I thought being a grandparent meant I was “retired.” Last Friday, my 8-year-old grandson taught me I was actually “required.”
It happened at 4:15 PM on a humid Friday afternoon.
My daughter’s SUV pulled into the driveway, brakes squeaking slightly—a sound of hurry. She didn’t even turn the engine off. She just rolled down the window, looking exhausted, her Bluetooth earpiece blinking blue in her ear as she gestured for my grandson, Leo, to hop out.
“Thanks, Mom! I’ll pick him up at seven! I have a conference call in three minutes!” she shouted over the hum of the engine.
And just like that, she was gone. Off to the races. Off to the endless hustle that defines modern life in America.
Leo walked up the porch steps. He’s eight years old, wearing a generic superhero t-shirt and a backpack that looked heavy enough to carry bricks. But the heaviest thing he was carrying wasn’t on his back. It was in his hand.
A tablet.
His eyes were glued to it. He mumbled, “Hi, Nana,” without looking up. He walked straight to the wicker chair on my porch, sat down, and continued tapping. The blue light reflected on his pale face.
My heart sank a little. I thought, Here we go. Another afternoon where I watch him watch a screen.
I went inside to get some lemonade. I felt invisible. I felt like a relic—an old piece of furniture in a world that had moved too fast for me. What could I possibly offer a boy who has the entire internet at his fingertips? I don’t know how to code. I don’t know who the latest YouTuber is. I’m just Nana.
I walked back out with the lemonade, preparing to sit in silence.
But then, something unexpected happened.
Leo sighed. It was a heavy, jagged sigh—the kind that shouldn’t come out of an eight-year-old’s lungs. He pressed the side button on his tablet. The screen went black.
He looked at the blank screen for a moment, then looked at the oak tree in my front yard.
“Nana?” he asked softly.
“Yes, honey?”
“Can we do something… real?”
I almost dropped the glass. “Real? What do you mean, Leo?”
He swung his legs, his sneakers barely touching the floorboards. “I mean… like, old-fashioned stuff. Can we just be here? No wifi. No buzzing. No levels to beat.”
It hit me right in the chest.
We look at these children—”Generation Alpha,” the digital natives—and we assume they want the noise. We assume they crave the constant stimulation. But looking at Leo, I saw the truth. He looked burnt out.
At eight years old.
“Absolutely,” I whispered. “Come with me.”
We left the electronics on the porch. We walked into the backyard. It’s not much—just a quarter-acre of grass, a few hydrangeas, and my vegetable patch. But to us, that afternoon, it became a sanctuary.
We didn’t do anything spectacular. There were no fireworks. There were no expensive toys.
We knelt in the dirt. I showed him how to pinch the “suckers” off the tomato plants so the fruit would grow bigger. He renamed the biggest plant “The Green Giant.”
We found an earthworm wriggling in the soil. Instead of saying “ew,” Leo picked it up gently, fascinated by something that was actually alive, not just pixels.
We lay on our backs on the grass, ignoring the grass stains. We watched the clouds drift over the suburban rooftops.
We listened. We actually listened.
“Do you hear that?” I asked.
“The wind chimes?” he said.
“No. Listen harder.”
He closed his eyes. “A dog barking… and… a lawnmower way down the street.”
“That,” I told him, “is the sound of the world turning slowly.”
At one point, while we were shelling peas into a metal bowl—the plink, plink, plink sound filling the silence—Leo looked at me. His hands were dirty. There was a smudge of soil on his nose. But his shoulders, which had been so tight when he arrived, were dropped and relaxed.
“Nana,” he said, “my brain feels quiet here.”
I stopped shelling. “Is your brain usually loud?”
He nodded, looking down at the peas. “Yeah. Everything is always fast. School is fast. The internet is fast. Mom is always rushing. It feels like a buzzing inside my head. Bzzzzzz all the time.”
He looked up at me, his eyes wide and honest. “But at your house… the buzzing stops.”
I had to turn away to pretend to check the hose, blinking back tears.
I realized something profound in that moment. Something I want every grandparent reading this to understand.
We often feel like we are “past our prime.” We feel like we can’t keep up with the technology, the trends, the slang. We feel slow.
But our “slowness” is not a weakness. It is our superpower.
In a world that is screaming at these children to buy more, do more, be more, and scroll faster—we are the only ones offering them permission to stop.
We are the human pause buttons.
As the sun began to set, painting the sky in shades of purple and orange, my daughter’s car pulled back into the driveway. The spell was broken. The engine was running. The phone was blinking.
Leo grabbed his backpack. He picked up his tablet from the porch chair, but he didn’t turn it on. He slid it into his bag.
He turned to me and gave me a hug. It wasn’t a polite “bye, Nana” hug. It was a desperate, clinging hug. The kind that says, Thank you for letting me breathe.
“Can we do the old-fashioned thing again next Friday?” he whispered into my apron.
I squeezed him back, smelling the outdoors and childhood in his hair. “Always, Leo. Always.”
THE LESSON FOR US ALL
If you are a grandparent, or an older neighbor, or an aunt or uncle, please listen to me:
Don’t try to be “cool.” Don’t try to entertain the kids with the latest gadgets. They have enough of that. They are drowning in that.
What they are starving for is peace.
They need someone who isn’t checking a watch.
They need someone who isn’t scrolling through emails.
They need a place where active shooter drills and social media likes don’t exist.
They need a witness to their childhood.
Grandparents, we don’t just offer cookies and gifts. We offer the one thing money can’t buy in modern America: Sanctuary.
To the world, you might just be an “old person.”
But to a child with a buzzing brain, you are the quiet harbor in a Category 5 storm.
You aren’t outdated. You are timeless.
Be the sanctuary.
If you read the first part of this story, you know that last Friday my grandson Leo found peace in my backyard. Part two starts a week later—when that quiet little miracle crashed straight into the chaos of modern parenting.
Click the button below to read the next part of the story.⏬⏬
