Although the Hindu religious text, Manu Smriti, says that “when a householder sees his skin wrinkled and his hair grey and when he sees the son of his son, then he should resort to the forest”, every grandparent knows that nothing is a more effective anti-depressant than the presence of grandchildren. Now, this common experience has been confirmed by a study presented at the American Sociological Association’s 108th annual meeting where researchers analysed data from a long-term study called the Longitudinal Study of Generations.
It is a survey of American families of three or four generations, compiled in seven sets of data from 1985 to 2004 and analysing 376 grandparents and 340 grandchildren. The average grandparent was born in 1917, making them 77 years old at the mid-point of the study in 1994, while the average grandchild was born in 1963, making them 31. The results show that encouraging more grandparents and adult grandchildren to interact could be a fruitful way of reducing depression in older adults.
The research also suggests that efforts to strengthen familial bonds should not stop with immediate families or those with younger children. Extended families comprising grandparents and grandchildren serve important functions in one another’s daily lives throughout adulthood. This may be why the Manu Smriti says that even while living like a hermit in the third stage of life, a person should be available for advice to family and society. In today’s world, too, when the traditional joint family is the exception rather than the rule, it is as an adviser that grandparents relate to their progeny. But, it is the maintenance of constant links via visits, mobiles and skypes that staves off depression for the older generation and enables the latter ones to gain from the former.