the grandma effect
Veteran 60 Minutes reporter Lesley Stahl has spent her career interviewing presidents, covering war zones and investigating injustice. Yet as she explains in her book Becoming Grandma, the most significant moment of her adult life didn’t occur in the White House or Tel Aviv—it was when her first grandchild, Jordan, was born in 2011. “I was jolted, blindsided by a wallop of loving more intense than anything I could remember or had ever imagined,” she writes. “I was at a time in my life where I assumed I had already had my best day, my tallest high. But now I was overwhelmed with euphoria. Why was she hitting with such a force?”
Susan Moore, an emeritus professor of psychology at Swinburne University and three-time grandmother herself, says there’s nothing unusual about Stahl’s reaction. Together with fellow researcher Doreen Rosenthal, Moore interviewed more than 1,000 Australian grandmothers, from ages thirty-four to ninety, to get their thoughts on this great transition.
