School-Home Relationships and Grandparent Connections: Building Continuity and Shared Purpose in Early Childhood Education

In urban India, the grandparent is rarely absent from the picture. This study asks what happens when a Montessori school's philosophy travels home, not just to parents, but to grandparents, and whether families are actively managing that transmission. Drawing on home observation data from 99 families across two branches of Blue Blocks Montessori School in Hyderabad, the research maps five dimensions of intergenerational engagement: how consistently parents speak about school in positive terms, whether they probe their children about prosocial behaviour at school, the regularity and quality of grandparent contact, whether parents have explicitly negotiated shared rules and screen-time expectations with grandparents, and whether gratitude toward elders is modelled in daily family life. The answers paint a picture of families that are not passively receiving a school philosophy but actively working to embed it across generations. Over 97% of children have regular, meaningful grandparent involvement; nearly 95% of families have had explicit conversations with grandparents about consistent behavioural expectations and gadget boundaries. These are not incidental findings; they reflect deliberate, culturally grounded parenting in a community where multigenerational households are the norm. The paper argues that grandparents are an undertheorised but operationally significant node in the Bronfenbrenner mesosystem, and that early childhood research that excludes them is missing a co-educator hiding in plain sight.