THERE they are, picking up from school, setting out some lunch, pushing lots of swings.

Filling in the gaps.

They offer practical support, willing to help out, ready to step in when the children they love need care.

No wonder they’re called grand parents.

Throughout Albury-Wodonga, the North East and, let’s face it, just about everywhere, grandparents play an important role in raising their children’s children.

Whether it be school holiday cover, regular weekdays or the occasional respite, the older generation makes life easier for the one below, especially in the juggle of work and family commitments.

Seniors Week may be drawing to a close, but the social and economic benefits of grandparenting, far from ending, continue to grow.

“Some grannies have ... interesting hair, crinkly eyes, friendly smiles or big soft laps.”

Grandparent tales dominate Storytime at Lavington Library this week and on Wednesday leader April Wood has an attentive, well, more or less, audience of about 15 youngsters and their carers.

“Some grannies have had six husbands,” she reads.

“Poor granny,” comes an adult comment from the floor, prompting chuckles.

Among the listeners is Lavington’s Judy Arendarcikas, a grandmother of four and there with her granddaughter Grace, 3.

“I gave up Wednesdays at work to have nanna day when her brother was little,” she says.

“He’s at school now, so I’ve been doing it about four years.

“That was my choice to do that, to spend time with them.”

Poppy Musgrave, who lives at Holbrook, looks after Logan, 5, every Wednesday while her granddaughter’s parents work.

“I love it really, it’s good to get out,” she says.

“Going down to the Botanic Gardens and Oddies Creek, we love that; sometimes as you get older you get in a bit of a rut and then it helps you have a new lease of life.”

In the second Storytime book, men are the focus.

“We can do just anything, my grandpa and me,” Mrs Wood reads.

Colin McPhee, grandfather of seven children aged eight and under, meets Zed, 4, and Tex, 2, and their mother Eve Desharnais at the library and brings with him a third grandson, Billy, 4.

“This little man I’ve just taken swimming, he’s still a bit damp,” Mr McPhee smiles.

He and wife Noella care regularly for their various grandchildren and he thinks it’s fantastic.

“I do a couple of pick-ups from school a couple of days a week,” he says.

“It’s good to be able to help.

“I retired 12 months ago and I actually have time to be home with them.”

Time is often what grandparents give that busy working parents cannot and the value of that can’t be measured.

“I suppose we don’t have the pressures that the young ones have,” Mrs Musgrave says.

“We’re able to be a little bit more, probably, freer.”

Grandparents Victoria, a non-profit advocacy group that began in 2001, says many grandparents feel they have a special bond with their youngsters.

Director and founder Anne McLeish says the unconditional love offered to grandchildren, the time for child-centred play and the confidences children share contribute to these links.

“It’s a different relationship when we take the busy-ness out of it,” she says.

These seniors, who grew up and raised children before the advent of modern devices, can also help encourage children to be more active.

“They certainly think children should be outside more,” Mrs McLeish says.

“Technology is what grandparents mention most.”

Sometimes grandparents do far more than just assist; they actually need to step in and become their grandchild’s primary carer.

Upper Murray Family Care’s Julie Wilkins, team leader operations, out of home care, says issues such as a parent’s drug and alcohol problems, mental or physical illness, imprisonment or neglect can lead to formal kinship arrangements.

Mrs Wilkins says her organisation supports 36 families in this region and there are about 3500 kinship carers around Victoria, with up to 70 per cent of these being grandparents.

“The biggest motivation for them is the love for the child; they’ve already got that wonderful connection, they don’t want to see these children go to foster care,” she says.

It’s estimated there may be at least as many informal arrangements as well.

“Kinship is the one that’s growing, even more so than foster care,” Mrs Wilkins says.

“So it’s the biggest provider of care outside the parental home in Victoria.”

The team leader says unexpectedly caring for a grandchild, sometimes with little or no notice, can present huge challenges.

“Often these grandparents are 50s, 60s, 70s and they’ve got their lives planned out for retirement, looking at a smaller home, doing some travelling or just managing on a pension,” she says.

“All of a sudden they’re asked to care for these grandchildren, which often they’ll do without a second thought.

“But it does place a huge amount of, I suppose, stress, financial obligations, there’s a whole range of things that they need to consider.”

One of the less obvious factors is moving from being a traditional grandparent into a parenting role.

“When you think about how children and parenting has changed, for a 60-year-old when they parented, it looks very different today,” Mrs Wilkins says.

“You’re very entrenched with the way you parent your own children and it’s learning to be more flexible and learning the new styles of parenting.”

Upper Murray Family Care provides kinship support groups for all kinship carers in Wodonga, Wangaratta and Benalla, with the next Wodonga meeting to be held on April 1.

Child and family information, referral and support is available on ChildFirst, phone 1800 705 211.

Even if care is only occasional, there can be varying opinions between grandparents and parents about how occasional, or not, this should be.

Mrs McLeish says some families do expect more support from grandparents, “but that’s not to say they’re not grateful”.

Of more concern are the expectations politicians seem to have that grandparents will always pick up the childcare slack.

Instead, decision-makers should be working to improve the affordability and flexibility of formal childcare.

“We want families to have more options,” she says.

“When we founded Grandparents Victoria, we saw a need to try and activate grandparents to take a role in the public discourse around families, because families are finding it difficult.”

Back at Lavington Library, Miss Desharnais knows she and her partner are lucky to have Mr and Mrs McPhee’s support.

“They don’t know how to say ‘no’ sometimes,” she says.

“We try really hard to let them know that they can say ‘no’.”

Certainly no feelings of obligation or burden emerge among the Storytime grandparents, who all speak of the joy of sharing in their youngsters’ lives.

A father in a different era, Mr McPhee nods his head as the needs of career and providing for a family are mentioned.

“I was working,” he says.

“My wife stayed at home until the youngest one went to school and I worked two jobs for a long time.

“I basically only ever really had Sunday off for years and years.

“So I see more of these than I did of my own.”

Mrs Musgrave and Mrs Arendarcikas describe being a grandmother as a privilege.

“And I think it’s a privilege being allowed to mind them because I run into people and they never see their grandchildren,” Mrs Arendarcikas adds.

She suggests many seniors have a lot to give to children, who deserve the chance to experience this.

“They should be able to adopt a nanna,” she says.

“There’s probably nannas out there who would love it and there’s grandkids who are missing out.”