Grandparenting Language Barriers

I’ll admit that when my children were growing up I would often think about my future days as a grandmother. I envisioned holding my grandbabies on my lap and just chatting. When I was small there was nothing like a good talk on grandma’s lap. Yup…that’s what I thought would happen. But things change, times change.

I was reading recently about the type of grandmother I am. I fit into the category of “global grandparent.” There’s actually a book about this new phenomenon, “How To Be A Global Grandparent.” My grandbaby lives on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and so my experience is different.

Now I realize that there have always been generation gaps. My grandmother had trouble with words like “groovy” and “peace out.“ But the language barrier that I might be living with is a real language barrier, My granddaughter lives in a country where a completely different language is spoken, one that I know very little of.

So it could be that when these chats I dream about occur I won’t understand a thing! And when I mumble words of my English language to my beautiful Miss Chloe, she might think that I’m an old woman who can’t speak intelligibly and has completely lost her mind (well, that’s not too far from the truth!), because she won’t understand me.

It’s becoming abundantly obvious that this old dog must learn some new tricks. So I’m beginning to practice my Dutch. I have learned goedemorgen (hello) and dankuwel (thank you) and that B is een bier. (and that’s “B is for bear”-my 25-year old son got all excited thinking we had found a children’s book about beer!).

I’ve also been trying to learn about the Dutch culture which is now part of my granddaughter’s heritage. I’ve tried eating many of the foods that she’ll be eating so that we can at some point discuss culinary likes and dislikes. I’m learning that Christmas is not as big a holiday as Sinterklaas, St. Nicolas Day. I’m not sure how my husband’s deeply-rooted southern family will feel upon learning that in the Netherlands, St. Nicolas’s helper is a black boy named Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) and that Dutch children wear black-face make-up during the holiday pretending to be their favorite character, Piet.

This “global” family situation will be a great learning opportunity for the entire family. Sharing languages and cultures. It truly is a small world after all.