Call Your Grandparents This Holiday Season—For Their Health

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Hhave you spoken with your grandparents recently? If not and those family ancestors are still around, you might want to consider getting them a ring. Not everyone has a close grandparent – ​​or any grandparent – ​​but when these connections exist, they can provide special sustenance for elders.

This is one of the conclusions of a recent study published in the journal Human development research. Mary Cox, a psychology and brain science researcher at the University of Washington, wondered how the remote nature of today’s families, combined with greater access to video and telephone technology, would influence the way grandparents talk to their grandchildren. She noted that very little research has actually measured the content of these conversations, how they are influenced by race and gender, or what impact they have on grandparents’ well-being. So she and her colleagues set out to find answers.

“Despite the importance of grandfathering, this is one of the first studies to really ask what’s going on in these conversations,” said Patrick Hill, co-author of the study and professor of psychology and professor of brain sciences at the University of Washington.

Read more: “How big is your family? »

Cox, Hill and their colleagues built on work from the St. Louis Personality and Aging Network study, launched in 2007 with a group of about 1,600 middle-aged participants. It now follows 500 of them as they enter their grandparent years. Most grandparents in the study, all of whom live in St. Louis, had about 3 grandchildren, and only 7% lived with a grandchild. About three-quarters of the study participants were white and one-quarter were black.

The study found that grandparents who talk to their grandchildren, especially about everyday topics like school, friendships and leisure activities, tend to feel more socially useful, with a greater sense of duty and more optimistic about society. The most surprising finding is that grandparents talk to their grandchildren more often today than a generation ago. Grandparents surveyed said they recalled talking less to their own grandparents about almost every topic imaginable, including education, friends, current events, social change, identity, and romantic partners.

This can perhaps be explained by the number of technologies available today for conversing remotely (phone calls, text messages, video chats) and the fact that more topics can be considered socially acceptable for conversation. But it is possible that memory biases also play a role, the team points out: grandparents can forget certain conversations from their early childhood.

Researchers have found that how conversations unfold between generations is partly determined by race and gender. Grandmothers reported talking to their grandchildren more than grandfathers, and black grandparents talked to their grandchildren more about identity and race than white grandparents.

The study only looked at grandparents, so the next step will be to talk to the younger generation. “We only have one side of the story right now,” Hill said. “What we don’t know is what the grandchildren think about these relationships.”

Regardless, the findings suggest that in our fragmented times, meaning still travels across generations, conversation after conversation.

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Main image: Simple line / Shutterstock

• Kristen French

  Published on December 26, 2025

  Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing articles and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, And New York Review. She holds a master’s degree in science journalism from Columbia University.