be more vigorous activity of this kind,” in the future, Call said. “I think we’re in the middle of a swing of the pendulum back towards marriage as a more stable institution--towards the sinking of roots, and towards the preservation of extended family ties.”