Your First Grandchild: Useful, touching and hilarious guide for first-time grandparents. Paul Greenwood

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      From the couples I have talked to, I am left in no doubt at all that tactful help and support during the immediate postnatal period is one of the most important services grandparents can render. It is also a wonderful opportunity to get to know the new member of the family. There’s nothing like walking up and down rocking a baby and having the satisfaction of seeing it fall gently to sleep to bring out all one’s most tender feelings.

       Marge: ‘When my daughter brought the baby home, I spent the first night with her. There was an utterly terrifying midwife who insisted on covering everything with newspaper. We were both scared stiff of her and really glad when she left for good.’

       Sophie: ‘After the birth I came into my own. I stayed with the parents for 10 days and did everything. When I left my daughter told me she couldn’t have done without me. They bought me perfume and I felt really wanted and valued. My own mother-in-law had been a nightmare. She came to stay after my first baby was born and just sat around chainsmoking and saying, “What are we having for lunch?”’

       Kay: ‘I stayed with my daughter for the immediate postnatal period. It all came back to me no trouble. I had been like a single parent to my two because my husband buzzed off to Turkey and left me when they were really young. I found I was not as anxious as I had been with mine. I’m so much wiser now than I was then – I was terrible with my own children.’

      Martin: ‘The other grandparents were the ones who lived near so they got to do all the helping when our granddaughter was born. We visited the hospital just after the birth and thought Tracy was the most gorgeous baby, all six pounds of her, that we had ever seen. But then we had to go back to Virginia. We felt jealous of the other pair, I can tell you. We needn’t have, but we did. We would love to have done the babysitting. The only one good thing about the distance between us was that our visits were always treated as a great event and Tracy never took us for granted.’

       Paul Writes

      I was 16 when my brother was born and very often I was the only person who could get him to sleep. I would walk up and down with him snuggled into my shoulder and find myself repeating the chant my father had soothed us with when we were young. He was Scottish and he used to murmur. ‘Shoo-shuggy, shoo-shuggy. shoo-shuggy … ’ When Peggy brought Sky home from the hospital, my putting-babies-to-sleep skills were again in demand. I was actually feeling quite stressed at the time because I had an important first night approaching. As I rocked this new baby in my arms and repeated my father’s mantra of ‘Shoo-shuggy’, I felt myself relax. When my grandson’s eyelashes began to droop and his breathing steadied into a quiet rhythm. I found myself as calm as he was. It is very satisfying to help a baby go to sleep.