I just finished reading a great article in Dana Blankenhorn’s newsletter, This Week’s Clue , on the important role of granparents in our society and the "warehousing" treatment that many grandparents experience today.  He argues, accurately, that our society needs to realize the positive impact that grandparents have on our families specifically and our society generally, and that we need to come up with a better way to treat them.

Dana, as always, puts it much more eloquently and I encourage you to read the entire article, but I thought I’d excerpt it rather liberally to share what I think are his most important points:

Some 1.5 million Americans today live in nursing homes, most of them
women, many of them over 85, most of them on some sort of government
assistance. They are under increasing risk of physical abuse, and every
effort to prevent that abuse (by law or litigation) is met by an
industry demand for carte blanche. Rising insurance rates, rising costs
of meeting government requirements, means higher costs and less money
for care, they argue, often successfully…

People need people. Robots can provide for our physical needs,
computers can assure our safety and comfort, but at the end of the day
it’s the presence of other humans in our lives that makes life worth
living.

Most people in nursing homes don’t have that. Families come
rarely. The other residents are lost in their own troubles. The workers
are strangers.

Then Dana goes on to describe a new project he’s working on called Hearthstone:

And that’s where Martin’s Hearthstone idea comes in.

The idea is to treat more of us, as we age, as my siblings treat my
mom. If older people spend their days with little children, the need
for staff on both ends of the age spectrum is reduced. Why the ages are
segregated in day care is beyond me.

But beyond that, ways must be found to keep people in homes, real
homes, for much longer. There’s a chef near me who has lived for some
years with an old black lady, unrelated to him. She taught him her
recipes, she taught him how to live, and now he’s giving her dignity as
her memories fade, and as her body withers.

Legal ways should be found to enable more of this. When my mom does
pass away, I want my brother to inherit her house, free and clear. When
this old cook dies, the chef should get some of her estate.

The benefits are many-fold. The chef is a better cook, and a
better man, for serving this lady who has become his grandma. My
sister-in-law, who lost her own mother when she was young, honors my
mom as she would have liked to have honored her own, and has become
saintly in my eyes as a result.

And then there are the kids. We often have no time for our
kids. But our parents have nothing but time for them. And if our kids
grow up with grandparents around them, even someone else’s, perhaps
they will seek their counsel later, as they become teenagers and find
they can’t talk to mom or dad.

Perhaps they will serve these grandparents tea, fluff their pillows,
turn off the TV, spill out their hearts, and see smiles coming to older
faces, then listen as the wisdom of decades rains down upon them,
blessing both sides of the conversation and bringing with it the light
of hope and contentment.

I plan on keeping track of the Hearthstone project and hope to post about it regularly.