Being a grandparent can be a great, although sometimes hard experience. It’s something that cannot really be taught, it’s a skill we all develop once it’s required. It’s most certainly beneficial for both the grandchildren and grandparents alike. It also helps the parents, of course, having somebody to care for the children when they’re unable to for whatever reason. There’s a grandparents’ school in Switzerland that enables grandparents to meet and share experiences. It helps them plan, organize, discuss, and support one another. This further makes the whole situation better and more suitable for the grandchildren, which they’ll certainly appreciate and reciprocate eventually.
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Being a grandparent is an art that cannot be taught, but which raises questions and reflections. A special relationship between you and your children’s children.
The Grandparents’ School of French-speaking Switzerland is a special place for grandparents, designed to enable them to meet with each other, to recognize their own specific role, to renew links, to make plans together, and to help them find their place in the generational order.
This place of meeting, support, and discussion is also a unique opportunity to share, exchange, reflect together, restore conviviality, fight against isolation and break the solitude. It allows finding the right measure of the Grandparents/PetitsEnfants links, to create a new relational dynamic, to seek and maintain the right distance in order to avoid the competition of authority, the situations of rivalry, and to overcome the problems.
What is the purpose?
The association promotes intergenerational links and helps its members to discover or rediscover the pleasure of being with their grandchildren, to be an active witness to their awakening to life, their games and their leisure activities and, in the satisfaction of “doing and being” together, to promote both the transmission of values and openness to the world by drawing on the historical, cultural and linguistic heritage.
The links are forged, including with people of the same generation, the transmission of knowledge and experience works between grandparents… while the reception and support of grandparents in difficulty are put in place, coupled with an offer of mediation to help those who are deprived of contact with their grandchildren.
All these activities take place through meeting places such as the “Grandparents’ Cafés”, open to all, exchange and discussion groups, workshops, and a telephone hotline.
