When Grandparents Read Aloud: The Intergenerational Reading Relationship in Indian Families

The Original Read-Aloud Relationship

Before there were school reading programmes, before there were children's publishers, before there were literacy curricula, there were grandparents telling stories. In India's oral tradition — across every region, every language, every community — the grandmother's story was the original education. It was how children learned about their family's past, their community's values, their culture's understanding of justice and beauty and the sacred.

The research on grandparent involvement in children's literacy is considerably smaller than the research on parent involvement, but what exists is consistently positive. Studies by Strom and Strom (1995) and subsequently by Proehl and colleagues found that grandparents who are actively involved in grandchildren's reading activities contribute meaningfully to literacy outcomes, and that the specific qualities of the grandparent relationship — less performance anxiety than the parent-child relationship, more time and patience, deep cultural knowledge and personal history — create conditions for read-aloud that complement rather than duplicate what parents provide.

For Indian families specifically, the grandparent read-aloud relationship has dimensions that the international research literature does not fully address: the transmission of regional languages, the sharing of oral tradition stories that exist nowhere in print, the communication of family and community history, and the specific emotional register of intergenerational love that makes the grandmother's story different from anyone else's.

What Grandparents Offer That Others Cannot

The grandmother's story — or the grandfather's story — has qualities that no school programme can replicate, no matter how well designed.

Personal history: grandparents hold living memory of a world that no longer exists in the same form. A grandmother who tells her grandchild what it was like to grow up without electricity, to learn to cook over a wood fire, to walk miles to school — is transmitting historical knowledge in its most vivid and personally resonant form. No textbook passage about rural India in the 1960s conveys what a grandmother's first-person account conveys.

Family narrative: every family has a story — of migration, of hardship overcome, of unlikely success, of loss and recovery. Grandparents are the primary custodians of family narrative, and sharing it with grandchildren gives those children something that shapes their sense of who they are and where they come from in ways that are deeply supportive of identity and resilience.

Regional language and oral literature: in families where grandparents speak a regional language that parents and children have moved away from, the grandparent's stories may be the child's primary remaining connection to that language. Hearing grandparents tell stories in Marathi, in Tamil, in Odia, in Bodo — even if the child does not speak the language fluently — maintains a connection to the language and the literary tradition it carries.

Unconditional audience: grandparents, in most cases, make deeply engaged and uncritical audiences for their grandchildren's own stories. A child who tells their grandmother about their day, their worries, their imaginings, and who is received with complete attention and genuine delight, is developing narrative skill — the ability to construct and tell a story — in the most supportive possible context.

How Schools and Families Can Activate This Relationship

The grandparent read-aloud relationship often happens naturally in joint family settings where grandparents are present. But in nuclear family contexts, in geographically dispersed families, and in families where grandparents feel they do not have 'educational' stories to tell, the relationship may need deliberate activation.

For schools: grandparent storytelling sessions — inviting grandparents into school to share a story from their community, region, or family oral tradition — are among the highest-value activities a primary or middle school reading programme can organise. They signal to children that stories do not only come from books; they signal to grandparents that their knowledge is valued; and they demonstrate to the school community that literacy is not only a school subject but a living cultural practice.

For families: the most important practical shift is from general visits to specifically story-centred visits. This is not about scripting grandparents but about creating the invitation and the time for storytelling to happen. Families who find that grandparents are hesitant — who say 'I don't have interesting stories' — can prompt with specific questions: 'What did you eat when you were a child?' 'What games did you play?' 'What do you remember about your school?' These specific, concrete prompts unlock stories that generalisations do not.

For grandparents who are geographically distant: regular video calls specifically structured around storytelling — not as a general catch-up but as a dedicated story time — preserve the relationship across distance. A weekly fifteen-minute video call in which a grandparent reads a book or tells a story becomes one of the most cherished regular rituals in the grandchild's week.

Spin A Yarn India's work with intergenerational storytelling specifically addresses the grandparent-grandchild story relationship. Visit https://www.anhayafoundation.com/spin-a-yarn to explore how our programmes support this relationship in schools and communities. For The Read Aloud Project's work supporting family reading culture in Indian schools, visit https://www.anhayafoundation.com/the-read-aloud-project.

Sources

Strom, R. D., & Strom, P. S. (1995). Intergenerational learning: Grandparents in the schools. Educational Gerontology, 21(4), 321–335.

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press.

Note: The research base on grandparent involvement in children's literacy is considerably smaller than the research on parental involvement. Claims about the specific benefits of the grandparent read-aloud relationship in Indian contexts are based on applying the general intergenerational literacy literature to the Indian cultural context. India-specific experimental research on grandparent literacy involvement is limited to the author's knowledge.