The Age of Intensive Grandparenting
Elena and her husband had plans for their retirement. They wanted to move to Wyoming; to meet new people, volunteer, hike the snowy, perfect Tetons. And they did move there—for about eight months. Then they got a call from their daughter, who was due to have a baby within weeks. She and her husband were on five or so different waitlists for day cares, and now she could see that they would still be waiting by the time she had to go back to work, six weeks after giving birth. She needed help. Her parents dropped everything, packed up a U-Haul, and moved to the Pacific Northwest. They were going back to work, too: as full-time grandparents.
Grandparents today have a certain reputation, Elena (who asked to withhold her last name to protect her family’s privacy) told me: They’re “all rich, retired, living it up in the Villages in Florida, playing 10 rounds of golf a day, having cocktails at 4:30, and laughing while their Millennial children are suffering.” TikTokers keep skewering a generation of supposedly self-involved, jet-setting older folks, or earnestly grieving that they don’t have a “village” to help them raise their kids. Commentators have jumped in with attacks and, in turn, with defenses (“Cut the Boomer Grandparents a Little Slack”). On Reddit, people are wondering, “What the f*** is wrong with grandparents nowadays?” Last year, when J. D. Vance was running for vice president and was asked how he would address the problem of staggering child-care costs, he first suggested that grandparents or other relatives “help out a little bit more.”
You could be forgiven, then, for thinking grandparents are shirking their duty. But the truth is quite the opposite: America is in an age of peak grandparenting—particularly grandmothering. A 2022 survey from Deseret News and Brigham Young University found that nearly 60 percent of grandmothers had provided child care for a grandkid, and more than 40 percent saw a grandchild in person at least weekly. A 2023 Harris poll found that more than 40 percent of working parents relied on their kids’ grandma for child care; nearly 70 percent of those parents said they might have lost their job without that grandmother’s help.
Such statistics might not sound jaw-dropping if you assume that in decades past most grandparents were living with their grandkids and cheerily providing care all the time. Yet the reality has always been more complicated. Carole Haber, a Tulane University history professor and the author of Beyond Sixty-Five: The Dilemma of Old Age in America’s Past, told me that American grandparents in earlier generations were typically seen as authority figures, as burdens, or as companions to their grandkids—but not necessarily as caregivers.
Today, though, economic, cultural, and workplace shifts have left parents floundering. A parent’s struggle has become a grandparent’s struggle. Elena, at 74, is now caring for her daughter’s second child while the first is in day care; that means she has lived through four years of sick nights and tantrums, teething, and food on the floor, all after having raised her own three kids. Her husband, who’s 77, helps out—but she told me he’s “not the main baby wrangler.” When I first reached out to her, she got my message while sitting on a tiny stool, begging her grandchild to try using the potty before nap time.
Americans are in a new phase of grandparenthood, in which many seniors, like Elena, aren’t just disciplinarians or playmates but co-parents. The real change isn’t that older adults are absent; it’s that their kids need them more than ever.
Some grandparents grasp at every possible opportunity to watch their grandkids; some don’t care to do so at all. But many, Madonna Harrington Meyer, a Syracuse University sociologist who wrote the 2014 book Grandmothers at Work, told me, fall into a third group—those who want to be involved and are trying desperately to set limits on that involvement. Here are a few strategies grandparents have told her they’ve tried: Some say they’ll help out only on certain days of the week. (“I’m a Wednesday grandma,” she’s heard.) Some pledge that they’ll commit only to fun time together, no math tutoring or dentist trips. Some semi-regularly ignore their adult children’s calls. When she interviewed grandmothers for her research, Harrington Meyer told me, a participant’s phone would occasionally ring; “they would look and they would say, Oh, I can’t answer that. She’ll ask me to babysit tonight.”
Rationing care might sound stingy—but the happily omnipresent grandparent has never really been the norm in the U.S., Haber, the Tulane professor, told me. In the nation’s early history, people had a lot more kids, on average, than they do today; many would still be raising younger children by the time they became grandparents, and older kids usually moved out to build their own families. Elders (especially grandfathers, who may have owned the land their adult children moved to) tended to act as authority figures, disciplining grandkids and imparting wisdom—not necessarily running around changing diapers. When three generations did live together, it was often because a widow had moved into a child’s home after her husband’s death. That wasn’t always a happy scenario. Those elderly women were generally dependent, sometimes relegated to a single room—and though they might have helped with child care, Haber told me, many didn’t want to. Historical evidence suggests that, then as now, older adults commonly wanted what sociologists call “intimacy at a distance”: to connect with family while maintaining autonomy.
In the 20th century, the Great Depression led to a greater number of three-generation homes by necessity. Family conflicts were common, Haber told me, and older adults were seen, more and more, as burdens. But then the advent of pensions and Social Security enabled more older people to live on their own. Multigenerational homes were on the decline. By the 1940s, the prototypical grandparent was shifting away from being the land-owning patriarch or the frail dependent; with congenial relations restored for many families, the new archetype was the loving granny or gramps who would swoop in to take the kids out for some fun. Merril Silverstein, a Syracuse University sociologist, told me he calls that the “Disney-fication of grandparents”—which you’ll understand if you ever go to Disneyland, he said, and pay attention to how many strollers are being pushed by senior citizens.
The new American grandparent is a family anchor: a comrade not only in the delightful parts of child care but also in the tedious, messy, and grueling ones. Several shifts have led to this reality. Life expectancy increased dramatically over the past century—so significantly that even though people now tend to have children later, the average older adult has more healthy years to help raise a grandkid. Meanwhile, over the past few decades, the numbers of single parents and of working mothers of young kids have increased in the U.S. Yet the cost of child-care services keeps climbing—and U.S. federal law doesn’t guarantee paid parental leave or paid sick leave. Parents are desperate. Once, at a conference, a French scholar asked Harrington Meyer a question: Why do American grandmothers do so much for their grandchildren? “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with our grandmothers,” she answered. “But I think there’s plenty wrong with our welfare state.”
Grandparenting may also be intensifying because, in many households, parenting is intensifying. In the past few decades, children—seen by their parents as ever more vulnerable, in need of protection and cultivation—have been granted less and less independence. In a qualitative 2021 study of British grandmothers, researchers found that many participants were taken aback by the expectation that children needed constant supervision, as well as by the increased focus on educational achievement—hallmarks of the kind of intensive parenting common in both the U.S. and the U.K. The older people being asked to help the kids with their homework and shuttle them to extracurriculars probably remember letting their own children roam the neighborhood while they worked or cleaned or had a martini.
A difference in parenting styles can create tension within families—and may add to some Millennial parents’ perception that older generations are underperforming. In that 2021 study, some grandparents tried to “resist” what they saw as excessive surveillance or competitive striving. A 2019 AARP survey found that only 25 percent of grandparents believed that modern parenting was better than it had been in their generation. Elena had to get used to plenty of new parenting practices. Take the ever-present baby monitors: If my grandson is four feet away in the next room, I’ll hear him if he cries, she thought at first. Why do we have cameras on him at all times? But she’s decided to honor her daughter’s preferences; it’s her daughter’s turn, she told me, to call the shots. And she can see, when she talks with friends who chafe at the newer methods, that their distaste for intensive (or just different) parenting comes from a place of insecurity. They’re worried that they’ll be perceived as incompetent, or that they’ll actually do something wrong.
Everyone just wants what’s best for the children. Still, changing norms, even when they’re positive, have made child-rearing more arduous, expensive, and time-consuming—and raised expectations for how much grandparents ought to contribute. From 1991 to 2022, Silverstein has found, grandparents gave their grandkids increasing amounts of both practical and emotional support. Of the older adults who had told Harrington Meyer they’d tried to set boundaries, many consistently failed to do so. A “Wednesday grandma,” asked to take the kids on a Saturday, tends to become a Saturday grandma.
And the rest of life, for many seniors, isn’t slowing down. Older adults are retiring later than they did in the 1990s. Roughly 40 percent of American grandparents are in the workforce, many because they can’t afford not to be. While reporting her book on working grandmothers, Harrington Meyer found that 83 percent of those surveyed said they provided more care to their grandkids than their own young families had gotten from their parents; the same amount said they provided more than they ever expected to.
Some need to delay retirement because they’re providing financial support for their grandkids. Harrington Meyer has talked with grandparents who’ve used up their nest egg or taken on debt for that purpose. One grandma hadn’t been to the dentist in years, and when she finally scraped together enough money to go, she sent her grandson instead; another spent the money she needed for an oil change on diapers. Historically, many adult children have financially supported and cared for their parents—but now the assistance is much more likely to flow the other way.
Of course, grandparenting doesn’t look the same in every family. Multigenerational living is more common, for instance, among Black, Hispanic, and Asian families than white ones; Black and Hispanic families are more likely to live within an hour of their extended family, and Black grandmothers are especially likely to be a “custodial grandparent” providing primary care. And yet, researchers told me that highly involved grandparenting appears to be common across race and class groups. The most consistent divide, it seems, is gender: Grandmothers tend to be so much more involved in child care that a good chunk of the research doesn’t refer to grandfathers at all. “I’m under so much pressure to quit my job and take care of these grandchildren,” one woman told Harrington Meyer. “And if I were a man, nobody would even ask me to.”
Active grandparenting has some profound benefits, not just for children but for older adults too. Grandparenthood has been linked to decreased feelings of isolation and improved cognitive resilience. Empathy, perspective-taking, problem-solving, imaginative play—the opportunity to practice these things might help keep people sharp. And for many, grandparenthood simply makes life richer. Elena loves seeing her daughter every day and watching her grandbabies grow up. When she was raising her own children, they were in day care while Elena was busy with work, and time blurred by so quickly. Now she feels like she’s getting a second chance, one that’s unfolding almost in slow motion. Her whole life is playing with her grandson on the floor, watching him take steps for the first time or build a tower that he couldn’t have built two weeks before.
But people have limits, especially as they age. One 51-year-old woman I spoke with, Sarah Garner, told me that even as a relatively young grandmother, she finds child care more deeply exhausting now than when she was a new mother. Her daughter and son-in-law can’t afford day care, so she and her husband watch their grandson five days a week: potty training him, bathing him, taking him to swim classes. She’s finding carrying him harder and harder. When his parents pick him up at the end of the day, she’s so worn down that she can’t seem to concentrate on anything.
At a certain point, getting pushed to your limits just isn’t good for you. One 2022 study of Western European grandparents found that grandparenthood improved aspects of health for older adults who provided child care—but reduced well-being both for those who weren’t in frequent contact with their families and didn’t provide it at all, and for grandmothers who provided care daily.
Dedicating later life to grandparenting can entail other losses, too. Before Garner got pulled into full-time child care, she was excited for retirement: She’d get to focus on her new online-tutoring business, develop friendships with some nice women in her church, maybe even go back to school and finally get her bachelor’s. Now, in ways both rewarding and trying, she’s not living for herself. “I’m not the center of my life. And so I’m willing to make those sacrifices,” she told me, “even though I don’t always want to.”
But some joys, once forfeited, you might never get back. Retirement is split into two phases, someone once told Elena: First is your go-go phase, when you try to take advantage of everything your newfound freedom has to offer. Then, as you age, you enter your no-go phase. Elena and her husband have noticed that jet lag has gotten really tough; their dream of hiking the Tetons is probably over. They might be entering their no-go phase—their last one in life. Recently, their middle daughter, who lives in California, had her first child. “If I needed you,” she asked Elena, “you would come and you would move here, right?”
A blessing can also be a burden. One grandfather I talked with, Mike Little, helps his daughter—a single mother—raise her son. “He is one of my best friends,” Little told me. “But freedom, for my wife and I, is largely gone just the same.”
Supporting family can’t, and perhaps shouldn’t, be all fun; inevitably, it involves sacrifice. But romanticizing that labor—pretending that when you love someone, being there for them is never an imposition—doesn’t serve anyone either. American society has come a long way in recognizing that women have value beyond their ability to raise kids. For many people, though, that understanding seems to apply only to younger women. Painting older women as natural, endlessly enthusiastic caregivers provides an excuse to deny more support to struggling parents. It presumes that mothers can have careers only at the expense of their own mothers’ work and interests. And it sets up a false choice—between devoting yourself to care work and losing connection to family altogether, as if closeness is won only through labor.
Silverstein, of Syracuse University, started doing research in Sweden decades ago; he told me that when he first went, he expected to find that family would be somewhat less important to people there, given that the government significantly subsidizes child care. Instead, he found the opposite: Compared with what he was used to in the U.S., kin relationships seemed to be especially warm and sweet. “Once you take the burden of care away from the family,” he told me, “people can engage in a much more emotionally satisfying way.”
America, it seems, may be headed in the opposite direction: toward a future in which families are more, not less, defined by caregiving. People are living longer and having fewer kids on average, which means more “beanpole families”: tall and thin family lines, with very old and very young living members—but not many “horizontal” relationships among, say, siblings or cousins, the kind that can feel fun and not always so loaded with responsibility. Vertical bonds can be beautiful. But the stakes in those relationships can feel so high, and the chances for disappointment so abundant.
When care work falls on families—and no strong social safety net exists to help—grandparents aren’t the only ones to suffer. So, too, do the parents whose own parents are not alive, not equipped to help, or not interested. I don’t blame all the people posting about how their Boomer parents aren’t measuring up. Surely some of those grandparents really aren’t around; maybe some are involved, but not enough to keep their kid’s head above water. Either way, the younger adults feel let down by the very people they assumed would be there to lift them up.
I spoke with one dad, Tommy Ciaccio, who told me a horror story: While his wife was in the final stages of her pregnancy, she experienced chest pains, which can signal a pulmonary embolism. All of the urgent-care providers around them in Milwaukee, where they were living at the time, were closed, so they went to the ER. Their insurance company, he said, refused to cover it, arguing they should have gone to urgent care. Then, when his wife gave birth, she hemorrhaged and almost died. All of the required medical care was so expensive that they had to declare bankruptcy. His wife quickly ran out of paid time off while she was recovering; his pay as a restaurant server wasn’t enough for them to afford child care, so he stayed home. Through all of that, his parents (who are divorced) were within a few hours’ driving distance, but they visited only infrequently. Neither, he said, was “meaningfully present.”
More than anything, this was a tale of being failed by systems: by a seemingly infinite maze of insurance rules, by employers that don’t provide paid parental leave or a living wage, by a government that doesn’t mandate either one. But what hurt Ciaccio the most was his parents’ relative absence. He had sympathy for them—especially his mother, who had worked hard to have a career while raising him mostly on her own and who’d wanted to be seen as more than a caregiver. He also wished that she wanted to help him now. “When I looked at my son and I loved him in this way that sort of assailed me,” he said, “I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t being loved.”
I’d want my mom’s help too. But imagine if the situation wasn’t so dire in the first place—if medical care, parental leave, and child care were all more attainable. In that world, family members might get a little more breathing room: room to see one another not just as mother or child or grandparent, or as a person with needs or answers to that need, but as someone with funny quirks and surprising preferences and interests other than baby food and story time. Life is hard enough as it is. They’d still have plenty of chances to depend on one another.