Dear Bess,
My grandchildren used to adore spending time with me. Now they’re teenagers and I feel like I’ve become invisible. When they visit, they’re on their phones the whole time, give me one-word answers, and look like they’d rather be absolutely anywhere else. I know they love me – I think – but I don’t know how to talk to them anymore or what we even have in common. Am I just supposed to accept this is how it is now? Or is there something I can actually do?
– Feeling Sidelined by a Smartphone
Dear Sidelined,
Oh, I hear you. One minute they’re sitting on your lap asking you to read the same picture book for the fourteenth time that afternoon, and the next they’re sitting across from you at the dinner table looking at their phone as though you’ve become a piece of furniture. It stings. Of course it does. You haven’t changed – but they have, dramatically and almost overnight, in that unsettling way teenagers have of becoming someone you suddenly feel you need to re-introduce yourself to.
But here is the thing I want you to hold onto before we go any further: this is not rejection. It just looks like it.
The teenage years are a period of intense inward focus. Your grandchildren are not withdrawing from you specifically – they are, to put it plainly, withdrawing from almost everyone who isn’t their peer group. This is developmentally normal, even if it feels distinctly personal. The child who once thought you were the most fascinating person on earth is now in the business of figuring out who they are, and that process doesn’t leave a great deal of room for anyone over the age of twenty-five.
That said – and this is important – teenagers still need the adults in their lives. Desperately, in fact, even when every fibre of their being appears to be broadcasting the opposite. Research consistently shows that grandparents occupy a unique and irreplaceable emotional space for teenagers. You’re not their parent, which means you don’t carry the same authority, the same rules, the same tension. You are, at your best, the person they can talk to when they can’t talk to anyone else. The trick is making yourself that person – and it requires a shift in approach.
The number one mistake well-meaning grandparents make with teenagers is going in looking for a real talk. You sit down, you ask how school is going, you ask about friends, you ask about their future – and you get monosyllables in return because, from their perspective, you’ve just launched an interview.
Teenagers don’t open up on demand. They open up sideways – during a car trip, while you’re both doing something else, when no one is maintaining eye contact and the pressure is off. Stop aiming for the heart-to-heart and start aiming for the side-by-side. Watch something together. Cook something together. Walk the dog together. Let them teach you something on their phone without making it a bigger moment than it is. Ask about their interests, not their progress. “What have you been watching lately?” will get you further than “How are your marks?”
This one is quietly transformative. Ask your grandchild to teach you something they know that you don’t – how to use an app, how to find a song, how to do something on your phone that you’ve been quietly baffled by for months. Teenagers, who spend most of their lives being told what to do and what they don’t yet understand, light up when the tables are turned and they get to be the capable one in the room. You learn something useful. They feel valued. Everyone wins.
Go to the things that matter to them. The school play. The Saturday sport. The art exhibition. You don’t need to make a speech about it or tell them what it meant to you – just be there, in the crowd, cheering. They’ll notice. They’ll remember. Even when they pretend not to.
And when they do give you a small moment – a comment, a joke, a brief flash of the child you used to know – don’t pounce on it. Just receive it warmly and let it breathe. Teenagers are testing the water constantly. If they sense that one small opening will be met with a flood of questions and enthusiasm, they’ll close it again quickly. Steady, gentle, patient wins this particular race.
I promise you this is not permanent. The teenagers who seem most unreachable now are often the ones who come back to their grandparents most fiercely in their twenties, when life gets complicated and they suddenly understand the value of someone who has seen a great deal of it and survived. Your consistency now – your willingness to keep showing up, to keep being interested, to keep not taking the one-word answers personally – is building something they won’t be able to articulate yet.
You are not invisible. You are just planting seeds in ground that isn’t quite ready yet.
Keep watering.
– Bess
Got a tricky relationship issue or a personal question you’ve been too embarrassed to ask? Whether it’s about love, dating, sex, friendship, family or blended households, Bess Strachan is here to help. With wisdom, warmth and just the right amount of honesty, Bess tackles the questions many over-60s are quietly wondering – but might not feel comfortable saying out loud. No judgement, just smart, thoughtful advice from someone who understands life doesn’t stop getting complicated after sixty. Submit your question anonymously to editor@startsat60.com and let Bess guide you through it – because you’re definitely not the only one asking.