The Book · Coming 2027

The role you will cherish
for the rest of your life.

Grandparent.

Grandparenting done deliberately is good for three people at once — and the research can tell you exactly how.

Get The Grandparent Plan — free See what's inside
The Grandparent Advantage, front cover
11,000+
American adults over fifty followed for up to eighteen years. Those giving regular grandchild care held sharper thinking than those giving none — with the biggest gain among the most isolated.
474
Late adolescents studied. The quality of the grandparent relationship predicted their wellbeing. How often they saw each other predicted nothing.
49%
Of the time children spend in their grandparents' care is spent on a screen, in a survey of 350 U.S. grandparents. That is the number this book exists to change.
What the book does

The role you were handed
without instructions.

Three generations. One decision.

Step back too far and you become a name on a birthday card. Step in too far and you are competing with your own child over how to raise theirs. There is a third way, and it is measurable.

For you

What this role gives back — thinking, purpose, movement, company — and the dose curve nobody warns you about. Some care protects you. Too much, unsupported, does the opposite.

For your child

How to help without taking over. The four kinds of help, which ones cause fights, and how to disagree once and then genuinely drop it.

For your grandchildren

What they actually need from the one adult who isn't grading them — and the reading, writing, and speaking habits that survive a house full of screens.

"Decisions belong to the parents. Delivery belongs to you."
The companion volume

The Grandparent Playbook

The first book changes your mind. The second one changes your Tuesday afternoon — scripts, games, and lists you use in the room, with the child in front of you.

  • Boundaries — ten scripts for the conversations grandparents avoid, including how to say no without losing access.
  • Play — forty games sorted by what you have: ten minutes, a car, a kitchen, a phone call.
  • Words — the one reading technique with trial evidence behind it, why handwriting still matters, and screens without a fight.
  • The handoff — supporting your child's household without taking it over.
  • Rewards under $10 — forty of them, and the research finding that changes how you use them.
Free, one page

The Grandparent Plan

Six decisions — two for you, two for your child, two for your grandchildren — plus the one conversation that resolves most grandparenting conflict. Fill it in on screen, put a review date ninety days out.

Send me the plan

Requests go straight to M. Dean Cafarelli. No list rental, no daily email, unsubscribe any time.

The author

M. Dean Cafarelli

Creator of the Be Your Best™ Personal Alignment System. He has spent his career advising founder-led organizations on leadership, alignment, and honest counsel — the same three things this book asks of a family. He wrote it after watching capable people arrive at grandparenthood with no plan at all.

Also honest about this

Where grandparents make it worse

A 2024 meta-analysis of 38 studies and 344,860 children found worse average mental health among children primarily raised by grandparents — almost certainly because of the crisis that put them there, not the grandparents. The book includes that finding rather than hiding it, because a plan built on flattering evidence is not a plan.