What men might discover as grandfathers

For some men, a sense of ease they never felt as fathers can arrive later and unexpectedly, when they become grandfathers.

Researchers who study grandfathers have a name for something many men report in the first months of the role: a welcome surprise. Not that they love the child; most men expect that going in. What catches them off guard is how much easier it is to be light with this one than it ever was with their own.

I often hear a version of this in therapy. A man who was careful, dutiful, slightly braced the whole way through fatherhood becomes, twenty or thirty years later, the grandfather who does the voices for every toy in the room, who gets down on the floor without being asked twice, who is, by his own account, sillier than his own children ever saw him be.

If you were not the playful father you wanted to be, this can feel more like a painful reminder than a comfort. It can feel as though whatever lightness you might find with children came too late, or that the window for it closed decades ago with your children's childhoods. But neither of those things is necessarily true, and there is some interesting thinking around why.

Why things can feel different as a grandfather

Erik Erikson had a word for this kind of shift: generativity, broadly the move from focusing on your own advancement towards investing in what comes after you. Late in his life, working with his wife Joan Erikson, he pushed the idea further, describing something that appears specifically in old age, once the duties of the providing years have been carried and mostly set down. Not decline. Redistribution.

I think of a man who described himself, without much affection, as having been a fairly absent father, present in the house but rarely present with his children, tired, preoccupied, doing what needed doing. What had changed for him thirty years on was not his character. It was what was being asked of him. Almost nothing, by comparison, and what came out instead, on the floor of his granddaughter's bedroom, was an impression of a dragon that made her laugh so hard she could not breathe. He said his own children would not believe it was him. Neither did he, for a long time.

A lack of emotional closeness in childhood does not necessarily mean that the capacity for it cannot develop later in life. Attachment researchers have a term, earned security, for adults who did not experience reliable closeness as children but go on, through later relationships, to build a genuine capacity for it anyway. The findings show that the capacity for closeness is not permanently fixed by what happened in childhood; it can still be built later, through the right relationship, at almost any point in life.

Men who stay genuinely involved as grandfathers, not just present but engaged, report fewer depressive symptoms and more positive affect than grandfathers who are less involved. Whatever opened up in that bedroom was not simply sentimental. Research suggests that this kind of involvement is associated with a man's own wellbeing, not only the child's.

Some men also notice something quieter alongside the playfulness: an awareness of what they needed as children and didn't always get. This can be meaningful, but it is not usually the main experience. What men describe is often simpler than insight: a sense of relief that this part of them still exists, and permission to let it be seen.

Opening that door

None of this is guaranteed, and I would not want to promise it as though it arrives for every man on schedule. Some find this door easier to open as fathers, while for others it may not open until they become grandfathers, or even later.

What the research on earned security suggests is that this is less about a door opening on its own and more about a capacity being built, slowly, through contact rather than insight alone. It can help not to force playfulness into being, but to notice where it is already trying to happen: a game that goes on a minute longer than it needs to, a voice you did not plan to use, and letting it happen, rather than stepping back into being careful.

If you were not the father you meant to be, it is worth knowing the door doesn't always close when you think it does. For many men, it opens again later, differently, and often at a point when they had stopped expecting it to.

References

Bates, J. S., and Taylor, A. C. (2012). Grandfather Involvement and Aging Men's Mental Health. American Journal of Men's Health, 6(3), 229 to 239.

Erikson, E. H., and Erikson, J. M. (1997). The Life Cycle Completed (Extended Version). W. W. Norton and Company.

Pearson, J. L., Cohn, D. A., Cowan, P. A., and Cowan, C. P. (1994). Earned and continuous security in adult attachment: Relation to depressive symptomatology and parenting style. Development and Psychopathology, 6(2), 359 to 373.

StGeorge, J., and Fletcher, R. (2014). Men's Experiences of Grandfatherhood: A Welcome Surprise. The International Journal of Aging and Human Development, 78(4), 351 to 378.

The clinical material in this article is drawn from patterns I have seen across many clients, not from any one person's story.