Grandparents are living longer which means that more of them have mental health issues, such as dementia. Can you recommend books that might help children cope with confused elderly relatives?
Grandparents frequently feature in children’s books – and always have done. In Joyce Lankester Brisley’s Milly Molly Mandy, published in 1928, for example, the extended family including grandparents, are part of Milly Molly Mandy’s everyday life. But grandparents looked and seemed much older and the idea that they might be suffering from acute memory loss or dementia was not widely discussed.
It is something that Lauren Child touches on in her first picture book Clarice Bean, That’s Me which was published in 1999. Clarice Bean sometimes feels overwhelmed by her family; she longs for a space of her own and feels that she is the only member of the family who doesn’t have one.
In the first spread that introduces the family, Grandad is in his chair “asleep as usual”. When Clarice Bean describes him later, she adds that when he is asleep he often has the cat on his head.
These characteristics are initially only mildly eccentric but later, it becomes clear that Grandad is pretty confused. He pours soup on his cornflakes and says he thinks the milk is off. Clarice Bean points out that what he thought was milk was, in fact, pea soup! Nothing is said here about Grandad’s behaviour but it does give a good picture of a modern grandfather who lives with the family and suffers from confusion. Lauren Child herself has talked about the fact that there is always a touch of ambiguity about Grandad – it’s possible that he’s putting it on a wee bit to make Clarice laugh… but actually, that sort of makes it more interesting in a way.
In Billy Elliot, written by Melvin Burgess and Lee Hall after the success of the film and published in 2001, Billy’s home life is full of complications. His mother died when he was young; his father and brother are both miners out on strike during the nationwide miners’ strike of the 1980s; his grandmother needs watching. She has a tendency to wander out of the house. Billy usually knows where to find her but her confusion is evident and he needs to be responsible. That’s not something that all children experience, but some do and, without spelling anything out, it gives a very good picture of how families manage grandparents with dementia.
Anne Fine is always a flawless commentator on families and their inherent chaos. Ralph, in The More the Merrier, is about to experience his family at its maximum in terms of both numbers and chaos. It is Christmas and the relatives are descending… There are his cousins – the twins Sylvester and Sylvia who are unbearable and the ghastly Titania in her frilly frocks, Uncle Tristram, Great Granny who says the most inappropriate things and Great Aunt Ada who, like Billy Elliot’s aunt has a tendency to wander.
The most powerful contribution to stories of this kind – and the only one that makes it the centre of the story is Jenny Downham’s Unbecoming. Very much a reflection of contemporary life, it is a deeply moving story of three generations of women that centres round a grandmother with dementia. In Unbecoming the situation is particularly difficult because 17-year-old Katie cannot remember ever meeting her grandmother Mary before she unexpectedly arrives to live with the family.
Everything Katie has ever heard about her grandmother from her mother Caroline has been negative, as they are based on Caroline’s memories of her own childhood in which she felt she had been abandoned. Mary needs a lot of looking after; she wanders if unsupervised, she gets upset, becomes desperate for things quite unexpectedly and she sees people and places that aren’t quite there. But Katie and Mary forge a strong bond which turns out to be important in unlocking the secrets concerning both of them. Jenny Downham never glamorises or trivialises dementia but through her understanding of Mary she opens readers’ eyes to something of what the confusion of old age may feel like in a way that makes is both heartbreaking but also bearable.
Can you recommend books on this theme? Tell us on Twitter@GdnChildrensBks and by emailing childrens.books@theguardian.com and we’ll add your ideas!
Ruth, via email
I really liked Celia and Nonna by Victoria Lane, it’s a great story about grandparents’ role with little ones, and helps tackle ageing issues such as dementia.
Amy Griffiths, via email
Can I recommend Jessica Shepherd’s Grandma published by Child’s Play.
@GdnChildrensBks The book that introduced me to Alzheimer's was Memory, by Margaret Mahy. My Grandad has it now; Mahy captures it perfectly.
— Miss Adkins (@RPS_Library) October 19, 2015
Mark, via email
I can recommend ‘Do You Remember’ published by Wombat Books – beautiful illustrations for difficult situations.
