I’m In My 70s And I’ve Realized That Being A “Good Grandparent” Is Actually A Second Chance To Apologize To My Adult Children Without Ever Having To Say The Words

I was not the parent I meant to be.

I don’t say that to be hard on myself—I say it because it’s simply true, and at seventy-three I’ve run out of reasons to soften it.

I worked too much. I was distracted in ways I told myself were temporary and weren’t. I said things I can’t unsay, missed things I can’t unmiss, and operated for years under the assumption that providing for my children and being present for them were the same thing. They weren’t. My children know this. We don’t talk about it directly. But we both know.

What I didn’t expect was a second chance.

Not to rewrite anything—you don’t get to rewrite it. But to do something different with what’s left. When my grandchildren arrived, something shifted in me that I didn’t have language for at first. I was softer with them. More patient. More present in the specific way I hadn’t managed to be the first time around. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I understood what was actually happening.

I was showing my children who I could have been. Without a single word of apology, I was letting them watch me get it right.

It’s the strangest, most quietly devastating gift I’ve ever been given. Here’s how I’m doing things different.

1. I Get Down On The Floor

Not because my knees thank me for it. They don’t.

But I remember all the times I was too tired, too busy, too somewhere-else-in-my-head to get down to where my children were. Physically, literally, on the floor where the playing happened. I was present in the room in those years. I was not always present in the moment.

Research on grandparent-grandchild relationships has found that physical engagement—getting to the child’s level, participating in their world rather than observing from a comfortable distance—is one of the strongest predictors of emotional closeness across generations.

My grandchildren don’t know why I lower myself onto that carpet with my creaking joints and stay there longer than is strictly comfortable. My children do. I see it in their faces sometimes when they walk in and find us there together. Something moves across their expression that neither of us names.

2. I Put The Phone Down

All the way down. Face down, in another room if I can manage it.

I was a distracted parent in an era before smartphones made distraction easy—which means I have no excuse for how distracted I was. I found ways. Work had a long reach. My own interior weather had a long reach. My children would be talking to me, and I would be there in body and somewhere else entirely in mind, and children know this. They always know.

My grandchildren have my full attention in a way my children deserved and didn’t always get. That’s not a comfortable thing to type. But it’s true, and I think the point of being seventy-three is that you’ve run out of time for comfortable untruths.

3. I Say “I’m Sorry” When I’m Wrong

Directly. To them. In the moment.

I was not good at this as a father. The authority felt load-bearing—like if I admitted fault, something structural would give way. So I didn’t. Or I did it sideways, through changed behavior or a gruff kindness the next morning that was meant to stand in for the words I couldn’t say.

My grandchildren hear me apologize, and I watch them absorb it the way children absorb everything—quietly, completely, into the permanent record. What I’m also watching, from the corner of my eye, is my own children watching me do this. The parent who couldn’t apologize to them, apologizing to their children without hesitation. I don’t know exactly what that does to them. I know it does something.

4. I Ask Them What They Think—And Then I Wait

What do you think? What do you want? What does that feel like to you?

Research on childhood emotional development has found that children whose opinions are consistently solicited and genuinely considered develop stronger self-trust and more confident decision-making in adulthood—not because their choices are always honored, but because being asked teaches them that their inner world is worth consulting.

I didn’t ask my children enough. I decided. I directed. I knew what was best, and I operated from that knowledge with a certainty I no longer have and probably shouldn’t have had then. With my grandchildren, I ask. I wait for the answer. I don’t fill the silence when the answer is slow in coming. It’s a small thing. It doesn’t cost me anything. I cannot believe I was so stingy with it the first time.

5. I Show Up For The Small Things

The Monday afternoon school play where they have four lines and forget two of them.

The soccer game where nothing of consequence happens, and the final score is 1-1, and everyone gets a juice box.

The ordinary, unremarkable moments that don’t feel significant when you’re in them and turn out to be everything when you look back.

I missed too many of these with my own children. I was there for the milestones, mostly. I wasn’t always there for the Tuesdays. My grandchildren have not had a play, game, or moment I didn’t show up for, if I could help it. That’s not for them, not entirely. Some of it is for the child my son was, standing in a school gymnasium, scanning the audience.

6. I Tell Them I Love Them First

Without waiting for them to say it. Without making them earn it with behavior, achievement, or being in the right mood. Just: I love you, offered freely, the way water comes out of a tap.

Studies on early attachment and emotional security have found that unconditional verbal affirmation—love expressed without condition or trigger—creates a fundamentally different internal landscape in a child than love that arrives as a response or a reward. My children grew up in a house where love was understood but not always spoken. Where it was demonstrated through provision and presence, but not always through words. I thought that was enough. I have since learned it wasn’t. My grandchildren will not have to learn that love was there by reading between the lines.

7. I Don’t Make Them Perform For My Affection

No “give Grandpa a hug” when they don’t want to. No visible disappointment when they’d rather play than sit with me. No subtle withdrawal when they choose someone else.

My love for them is not a variable that changes based on what they give back. They seem to know this. Children always know.

What I understand now, and didn’t then, is that a child who never has to perform for affection learns that love isn’t a transaction. That’s the lesson I should have been teaching all along. I’m teaching it late, in a roundabout way, through children who belong to my children. Better late than not at all—though that’s a sentence that costs something to say.

8. I Tell Them Stories About Who Their Parents Were

The funny ones. The tender ones. The ones that show my children as full, complicated, beloved people rather than just parents in the permanent parental role.

Research on family narrative and identity development has found that children who grow up with a strong sense of their family’s story—who know where they came from, who their people were before they became who they are now—demonstrate higher resilience and a stronger sense of self than those without that connective tissue.

I tell my grandchildren about their parents’ childhoods partly for them. And partly because it lets me say, out loud, in the only way I know how: I saw your father. I saw your mother. I was paying more attention than they knew. I loved them more than I showed. I’m sorry it didn’t always look like that from where they were standing.

9. I Repair Quickly When I Get It Wrong

I still get it wrong sometimes. I’m impatient on days when my body hurts. I say something sharp when I mean something gentle. I am, at the end of it, still myself.

But I go back. I find them, and I say I didn’t handle that well, and I’m sorry, and I love you. It takes five minutes. It costs me nothing. It gives them something I’ve come to understand is one of the most important things a child can receive—the evidence, in real time, that a relationship can withstand a rupture. That love doesn’t leave when someone makes a mistake.

My children are watching me do this, too. I know they are.

10. I’m Not In A Hurry When I’m With Them

Nowhere to be. Nothing more important. No half-attention while I wait for something else to start.

Just this, fully, for as long as we have.

I spent so much of my children’s early years living slightly ahead of the present moment—thinking about what came next, what needed doing, what I’d handle when this was over. I was in the room. I was also always, slightly, somewhere else.

I don’t have the luxury of that anymore, and I mean luxury as the bitter thing it is. Time has gotten specific. I know what I’m spending when I spend an afternoon. And so I spend it completely, here, with them, without one eye on the door.

11. I Let Them See That I’m Glad To Be With Them

Not performed gladness. Not the cheerful grandparent performance. Just the real thing, visible on my face when they walk in the door.

My children didn’t always know, when they were small, whether my presence meant I wanted to be there. I was there. Whether I was glad to be—whether they were the thing I wanted most in that moment—I’m not sure I made legible.

My grandchildren know. I make sure they know. And I am aware, every single time, that their parents are watching. That somewhere behind their adult eyes, the child they were is watching too. And if that child can see, in the way I light up at the door, some version of what they needed and didn’t always get—then I will have said, without a single word, the thing I should have said a long time ago.