By Annie Wright, LMFT · Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist (#95719)Clinically reviewed July 2026

Your Children Are Watching: What the Grandparent’s Decline Is Teaching Your Kids (and What You Can Do About It)

SANDWICH GENERATION • July 19, 2026

Last reviewed: July 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

He Asked the Question Between Problems Five and Six

Tameka stood at the kitchen sink rinsing the dishes she’d pulled from the dishwasher ten minutes earlier, the late-afternoon light coming in low and gold through the window over the faucet. At the kitchen island behind her, her son Marcus, nine, was bent over a worksheet titled FRACTIONS WITH UNLIKE DENOMINATORS. His pencil had stopped after problem four out of twenty. She could hear the quiet scratch of it starting and stopping.

Without looking up, Marcus said it, his voice level in that particular way kids have when the question underneath is much bigger than the tone carrying it: “When Grandma forgets us, are we still her grandkids?”

Tameka’s hand went still over the sink. Water kept running. Through the window, she could see her older son, Devon, fourteen, sitting on the back step with his earbuds in, elbows on his knees, not looking at anything in particular. She had no idea whether he’d asked himself some version of the same question, out loud to a friend or just silently, on his own, weeks ago.

She’d been holding this question at bay for almost two years, ever since her mother’s diagnosis, treating it like a door she could keep shut through sheer force of not naming what was behind it. Now Marcus had opened it himself, mid-homework, and she had maybe thirty seconds before he’d expect an answer and go back to problem five.

Not every family gets the decline delivered this plainly. Some kids never ask the question out loud at all. But this moment, ordinary and enormous at once, is where a lot of families find themselves once a grandparent’s decline stops being an abstraction and starts being Tuesday. What happens in the next thirty seconds, the words chosen or swallowed, the tone in the room, the things left unsaid, shapes how a child learns to carry complexity for the rest of their life.

Here is what I keep coming back to with the parents who sit across from me in exactly this position. The pressure isn’t really coming from the question. It’s coming from the fact that most parents have never once been taught what to do with thirty seconds like this one. Nobody hands you a script for this. Nobody rehearses it with you the way you might rehearse a difficult conversation with a boss or an ex. You are simply standing at a sink, hand suspended, improvising in real time, on a topic most of us spent our entire childhoods being protected from ourselves.

Tameka told me later that what she remembers most from that afternoon wasn’t Marcus’s question. It was the half-second of silence right after it, the one where she genuinely didn’t know which version of herself was going to answer him: the version who wanted to protect him from the whole truth, or the version who suspected, correctly, that he already knew more than she’d given him credit for.

What Is Ambiguous Loss, and Why Does It Explain What Your Child Is Feeling?

Children are extraordinary witnesses, more attuned than most adults give them credit for. What they absorb when a grandparent’s health falters isn’t limited to sadness or confusion. They pick up shifts in the emotional temperature of a house. They notice which phone calls make their mother’s shoulders climb toward her ears. They register, often before anyone says a word to them directly, that something about safety and permanence has changed.

I recently reread a passage from Pauline Boss, PhD, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. Boss coined the term ambiguous loss to describe exactly this situation: a loss without the clarity of death, where the person is physically present but psychologically altered, sometimes hour to hour. Boss’s decades of work with families of the missing and the cognitively declining names something I see constantly in my practice and rarely see named anywhere else. Children (and adults) can’t fully grieve a loss that keeps refusing to resolve.

Think of it like a door that’s neither open nor closed. You can’t walk through it, and you can’t shut it either. You just stand there, hand on the knob, waiting for information that isn’t coming. That’s what a nine-year-old is doing every time he visits a grandmother who sometimes knows his name and sometimes doesn’t. He’s standing at a door, hand on the knob, and nobody has told him it’s okay to stop waiting for it to resolve.

What this looks like in practice, in an actual week, is a kid who seems fine at breakfast and then cries about something unrelated, a broken shoelace, a lost library book, twenty minutes later. It’s the storm that shows up sideways because the real weather system has nowhere sanctioned to land. It’s also, sometimes, a child who becomes suddenly and uncharacteristically clingy at school drop-off, or who starts asking, out of nowhere, whether you’re going to forget them too one day. These aren’t manipulative bids for attention. They’re a nervous system trying to locate solid ground in a family story that currently has none.

I want to be direct about something that gets lost in a lot of the parenting advice on this topic: ambiguous loss doesn’t resolve on a schedule, and neither does a child’s reaction to it. A five-year-old might ask the same question every single visit for months. A twelve-year-old might seem completely unaffected for a year and then unravel unexpectedly at a birthday party that reminds her, obliquely, of a grandmother who used to bake the cake. Both are normal. Neither means you did something wrong.

Children also watch how the adults around them cope, or fail to. They see a parent juggling a work call and a care coordinator and a nine-year-old’s fraction homework in the same twenty-minute window, and even if nobody explains what’s happening, kids absorb the strain in the room the way they absorb weather. This is one of the quieter ways children learn what resilience looks like, or doesn’t, well before they have the vocabulary to describe either one.

How Do Children at Different Ages Process a Grandparent’s Decline?

A child’s age changes almost everything about what they take in and how they take it in. I want to walk through three rough bands, because the temptation to give every child the same explanation, the same visit schedule, the same conversation, is understandable and almost always a mismatch.

Ages five to eight. Children this age are concrete thinkers who lean heavily on magical and literal interpretation. When a grandparent forgets a name or repeats a story, a young child may genuinely believe Grandma is playing a game, or that whatever’s happening is temporary and reversible, the way a cold is temporary and reversible. Their grief rarely comes out in words. It shows up as clinginess, regression, a return to thumb-sucking or bedwetting long since outgrown, irritability, or disrupted sleep. What they need most is not more information. It’s more consistency: the same bedtime, the same Tuesday pickup, the same tone of voice, even while everything else in the family system wobbles.

Ages nine to twelve. This is Marcus’s band, and it’s the band where direct questions start arriving, the kind that stop a parent’s hand mid-air over a sink. Cognitive complexity has grown enough that permanence and mortality start to make sense as categories, even if kids can’t yet fully metabolize what they mean personally. They want clear, honest information, not euphemism, and they want reassurance that the ground under them specifically, not just the grandparent’s ground, is still solid. Their feelings often arrive tangled: anger sitting right next to sadness, guilt sitting right next to relief that it isn’t happening to their own parent.

Ages thirteen to seventeen. Teenagers are managing identity formation, peer belonging, and a hunger for independence all at once, and a grandparent’s decline lands inside that already-crowded internal room. Devon, on the back step with his earbuds in, is a fairly typical example: cognitively capable of a mature, nuanced understanding of what’s happening, and simultaneously more likely to withdraw or express almost nothing at all. Teens frequently experience anticipatory grief, mourning a loss before it fully arrives, and often benefit far more from being invited into some piece of the caregiving or the decision-making than from being protected from it entirely.

What complicates the teenage band further is timing. A fourteen-year-old is already renegotiating almost every relationship in his life, testing distance from parents, leaning harder into friend groups, figuring out who he is when nobody’s watching. A grandparent’s decline asks him to hold something achingly tender at precisely the developmental moment he’s built to push tenderness away. That contradiction isn’t a character flaw. It’s just two conflicting jobs landing on the same kid at the same time, and most teenagers manage it by doing one job loudly (independence) and the other job silently (grief), which is exactly what can look, to an anxious parent, like not caring at all.

Why Does “Protecting” Children From the Decline Often Hurt Them More?

Nearly every parent I’ve sat with in this situation started in the same place: an instinct to shield the kids. It comes from love. It also, more often than not, backfires.

Children are exquisitely sensitive to the emotional weather in a house, and they usually sense that something is wrong well before anyone names it out loud. When what a child perceives and what a child is told don’t match, that gap doesn’t stay empty. Kids fill it, and what they imagine to explain the silence is very often more frightening than the truth would have been.

Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and author of Trauma and Recovery, has spent decades documenting a finding that matters enormously here: the impact of a difficult event is shaped less by the event itself and more by whether the person experiencing it feels connected to others while it’s happening, or isolated with it. A child excluded from the family narrative around a grandparent’s illness doesn’t stop having feelings about it. He just has them alone.

What this looks like on an actual Tuesday: a child who has been shut out of the family conversation might start avoiding visits altogether, or might develop stomachaches on the mornings the family drives to the memory care facility, or might simply stop asking questions, which parents sometimes mistake for the child being fine. Silence in a nine-year-old is rarely fine. It’s usually the sound of a kid who has learned that this particular door doesn’t open.

I think often of a version of this pattern I’ve seen play out over months rather than one afternoon. A parent decides, with entirely good intentions, that the kindest thing is to keep visits short, keep explanations vague, and keep the whole subject as far from the children’s daily life as logistics allow. For a while, it looks like it’s working. The kids don’t ask much. Nobody cries at dinner. Then, eighteen months in, a school counselor calls about a ten-year-old who has started refusing to go to sleepovers, terrified that something catastrophic will happen at home while he’s away and nobody will tell him the truth about it either. The decline itself didn’t create that fear. The silence around it did.

Letting children witness decline with honest, age-calibrated information does something different. It tells a child’s nervous system that hard truths can be spoken inside this family, which is one of the most protective beliefs a child can carry into adulthood. This doesn’t mean handing a nine-year-old the full weight of adult grief. It means trusting that the truth, sized correctly, is safer for a child to hold than a silence he has to fill in himself.

What Should You Actually Say, and When?

Knowing what to say and when can feel like its own kind of overwhelming, so here’s how I break it down with the families I work with.

For ages five to eight: use simple, concrete language. “Grandma’s brain is having trouble remembering things right now.” Reassure them directly that they are still loved and still her grandchild, no matter what she forgets. Skip clinical detail and skip frightening hypotheticals. Let the child lead on how deep to go, and don’t force a conversation about mortality before the child asks for one. Drawing and simple storybooks often carry what words can’t yet.

For ages nine to twelve: this is the age for more complete, honest explanation, including some sense of how the illness tends to progress. Answer direct questions directly. Marcus’s question, asked mid-fraction-worksheet, deserved and got a real answer, not a deflection. Invite the child to keep telling stories about the grandparent as she was. Balance honesty about loss with concrete evidence of ongoing family closeness, a memory box, a shared photo album, something with your hands in it.

For teenagers: where they want it, invite them in as genuine participants in caregiving conversations, not as spectators. Respect the pockets of privacy they need. Validate that grief can show up as anger, numbness, distraction, or all three in the same week, and resist the urge to correct the form their grief takes. Journaling, art, or a few sessions with a therapist who works with adolescents can give a teenager somewhere to put what they aren’t ready to say at the dinner table.

Both/And: Your Children Are Learning Something Hard AND They Are Building a Capacity Most Adults Don’t Have

Watching a grandparent decline is genuinely painful for a child. It is also, simultaneously and without contradiction, building something in them that most adults spend years in therapy trying to learn: the capacity to hold love and loss in the same hand without needing to resolve the tension between them.

Marcus, back at the kitchen island, went from asking his enormous question to sketching a small spaceship in the margin of his worksheet within about ninety seconds. Tameka watched him do it and felt her stomach drop, not because something was wrong, but because she recognized what she was seeing. He wasn’t avoiding the question. He was doing something more sophisticated: holding it, then setting it down to do fractions, then presumably picking it back up later on his own terms.

I’ve come to think of this as a child’s early rehearsal for something psychologists sometimes call dual-process grieving, moving fluidly between confronting a loss and taking a break from it, rather than getting stuck fixed in either state. Children who are allowed to move this way, question, spaceship, fraction, question again next week, tend to build a durable relationship with hard feelings rather than a phobic one.

This capacity doesn’t develop in isolation. It grows inside attentive, attuned parenting and a family culture where hard conversations aren’t rare emergencies but a normal, if uncomfortable, part of family life.

The Systemic Lens: Why Are We So Unprepared to Talk to Kids About Decline?

Here’s the structural piece that rarely gets named in articles like this one. American culture, broadly, treats aging, cognitive decline, and death as subjects to be managed quietly, professionally, and out of view of children. School curricula teach almost nothing about grief or mortality. Pediatric well-visits rarely ask about a family’s caregiving load. There is no cultural script handed to parents the way there’s a script for talking about strangers or online safety.

The result is that parents like Tameka are left improvising, alone, in real time, at a kitchen sink, with no rehearsal and no template, on a topic most adults were never taught to discuss even about themselves. This isn’t a personal failing. It’s a gap in how the culture prepares families for one of the most universal experiences there is.

Compare this to how thoroughly a lot of families prepare children for other major transitions. There are books, classes, and entire cottage industries built around talking to kids about a new sibling, a divorce, a house move, a first day of kindergarten. Aging and cognitive decline, despite being one of the most statistically certain events in a family’s future, gets almost none of that infrastructure. Most of the parents I work with in this exact situation tell me the same thing: they didn’t feel unprepared because they weren’t paying attention. They felt unprepared because nobody, at any point in their own upbringing, modeled what preparation for this would even look like.

That gap lands hardest on the parents already stretched thinnest, often the same driven women managing a demanding job, a marriage, their own children, and a declining parent or in-law simultaneously, with no template and often no permission to say out loud how heavy the load has become. Naming the systemic absence of preparation doesn’t erase the load. It does, at least, mean a parent doesn’t also have to carry the belief that she should have already known how to do this.

There’s a second, quieter piece of this systemic gap worth naming directly: workplaces and school calendars are built as though caregiving for aging parents and raising children are two separate life stages that happen at two separate times. For a huge number of families, they don’t. They happen in the same year, sometimes the same week, and the culture’s total silence about that overlap leaves parents believing the exhaustion is a personal shortfall rather than what it actually is, an entirely predictable consequence of an unsupported structural collision.

What Do the Children Who Witnessed Well Have in Common?

Over fifteen years, I’ve noticed a pattern in the children who come through a grandparent’s decline with something closer to resilience than dread. It almost always traces back to parents who leaned in rather than away.

These parents shared age-calibrated truth rather than curated versions of it. They invited kids into small, real pieces of caregiving or memory-making, a phone call, a drawing taped to a hospital wall, a memory box filled with photographs and ticket stubs. They protected children from adult-sized anxiety without pretending the anxiety didn’t exist. And critically, they didn’t perform an unbroken front of calm. They let their children see them cry sometimes, and then keep functioning afterward, which teaches a child something no amount of forced cheerfulness ever could: that big feelings are survivable.

Tameka, three weeks after that afternoon at the sink, told me she’d finally answered Marcus directly. “Grandma’s brain is having a hard time right now, and that’s not going to change back to how it was. But you are always going to be her grandson, even on the days she can’t remember your name.” He’d nodded, gone quiet for a moment, and then asked if he could bring her one of his spaceship drawings on their next visit. Devon, when she tried something similar with him a few nights later on the back step, said almost nothing, took his earbuds out for exactly as long as it took her to finish talking, and put them back in. She told me she used to read that as him not caring. She’s since come to read it as him listening in the only way he currently has access to.

Both of those responses, Marcus’s spaceship and Devon’s silence, are evidence of witnessing, not evidence of failure to witness. Children process this differently by age and by temperament, and a parent’s job isn’t to get a uniform reaction. It’s to keep the door open long enough that whatever reaction a child has, has somewhere honest to go.

Readers who recognize themselves in this piece may also find Annie’s guide to betrayal trauma and relational shock, her overview of relational trauma patterns, or her writing on nervous system regulation useful as companion reading. For direct support, individual therapy with Annie and executive coaching for driven women both address the caregiving-and-capacity strain this piece describes, and Fixing the Foundations^™ works with the older family-of-origin material that a grandparent’s decline often stirs back up.

You don’t have to get every conversation right. You just have to keep the door open.

Warmly, Annie.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399-408. doi:10.1002/jts.20444. PMID: 19795402.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Boss, Pauline. Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Harvard University Press, 1999.
• Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books, 1992.
• Worden, J. William. Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy: A Handbook for the Mental Health Practitioner. Springer, 1991.
• Grollman, Earl A. Living When a Loved One Has Died. Beacon Press, 1977.

About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author

Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719), EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist, and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven women, including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs, in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

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