Grandparents and play: what has actually changed, and what has not

What has not changed at all

The developmental mechanisms are the same as they were. Children still learn motor skill through voluntary repetition, still build language through back and forth interaction, still develop negotiation by falling out and repairing it, and still need long uninterrupted stretches for elaborate play to appear.

The materials that support this are also unchanged. Cardboard, water, sand, sticks, fabric, containers and other children do now what they did then. A grandparent who thinks children today have too many toys and not enough time is making an observation that most early years practitioners would agree with.

What has genuinely changed, and why

Several pieces of safety guidance are substantially different from forty years ago, and the differences are not fashion. They followed evidence, and in some cases they followed large reductions in infant deaths.

Sleep guidance deserves particular emphasis because it is the one most often treated as a matter of opinion. It is not. The change in advice was followed by a very large fall in sudden infant deaths across many countries, and it is one of the clearest public health results of the last several decades.

What is fashion rather than evidence

A good deal else is preference dressed as necessity, and a grandparent is entitled to be sceptical about it.

The idea that toys must be educational and named as such has no evidential basis. The idea that a child's day should be filled with organised activity does not have one either. The suggestion that ordinary household objects are inadequate compared with purchased equivalents is a marketing position. And the strong contemporary emphasis on constant supervision of older children in low risk situations is not supported by anything about outcomes, as set out in the article on risky play.

What grandparents supply that is genuinely scarce

Three things, and none of them can be bought.

Unhurried time. A person who is not managing a schedule and does not need the activity to finish is rare in a child's week. Extended pretend play needs exactly that.

A different relationship. A relationship without the daily discipline of parenting allows a child to be different, which is one of the reasons children are frequently more agreeable at a grandparent's house.

Continuity. Family stories, how things were done, what a place used to look like. Children are more interested in this than adults expect, particularly from about six, and it is a form of narrative and historical understanding that has no substitute.

When the generations disagree

Two categories, handled differently.

Safety items are not negotiable and are also not personal. Sleep position, car seats, button batteries and the specific hazards above are matters of current guidance and, for car seats, of law. The most workable framing is that the advice changed, not that the previous generation was careless: nobody knew about sleep position in 1985 because the evidence did not yet exist.

Everything else, screen rules, sweets, bedtime, mess and tone, belongs to the child's parents, and consistency matters more than any particular rule. Small differences between houses are ordinary and children handle them easily. What causes difficulty is a rule being actively undermined rather than merely relaxed.

Practical points for having small children in the house

Older houses and houses without young children have hazards that a family home has already dealt with. Worth checking: button batteries in remote controls, greetings cards, key fobs and hearing aids; medication in handbags and on bedside tables, particularly blister packs left out; blind and curtain cords; stairs without gates; garden ponds and water butts; small ornaments and coins at floor level; and cleaning products in unlocked low cupboards.

None of this requires converting the house. It requires one walk around at a child's eye level, which takes ten minutes and is worth doing before the first visit rather than after.