Miriam Weinstein, Author

  There is a certain category of song that somehow slipped my mind all the time that I was a parent, but has bubbled up through my grandmother brain. These are tunes that I learned as a child. At the time, they were laughably out-of-date. Now they are quaint. We…

What does it mean that you can buy a t-shirt, a onesie, a tote bag, a bib; even a house decal that announces, “What happens at Grandma’s stays at Grandma’s?” OK; beyond the fact that we can now take a phrase and print it on pretty much anything that can…

The argument that post-menopausal women help to produce more offspring has been around for long time. But a study of 18th and 19th century Finnish and Canadian farm families (stable populations with excellent record-keeping) puts numbers behind this aren’t we helpful idea. Women whose mothers were alive began having children…

In case you thought that grandparenting was about posing for photos with adorable toddlers, that is just the beginning. The really good news is that, if you live long enough, and stay reasonably close, those young charmers can grow up to be an actual help to you, and vice versa.…

It starts as advice to the mother-of-the-groom: wear beige and keep your mouth shut. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if you have a tendency to spew unsolicited opinions and pronouncements, and if beige is your color. Lesson one: this is not your wedding. It continues as a grandmotherly…

There’s a Senegalese proverb: “The grandmother’s heart is the school where one prepares for life.” But what if westernization has made that heart less available to young people, especially girls? The standard practice for health and development workers looking to change unproductive traditional behaviors, like female genital mutilation, teenage pregnancy, and…

Who knew that the concept even existed, let alone was a recognized style trend. But that uber-arbiter of approachable hip, the New York Times Style Section, has alerted us to the possibility of grannies walking down the aisle as bridesmaids or even flower girls. And these are not the “young…

Thanks, Hilary, for putting a human face on such a common quandary. We may not all be presidential material -- for some of us it might only be a question of becoming senator or CEO, or maybe just picking up an Oscar for lifetime achievement. But which of us doesn’t…

I call it The Big Disconnect. The prestigious “Lives” essay spot in the back of the New York Times Magazine not long ago included in its writers’ guidelines this helpful hint: “No grandmother stories, please.” Which would lead you to think that, because so many people considered their grandmothers such…

It’s called The Grandmother Hypothesis, and it was first posited more than half a century ago. The idea is that we post-menopausal dames might have played a really crucial role in the development of the species. Long ago, when our ancestors were tending their fires and sweeping out their caves,…