This time there will be no late-night feeds or bleary-eyed mornings; as a grandparent-to-be, you can look forward to taking pleasure in your grandchildren at a more relaxed pace than you did with your own brood. For many, the prospect of becoming a grandparent is appealing – but it’s also easy to be lured into the trap of thinking you know best because you’ve done it all before.

Anna Scott, who is in her 60s, thinks it makes a difference if you’re dealing with your daughter or your daughter-in-law. “The maternal grandmother will quite often interfere too much because it brings her back to when her own babies were born,” she says. “You just want to savour it all again. I think there’s a danger that the daughter’s mother will try to take over.”

She says that grandparents ought to give help when it’s most needed. “When the baby comes, the mother is so harassed and so exhausted, she really needs help then because she needs to get sleep and she doesn’t really know how to cope.”

However, grandparents should be mindful about keeping the newborn all to themselves. “I think that most mothers want to be the one that their baby gets comforted by, so it’s not ideal if the grandparent is the one who is soothing the baby and getting the baby to sleep. I think the grandparent would be far better off doing all the housework.”

Disciplining your grandchildren
Discipline is the next problem that new grandparents face: you know how you would deal with a toddler drawing all over the sitting room walls but what approach do the parents feel is right?

Nancy Hegarty, who has two young grandchildren, thinks it’s a tricky problem. “A lot of young parents today take things very seriously. They buy all the books and read them, but you can get too caught up in all that – every child is different,” she says. “All these things like Supernanny and the ‘naughty step’ are fine, but sometimes I think it’s too much talking and not enough acting. Children can enjoy all the talking and attention. Sometimes I think, merciful God, just tell them to do it and leave it at that!”

Anna adds: “Quite often when children are misbehaving they’re looking for attention – and what parents do a lot of the time is stick them in front of the television. What they actually want you to do is play games with them or read a book with them. Parents can find that quite tedious, so that’s something that grandparents can do.”

Setting your own standards
Anna and Nancy both point out that it’s important to maintain your own standards and not to worry about confusing the child if your approach is slightly different.

“If, at home, a toddler was allowed to bang away at mirrors and doors with a stick, I still wouldn’t allow it. I’d say ‘not in this house’ and I would expect the parents to respect my rules as well”, says Anna.

Giving advice
Giving advice, however, seems to be the most complicated issue for grandparents. “I think people take the utmost offence when you give them any advice on babies,” says Anna, “and everybody that you meet, as a new mother, gives you advice.

“When my daughter-in-law asks me for advice, she actually just wants reassurance. She doesn’t want me to give her advice – and she certainly does not want to be told that she’s doing anything the wrong way!”

Nancy agrees, saying that advice should only be given when it’s requested. “The parents arrive home with this baby and no training but you have to be very careful about giving advice; they don’t need someone there undermining them.

“The best thing you can do is offer to take the baby for a night and tell the parents not to worry about what time they get back. They need time to just be themselves – it’s a very hard time in a marriage.

“I think it’s hard on the husbands as well; they’ve been number one for so long and then this little scrap comes along and get all the attention,” she adds.

Bad news
Nancy says that there are some situations that, sadly, you cannot be prepared for. “I had a vision of the baby arriving and it all being happy-clappy… it doesn’t always work out that way.”

Nancy’s first grandchild was born with a rare childhood cancer but, thankfully, the doctors were able to successfully treat it. “There was nothing I could do but be there. It was dreadful,” she says.

The best advice she can give to grandparents of an ill child is to “give all the support and help you can to the parents but also give them their space; they need it”.