'I Don't Wanna Turn 3!" Grandparenting Insights and Resources from Baby Boomer Gramps Jeffrey

Hey, welcome back, No Problem Parents, to another Social Saturdays episode on the No Problem Parenting podcast. I'm your host, Jackie Finneman, and today I'm speaking with Mark Joseph, otherwise known as Gramps Jeffrey. He wrote a book called I Don't Wanna Turn Three, which explores what goes through a toddler's mind that parents are so desperate to understand. It's based on the true experiences that he's had with his six grandchildren that were born to each to his three millennial daughters.

Gramps Jeffrey is the pen name for Mark Joseph, whose first book, The Secrets of Retailing, How to Beat Walmart, was written to help entrepreneurs and small businesses compete against the big guys. Gramps is currently the co-founder of the new website, babyboomer.org, which pulls together news and resources for the baby boomer community. There are close to 500 resources currently on the babyboomer.org page covering a variety of topics for the baby boomer generation and also for their kids and grandkids. In today's conversation with Gramps Jeffrey, we're going to talk toddler tales and grandparenting wisdom. He spills the beans on why he wrote I Don't Want to Turn Three and why grandparents are the secret sauce to raising the newest generation. We're going to talk about the benefits of reading to kiddos and how grandparents can stay connected with their grandkids. Mark is going to share a really fun story about how he and his wife stay connected with their grandkiddos who live in different states. And he's going to describe what's all available on the babyboomer.org website. Stay tuned for this fun conversation, including stories and nuggets of grandparenting gold.

Hey there parents. Thanks for listening to the no problem parenting podcast. Are you ready to become the confident leader? Your kids crave you to be, are you losing your crap on your kids, yelling, giving in and exhausted at the end of every day, you can start building confidence in your parenting immediately. Whether your child is a toddler or all grown up and still living in your house. Don't make this parenting gig harder than it needs to be registered to become a no problem parent. It comes with an app so you can listen to the tips and tools, just like you're listening to this podcast. Click the link in the show notes or go to no problem parents.com. Become a no problem parent today. Well, hello there, Mark. It is so great to meet you. Welcome to the show. Oh, thank you so much for inviting me. We're going to talk about a couple of things today. Let's start with why did you write this book? I don't want to turn three? Well, I wrote the book during the pandemic, you know, caused by COVID-19,

because we were all in isolation, gave me, except for being able to be with my family. And so this gave me special time to kind of watch all interact with all these grandkids. I was able to have all six of them here for about six weeks at a time. You know, they all have completely different personalities. The one thing they do have in common is a sense of curiosity, how excited they get when they do accomplish something. You know, watching them grow year to year and how they interact with each other really is the basis for my book, I Don't Want to Turn Three. You know, what goes through a toddler's mind? Parents are so desperate to understand. When does a toddler really understand the difference between me and us? You know, the book explores how the whole family finds this out together. You know, as a baby boomer trying to understand, you know,

how the world has evolved since, you know, I was three years old. But it's also kind of part of the story. You know, my parents, they didn't have cell phones. You know, they didn't have the internet.

They didn't have cable TV. They didn't have remotes. I was my dad's remote. He said, son, go change the channel.

You know, I was the remote. Exactly. You know, my parents' definition of discipline is quite different than the parents of today. Has today's world made for a better place for children to grow up?

I'll let your listeners answer that. How were you treated as you were growing up versus how we treat our kids today? So that's kind of why this whole book was written. Well, and give us a little bit of insight into the book and why you start out with the age three.

Why is that so key? It was really interesting watching all these kids grow up from two to three. And you could see the light bulb going on. You could see that when they were turning three and the celebration of their turning three really is when they started to get awareness of what's around them.

And so that's why I wrote the book. The book is about Jordan who keeps taking things from all his cousins. And then they discover that he's got all their toys in his closet on the birthday. And the oldest, which is Olivia, who was 10 at the time, came up with the idea.

It's a true story. came up with the idea that they should give everything to the poor kids downtown. And that's what they ended up doing. And so it's how the father pulled all the kids together, and they came up with this decision to happen.

So all the pictures in the book are pictures I had taken, and then I sent it to an artist to make it into more cartoonish. But it's a true story, really what happened. And I'm sure this happened to my family. It's happened in many, many other families around the world.

It's fascinating. I love it. It's a good, true story. And you say that many grandparents aren't maybe as involved as they should be in their grandkids' life.

And so what's your take on that? That's interesting that you bring that up because we found, as I was promoting this book and talking to different people around the world, it became very apparent that the baby boomer generation, Just 30% of us are not involved in the raising of our grandkids. You know, that means one out of every three of us. That means if I sat here in a room, you know, one of us wouldn't be involved.

Our philosophy has been, hey, I raise great kids. Let them raise the grandkids. I'm going to go play pickleball. You know, that's one of the reasons.

In fact, that's one of the reasons we started our site at babyboomer.org is because we know that grandparents have got to get more involved in the raising of these kids. I am fairly convinced that this generation, these kids from one to 10 years old today, are going to be the greatest generation this country has ever produced. And when you think about it, as soon as they come out of the womb, they're on the Internet.

You know, they've got cell phones. They're all electronically. I mean, I didn't get on the Internet until I was 40 years old. So this whole generation coming up today, you know, it's just going to be so much smarter than we ever were.

But it's up to the grandparents and also obviously the parents to make sure that we balance all this great information that they're getting on the Internet with real life. You know, with going out and playing without having experience reading and touching books. You know, that's part of our responsibility. So but when you think about it, why aren't grandparents so involved in the raising of these kids?

Well, you know, we may have our children may have married a spouse. we don't like. Okay, all of a sudden, we don't want to get involved. You know, we may have different ways of raising kids than what our kids feel about. That causes grandparents to be pushed away from by the children. You know, we may undermine our parents, our kids, you know, parents' authority of challenging what are parents teaching them. You know, they teach you that the parent wants to do this they come over to mom and grandpa's house and he teaches them something different that pushes grandparents away from their kids we tend to play favorites uh you know you know i've got six grand kids i've got a favorite i'm not going to tell you i haven't even told my wife you know because you can't do that we may try to transactually control these kids give them money gifts take on vacations, that causes issues between parents and grandparents.

You know, we, as we get older, may have a lack of empathy that we had when we were younger. You know, we may not be able to understand and to share our feelings with our kids. You know, and as you well know, this is so crucial in young kids, you've got to be able to have empathy. We may, as grandparents, demand that a child comply and respect us.

You know, that turns them off. So there's all kinds of reasons why a third of us are just not involved. And those are just a few of them. You bring up some really good points with that.

There can be a lot of barriers for grandparents to spend time with their kids. If your children have a different viewpoint on raising them, it can cause a wedge. So what are maybe some suggestions for what parents can do when the grandparent is maybe intrusive or isn't open to listening to what they have to say about how they want to parent their kids? And then also what could the grandparent say to their child? And how can we open the door to communication on that? I do think it's important that parents raising their children have some say over what happens at grandma and grandpa's house. I also believe that we don't get to control all of that at grandma and grandpa's house. So how do we find that right balance?

Well, you know, it's gotta be an open, honest conversation. We assume as grandparents that we have an open, honest kind of thing with our children. But when you think about what they did when they were in high school and how they got away with stuff with us and so forth, you know, maybe we don't. And so you gotta, you gotta bring it up.

You gotta talk about that kind of thing. But there's another reason why it's so crucial. Well, you know, when I was growing up, my grandmother lived two blocks over, my uncle lived up the street, we were all together. But you know, like, like in today's world, you know, I just came back from this weekend visiting my grandkids in Orlando, Florida, and I live in Scottsdale, Arizona. You know, that's pretty far away from each other. That's different than having them down the street and having that kind of influence. You only have an influence every two or three months, if you go to visit them, You may have an influence on Zoom calls and so forth.

So you've got to come up with ways to connect with these kids. I'll kind of tell you how we're doing it. And then I'm sure your listening audience has other ways of doing it too. But one of the things I learned when I had all these kids with us is that the language of two, three, four, five, six-year-olds is dinosaurs.

They all know about dinosaurs. They can tell me the long names of the three-year-old, long names of the dinosaurs and whether they meet and who they fight with. You know, all I know about dinosaurs is they're small, medium, and large. So their language is dinosaurs.

I even noticed that on the playground. When they talk to strange kids, somehow it always turns to dinosaurs. So what we decided to do to keep in touch with our kids that were in Texas and were in Orlando once they left is we needed to get to where they believed something they believed in. So, you know, we have about half a dozen dinosaurs around our house that the kids were playing with and so forth.

So we decided that every night we would put the dinosaurs someplace different. So, for instance, one night the dinosaurs were in the refrigerator eating blueberries. Another night they were at the sink washing dishes with Grandma. Another night they were playing the piano.

Another night they were walking up the steps. They were outside. So we had 50 different nights of the dinosaurs doing something different. So we wanted to become the routine of our kids that weren't here.

So their moms and dads would give them a bath. They'd read them a book. And all of a sudden the kids were saying, what are the dinosaurs doing tonight? So they would call on my wife's iPhone.

We'd do FaceTime. And then they would see exactly what the dinosaurs are doing tonight. Because little kids don't call you. You're out of sight, out of mind.

So you've got to do something to interact with them. And so that's what we did. And that helped bring us closer and be part of their lives. And I'm sure your listeners can come up with other ideas, too, to do that.

But that's what we've got to do because grandma doesn't live up the street anymore. And uncle doesn't live down the street. You know, you've got to reach out. We as a baby boomer generation have to reach out to make sure we're part of these kids' lives that don't live in the same cities as we do.

I absolutely love that you guys did that. How cool to create that curiosity and engage the grandkids and be and wondering, you know, what are grandma and grandpa up to next? and step three of no problem parenting. It's all about changing the conversation.

And one of those things is creating curiosity. When we're so engaged in the problem behavior that our kid is having, and we're putting all our emotion and energy into the problem, they can kind of sit back and be like, mom and dad are going to handle this. I don't really have to worry about what I'm doing wrong or whatever. When we can turn that table around a little bit and the parents can start doing things and grandparents to create curiosity where the kid's going, I wonder what mom and dad are going to do next. I wonder what grandma and grandpa are going to do next. Takes the kids out of fight, flight, or freeze mode, out of misbehavior, and engages them in that curiosity mode, which is a game changer. So I absolutely love that idea. We can ad lib that as kids grow, getting our teenagers to be curious about what we're doing next or what's going on in our life. Absolutely love it. What are some other things that baby boomers can teach the younger generations? Well, one of the things that we have to do is, you know, I was talking about the kids have a routine and taking a bath, reading a book, you know, reading a book seems to have gone out of style. It's something that we, and as grandparents, we ever have the kids over our house, we got to make sure we're reading books to them. And why should we read books? Okay. Again,

going back to, they're on the internet, they understand all that kind of great stuff. But, But the benefits of reading books to kids are all kinds of benefits. First thing, which should be as an example, I grab one of my kids, whether they're four, five, or six years old. They sit on my lap.

We grab a book. Because kids' books take no more than 20 minutes to read, if not the most. It creates a bonding. It really gives you a chance to be one-on-one with that grandchild and spend time together.

Because you're looking at something. You're doing something together. You know, it really creates that motive. One of the main things of teaching kids to read books is it supports listening skills.

You and I both know, as we grow older, listening skills is the best skill we can have. I mean, you as a podcaster and a teacher, you have to listen to your patients and to your guests to understand and ask the right questions. I have to listen to people that are joining us on babyboomer.org to understand what their needs are to make sure we satisfy those.

If we can teach these kids listening skills, you know, if it's only 20 minutes a night, because reading a book supports listening. It makes them listen. You know, reading books to kids, it creates a chance to cognitive and language development. You know, there are plenty of these words in these books that obviously the kids don't understand.

Gives you a chance to explain it. Gives you a chance to really talk about it. There's plenty of words in these books I don't understand. I've got to go look up.

So, you know, it helps with that cognitive and language development. But probably as important is, you know, two, three, four-year-olds, they bounce around all day long. So it creates a chance for attention span, you know, concentration, self-discipline. It creates that chance.

So I urge any grandparents, and obviously parents, but any grandparents, when you have the opportunity, grab a book, grab a kid, sit down, read with them, because it's going to help balance out everything else that they're exposed to during the day. FaceTiming, getting on the phone, reading the book to the child from a different location is very doable. Let's transition here quick. Why did you start babyboomer.org then, and where was the inspiration for that born?

The reason we started babyboomer.org is we realized that the grandparents are not involved. We want to make sure they're involved. But more importantly, the baby boomer generation is as diverse as anyone before us and after us, whether it's religiously or politically or ideas.

we are all over the world. This is one of the reasons why our country is having so much trouble now, because the baby boomers are in charge and we're not doing a good job. We've got all of this going on. The one thing that baby boomers have in common is a shared experience.

We grew up when the Kennedys were assassinated, Martin Luther King's assassination. We were there for the landing of the moon. And we were there when birth control became widely spread all over the country. You know, we were there for Vietnam and Kent State, all the riots in the streets.

But, you know, we've got our music. You know, if you talk to baby boomers, you know, you got Elvis and the Beach Boys and the Beatles and the Three Dog Night and the Association of Supremes. You know, that brings us together. You know, we've got all our movies, whether it's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or Jaws or pretty much any Spielberg movies, Animal House, Star Wars, The Godfellas.

We've got all of those things in common. Because when we were growing up, well, there were only three television stations, and we all had landlines. That's how we communicated. That's what brought this generation together, which is different today with all these social media and, you know, these phones.

That's what brought us together. So we wanted to create a site that not only looked back to all the great things that we did, but are taking care of what we need to do now. You know, all the things that make us who we are and where we are, whether it's retirement or financing, travel or pickleball. So all these things that we're doing now, but also have to deal with in the future, all the health issues, whether it's Alzheimer's or dementia and all the technological issues.

Again, I wasn't on the internet until I was 40. So my generation, it's got lots of technological issues that we've got to deal with. So that is why we created babyboomer.org.

And so what can people find on babyboomer.org? I know that you share a number of podcasts, such as myself. I'm happy to be contributing to your site.

There are resources for the baby boomer themselves, but then there are also ways for baby boomers to connect with their grandkids. Oh, absolutely. You know, on our site right now, we've got 468 different experts contributing to our site. That's 82,000 pages of things on our site.

The site changes every day because we pick up all the brand new blogs and articles and podcasts that people do every day. And that goes on the front of the site. So it's a brand new site every day. Within the site, you'll find a whole section for lifestyle. So it's about grandparenting.

It's about parenting, you know, and it's about all kinds of things that we, as we grow older, need to know. What's interesting, you know, we have a lot of big health area, we have a big travel area. But what's interesting is where we thought our customer base would be baby boomers, we're finding more and more it's the kids and the grandkids of baby boomers because they're trying to figure out what i gotta i gotta figure out this generation of baby boomers how do i do that there's news on their entertainment lifestyle relationships health travel money technology you cover so many different topics the site is absolutely free anyone can come to the site and anyone can participate in the site so uh you can join for free it's absolutely just a wealth of resources in there for, like you say, baby boomers, but also the baby boomers, kiddos,

and then the grandkiddos. You have options for people to join the community, to advertise with you, to get on your website, much like our No Problem Parenting podcast is on there now. We've got all kinds of classes on the site for anybody that wants to learn. I'm looking at the front page right now. This one's on better sleep. One is on Alzheimer's. So we've got It's plenty and plenty of classes for people to learn.

We also have, because, you know, unfortunately, our generation is dying every day. We also have an area for you to leave a legacy. So if one of your loved ones has passed on, you can leave a legacy on our site to them. So we've done that also.

So that's what we're all about. When you think about, as you get older, you do get wiser and smarter. And the reason being is you make more mistakes. So, you know, and that's one of the reasons why we've got to get involved in helping to raise these kids, because we can teach them from our mistakes.

You know, we've messed up enough that we can help others not make that many mistakes. But you're also thinking about your legacy. What are you going to do once you hit your 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s? How are you going to be remembered?

You know, no matter how wealthy you are, you can't take it with you. How are your grandkids and your children going to remember you? And so that's another reason why we created this site is to help with that. I just absolutely love everything about this.

And so, Mark, tell us, how else can we connect? Oh, connect with me at markmarc at babyboomer.org. Feel free to email me.

You can go to my website of grampsjeffrey.com. That's for the book. I don't want to turn three.com.

It's another website for the book. But there's all kinds of ways. Just go onto the site. Get involved.

And I'd love to continue a conversation with anybody that's listening. Excellent. And when they go to babyboomer.org, they can find all your links for social media.

Thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks. I'm glad you're on our site. All right.

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