Shari Sabelli's childhood was not predictable. Her parents divorced. Her mother was in and out of the hospital. The adults at the center of her world were, by her own account, not close to her. But...
Shari Sabelli's childhood was not predictable. Her parents divorced. Her mother was in and out of the hospital. The adults at the center of her world were, by her own account, not close to her. But every week there was one fixed point, and fifty years later, talking to a team of researchers, she could still describe it in sensory detail: "I mean, you go to mass. And, you know, my grandfather had a carnation in his lapel. We sat in the same seats. It was really predictable. And most of what was going on in my family life just wasn't really that predictable."
The grandfather was Leo, a devout Catholic who lived in the same neighborhood. He did not run programs for his granddaughter or sit her down for instruction. He wore a flower, kept the same pew, and showed up. "He didn't just go to church or talk about it; he actually lived the tenets of the faith," Shari said. "He was wonderful. He was like a rock for me. You know, when everything was going bad, he was the rock." Years after Leo died, Shari, who had drifted from the church, came back to it, and got married and photographed her own children on the steps of the building where she had sat beside him.
That story sits near the center of Families and Faith: How Religion Is Passed Down Across Generations (Oxford University Press, 2013), the capstone of the longest-running study of family transmission ever conducted. Vern Bengtson, a sociologist at the University of Southern California, began surveying three-generation families in 1970 and kept the study alive for thirty-five years, through eight waves of surveys, more than 3,500 people, four generations, 358 families. With his colleagues Norella Putney and Susan Harris, he added 157 in-depth interviews across 25 of those families. And buried in that mountain of data was a finding the authors admit they did not expect and their whole field had ignored: the grandparents.
Research on grandparents barely existed before the 1980s, and even now, the authors note, grandparent influence is usually dismissed as indirect: whatever grandmothers do is assumed to wash through the parents. The LSOG data said otherwise. About four in ten of the grandparents and grandchildren in the sample shared the same religious tradition, which the authors call "a higher level of transmission than we expected." More striking still: across thirty-five years of cultural upheaval, that figure did not decline. The wave that was supposed to have swept away the elders' influence never arrived.
Two honesty notes before we build on this, because the study earns careful handling. These are American families: the sample was drawn in 1969 from members of one Southern California health plan, mostly white, with Hispanic families underrepresented and essentially no Muslim, Hindu, or African-tradition households among the interviewed families. The numbers are self-reported survey data, strong by the standards of social science because the same families answered for thirty-five years, but they describe correlation, not proven causation. The book studied American Catholics, Mormons, Jews, Protestants, and nonbelievers. What it found, though, is a piece of machinery, and machinery travels.
The authors sorted grandparental influence into four patterns, and the sorting is worth keeping whole, because most families will recognize themselves in one of these lines:
Only the first two reliably worked. And the first is the one this essay is about, because it is the pattern the modern world is quietly mass-producing.
Leo Sabelli was a skipped-generation grandfather twice over. His granddaughter Shari found in him the stability her divorcing parents could not provide. Her cousin Nina, raised in the same extended family, described a father who "worked constantly" and was "so withholding" that religion in her childhood home amounted to "none... nothing." It was Leo who took the cousins to church, Leo who sent Nina what she called inspiration "to uphold me and keep me spiritually fed," and Leo who, decades later, when adult Nina had lost her job and was frightened, took her to church again. "That was the most comforting thing," she remembered, "to be there with him in church, knowing that God was in control."
Notice what Leo's method contained: proximity, repetition, and a lived example. Notice what it did not contain: a single recorded lecture. The book's larger finding, that emotional warmth predicts transmission better than piety or preaching, holds for grandparents exactly as it holds for parents. Leo transmitted because he was close, constant, and consistent, the same seats every week, the carnation in the lapel. The flower matters more than it seems. It told a child whose world was chaotic that some things are done carefully, on purpose, every time. Order can be inherited, and it is inherited from whoever demonstrates it.
The failed patterns teach the same lesson from the other side. In the study's Goldman family, devout Jewish grandparents tried to teach their grandchildren Hebrew and Torah during visits, against the wishes of the children's fervently Evangelical mother. Every lesson was contradicted the moment the children got home, and the campaign failed completely; all three children followed their mother. Subversion, the authors conclude, was not just ineffective but counterproductive. And in the Jackson family, four generations of religious indifference ran alongside four generations of emotional distance, family reunions dominated by a grandmother whose commentary one granddaughter summed up as "ridicule." Nothing passed down that line except the coldness itself. Grandparents transmit through relationship or not at all. Working against the parents burns the relationship. Criticizing from the head of the table burns it faster.
By the book's final chapter, the authors have promoted this from a curiosity to one of their five closing counsels for families: "Don't forget the grandparents. For many children, grandparents are the de facto moral and religious models and teachers in lieu of parents who are too exhausted or too busy."
Here the book stops, and we go on, saying plainly that what follows is our extension, not the study's claim. The authors never wrote about African families, and their "skipped generation" was mostly a story of divorce and preoccupation in American suburbs. But look at what the pattern maps onto in the world our readers live in.
Across African families at home and in the diaspora, the skipped generation is not an edge case; it is often the design. The parents are in London, Dubai, Houston, Nairobi, working the jobs that fund the school fees, and the children are in the village or the home city with a grandmother. Or the parents are present but consumed, two jobs and a side hustle, and it is the grandfather who walks the children to church, the grandmother whose proverbs they will quote at forty. Entire generations of our readers were themselves raised this way and carry a private uncertainty about it: the sense that grandparent care is a compromise, a second-best arrangement to be apologized for.
The only thirty-five-year dataset in existence suggests the opposite. Grandparent transmission held at four in ten across the whole study, and it was precisely in the households where parents were absent, strained, or overwhelmed that grandparents became the load-bearing generation, the rock in Shari Sabelli's exact sense. The study gives elders something better than comfort. It gives them a job description backed by evidence. If your grandchildren are in your care, or even just in your neighborhood, you are not keeping seats warm until the real influence returns from abroad. By the numbers, you may be the real influence.
And the mechanics of the job are the mechanics Leo modeled, all of them available to any elder on any income. Regular, predictable presence beats occasional intensity: the same service, the same seat, the same walk, week after week. A lived example beats instruction: children audit whether the elder practices what the family preaches, and they file the result. Warmth carries everything: the four-in-ten figure belongs to the grandparents the grandchildren loved, not the ones they feared. And alignment with the parents, wherever possible, multiplies the effect, while open warfare with the parents cancels it. The Goldman grandparents lost not because they cared too much but because every visit became a battlefield, and children flee battlefields.
For the parents abroad, the same finding has a converse worth saying directly: the values your children absorb this decade are being transmitted by whoever is warmly present this decade. Choose that person deliberately, honor them out loud, and stay aligned with them, because undermining the grandmother from six time zones away puts you in the subversion pattern, and the subversion pattern loses.
There is one more thing the Sabelli story teaches, and it is about record-keeping. Almost everything we know about Leo survives because a research project happened to interview his granddaughters. The carnation, the pew, the funeral on the church steps: one study's tape recorder stood between those details and oblivion. Most families have a Leo. Almost no family has the tape.
This is work the Family Tree module in LegacyPot was built to hold. Do not let the elders in your tree exist as names and dates. Attach the substance while it can still be gathered: what your grandfather did every week without fail, the habit each grandchild remembers, the one sentence the family still repeats in his voice. If the elder is living, this is an interview to conduct this year, not eventually; if the elder is gone, it is a collection to take up among the cousins before the memories scatter with them. A tree that records only births and deaths preserves the chain's shape. A tree that records the carnations preserves its meaning, and hands the next skipped generation, and there will be one, its instructions.
If you are an elder with grandchildren in reach: choose your fixed point this week. One recurring, unbreakable appointment with the young ones, the same day, the same ritual, whatever your faith and family make natural, and keep it with the discipline Leo kept his pew. You are not helping out. On the best evidence anyone has, you are conducting the family's main transmission line.
If you are the middle generation, near or far: name the elder who is carrying your children, thank them in front of the children, align with them on what is being taught, and then open your Family Tree and start recording who this person is while you can still ask them questions.
Shari Sabelli's parents gave her a childhood she describes mostly by its instability. She grew up to be a woman of durable faith anyway, and she could tell you the exact shape of the reason: an old man, a flower, the same seats every week. Somewhere in your family, someone is being that rock right now, probably without knowing it counts. It counts more than almost anything else in the ledger.