Becoming a grandparent means you now have the chance to combine and make the best of the skills and experiences of the first two phases of your life and pass on all this good information to your offspring.
You have had the steep learning curve of finding out what life is about and how you can survive and prosper as a child.
You have also managed to bring into the world your own child or children and bring them up in such a manner that they too survived and prospered enough to bring their own children into the world.
So now you are ready to advise your child the best way to bring up their children based on the successes and mistakes you made yourself.
Except it doesn't work like that.
Not one little bit.
My formative years were in the fifties.
Bigger families seemed to be the norm then.
My mother was one of nine children, my father one of four.
With all that experience of bringing up children my mum and dads parents were respected and listened to when it came to raising kids.
Plus there was a lot of information passing around brothers and sisters.
We all lived reasonably close to each other so we all saw a lot of each other and knew how to behave in the company of others.
I was the little grandchild then so I could only see it from my perspective of course.
My grandparents were great as far as I was concerned.
From Children to Parents Time moves on and the world changes.
It was in the seventies when my wife and I were raising our own kids.
The immediate families were much smaller then.
Both our mums and dads had brought up only two kids.
Not only that, we were the first of our generation to start bringing up our own children so brothers and sisters were not experienced helpers.
We also felt that there were certain aspects of the way we were brought up that we would like to avoid when bringing up our own children.
This meant we were not always willing to accept the advice that our parents wanted to pass on.
Notice what is starting to happen here? On to today's information revolution In the last twenty years fantastic changes in communication have been taking place.
Unfortunately, as far as raising families are concerned this can be as much of a bad thing as a good one.
It used to be that young parents could rely on what was passed down to them and relate to it as being relevant to the way they themselves were brought up.
Now, all manner of information is easily available in all forms of publications and young parents are being bombarded with ways different from what they experienced in regard to raising their youngsters.
What parents and grandparents say might not now be taken as a reference.
All those skills and that experience is often ignored.
Your children will often try different ways that could well have been written by someone whose circumstances and lifestyle are far removed from their own.
The writer may not be writing from experience, never had their own children, and is portraying idyllic but impossible methods.
I've recently seen this happen.
Mum and dad were trying to persuade, coax and explain to their three year old to do something the child did not want to do.
Modern thinking says explaining things to children of this age helps.
It didn't.
This clearly only served to wind up the parents and annoy the child.
If you read the right books, they say explanations should only be given to older children after the ground rules have been firmly established.
Granddad's conclusion My experience says you give the child two alternatives and a deadline.
Let them work out for themselves what the consequences will be.
Do not bother to explain as all explanations will be used against you in future 'discussions'.
When the deadline arrives carry out whatever you said will happen.
Ignore all protests.
It does not take many scenarios like this for the child to learn you mean what you say and any attempts at blackmail or bartering will be useless.
It still has a choice of what action it wishes to take.
It just knows you will not be played with as I saw happening.
Ground rules set.
Life gets easier.
I am pretty certain had I pointed this out to the parents I would have had to suffer a tirade of words explaining why I was wrong.
The thing is, as an observer and in this case being a grandparent with experience, it is much easier to spot the answer to a problem than when you are involved with the problem.
Just don't try to tell your kids though.
They will have to wait till they are grandparents themselves before they will understand.