I’ve seen several videos on TikTok making the same claim. That current grandparents really don’t want to do much with their grandkids, compared to the role our grandparents generation played in our lives when we were little.
Nursery rhymes? Hymns?
At the very least, “Happy Birthday”?
~Max
Not necessarily. You need to incorporate a statistic about the age at which parents are having children, which I understand to be rising with the introduction of widely available birth control, education, and a trend in marrying later. Not fast enough to outspeed the rising life expectancy alone, but possibly enough to counteract any expectation of a drastic change in number of living grandparents.
~Max
Nope. Not even “Happy Birthday.”
Did your grandparents ever drive you somewhere? If so, did they listen to talk radio or music stations?
…or was there no distinction at the time?
~Max
Yes, they would drive us to places when we stayed with them (Generally, two weeks every summer for the paternal set, less often for the maternal) But the radio was never on. Never.
But I do remember them taking us to see Oklahoma at the Jones Beach amphitheater. That’s music. But I wouldn’t say that rises to the lever of “personally each you a lot of songs or about music.”
I never heard two of my grandparents listen to music of any kind - not even Happy Birthday. When we were at their apartment, the kids were watching TV and adults were playing cards . They never took us anywhere. I assume they listened to music when we weren’t there because my father was familiar with too many German drinking songs for him not to have heard them growing up.
This may well be, in some countries, an era of more grandparents per grandkid by headcount.
But there are a lot more obstacles to grandparents’ participation in their grandkids’ lives than e.g. 50 years ago. Which effect will predominate where & when to what results? Darn good questions.
I never had any offspring, so my own thoughts are immature / ill-formed.
My new wife has two adult kids, one of whom fosters a bunch of young kids and has adopted one who’s now age 2. Her daughter lives about 20 miles down the freeway from us; figure 30 minute drive door to door.
Wife is happy to be involved with the brood on holidays, And in fact we’re bringing over dinner for the whole crew on Sat. But the idea that she’d take anything but an emergency role in grandkid management is anathema to her. I genuinely believe her reaction would be identical were they bio-kids, not foster / adopted kids.
Her attitude certainly matches many of the older retired Floridians I lived with in my condo. In some sense, Florida is a self-selecting group of retirees willing to move away from their extended family. So I hesitate to apply too much universality to this attitude. But IME it is commonplace around here.
The closest of my own extended bio-family lives 1,300 highway miles from me. Sort of by accident of career trajectory, but also by difference of temperament; we each choose to live where we are comfortable, and proximity to remaining family is about priority #173 on the list of decision metrics. The rest of my kin are more like 3,000 highway miles away.
Which certainly limits my role in the lives of my downline nieces, nephews, etc. It’s a shame, but not a shame worth upending my life to try to correct.
I have to assume my attitude is not universal. I also have to assume it’s not unique.
On the other hand, I personally know of more than a few cases where there was such an emergency and the grandparents ended up with permanent custody.
~Max
Me too. It’s far from rare. I mentioned that my step-daughter fosters kids. Most such kids end up in the legal custody of some extended family member, not back with their actual bio-parents. The foster parenting program is merely a stopgap until the legal system can find a bio-relative to take in the poor kids. And grandparents are by far the lion’s share of which extended bio-family members end up with the kids. At least in recent years.
But you and I are talking very different sorts of “emergencies” here.
I meant that babysitting was not going to be my wife’s routine hobby. Nor would she be rescuing adult daughter from the consequences of her decisions if she’s being an idiot.
OTOH, we’d surely take her in if her house burned down. And raise her adopted- (or so-far theoretical) bio-kids if she was incapacitated or killed. We’re there for real emergencies. We’re not there for the bumps and scrapes and ouchies of daily life. “Raise 'em right, turn 'em loose, and watch now and again from a respectful distance” seems to be my wife’s MO.
All this is her choice. I’m an interested observer who doesn’t have enough standing to have an independent interest of my own.
Right, I was thinking more like back in the day, if there were less grandparents around, maybe there would be more cases where the kids move far away or become wards of the state. Or simply street urchins if you go far enough back. My father, for example, probably didn’t know any kids growing up whose grandparents had custody.
~Max
My understanding, and sadly I can’t find a cite yet, is that the rise in life expectancy in the US is a statistical mirage partly because children aren’t dying as often. If you make it to (say) 15, your ultimate longevity is higher. If you don’t, that drags down the longevity statistic for everyone else. I can’t say I have my head wrapped around this, but I’ve read it many places.
That makes sense. Child mortalities would be statistical outliers when calculating mean life expectancy. For example,
(Alice dies at 60 + Bob dies at 80) / 2 = mean life expectancy 70
(Alice dies at 60 + Bob dies at 80 + Charlie dies at 1) / 3 = mean life expectancy 47, but mean life expectancy for people who make it to 2 years old (past the outliers) is 70
~Max
I think this is indicative of the fact that people are more mobile than they used to be. It used to be that you stayed where your were born, more or less. Whereas now it’s likely for family to be spread out all over the country. Mine is. Kids move away, and parents move away, even after kids move back. It’s just a different time now.
People having kids at an older age is also a factor. I had my son at age 37. I have unusually young parents but I don’t talk to either of them, my husband’s mother is pretty much elderly and lives in another state. The one younger, athletic grandparent has made other choices than to be involved in his grandchild’s life, but this was never going to be a family with a large support network.
I just look at my own childhood, how deeply involved my grandmothers were in my life, how much a part of my childhood it was to be at their house for days or weeks at a time, and how critical it was for my development given the instability, abuse and neglect I was exposed to growing up. My grandparents have stepped in for their grandkids at every level, from helping to raise me to taking parental guardianship of my cousin when his father died. They have raised so many kids and grandkids it’s crazy. And my grandmother (who I should add is my mother’s age, my grandpa’s second wife) was the one to step up when we were drowning during the pandemic. A few times she drove two hours to help so we could get some work done, and she has periodically given us birthday/holiday gifts of her time, like watching our son so we can take an extended day out. But she needs to take care of my grandfather now, and she lives two hours away. I expect that we will be taking care of her someday.
As for me, I’ll be close to 60 when my son graduates high school, and I may be overreacting at the moment, but given the uncertainty right now surrounding his possible developmental issues, I’m not even entirely sure he’ll ever be able to support himself as an adult. So we could be looking at supporting my kid, and my grandmother, at the same time. What I am doing is trying to take care of myself as well as possible, get regular exercise etc. to #1 live that long #2 be up to the task when I get there.
No matter which way you slice it, why or why not, family ties are breaking down. Estrangement appears to be at an all-time high, people are no longer geographically close, attitudes about familial responsibilities have changed, and the upshot is that everyone’s lonely and isolated.
Everyone is more isolated. Whether that’s lonely is up to them.
I’m very glad you had the support of your grandparents; it certainly sounds like you needed it, given the horrors of your parents.
For comparison …
I’m now 64, so a bunch older than you. Said another way, my grandparent era was ~20 years before yours, before the atomization of society had developed as much as it was in your kid era, much less as much as it is today.
Of my 4 grandparents
- One GP died decades before I was born.
- The corresponding GM I met once when she was ~70 and I was ~5. We spent a couple days staying near her house which was halfway across the country from where I lived. She died before we ever went back. I probably spent a lifetime grand total of 2 hours in her presence.
- The other GP & GM lived 400 miles from us while I was a kid. Our family spent a few days each Thanksgiving with them for about 7 years, say my age 6 to 13. They came to visit us once in that interval, also for a few days. The next times I saw them was when he had a stroke and was mentally crippled, then a couple years later saw GM only at his funeral. She died a few years later. So ~40 total lifetime days in their presence.
That’s it. I remember the second pair fondly, but they were little more than hazy strangers then, and only vague impressions of hazy strangers now. I have no meaningful recollection of the first GM at all. I know we once visited some old lady & that’s it.
I don’t think my experience was that atypical for a kid in the 1960s. Much less a kid in the 2020s.
I can’t read the title of this thread without hearing it in a stentorian newreel announcer’s voice: “The Age of Grandparents! When grandparents ruled the Earth!”
Looking at the ages of most heads of state and prominent legislators in countries that have legislations / parliaments, I think that’s always been true.
I knew my four grandparents quite well,
- My paternal grandparents passed in 2003 and 2013 at 85 and 94. My maternal grandfather passed two months ago at 87, and my maternal grandmother is still healthy at 80 something.
- All four lived about 1,000 miles away (they in St. Louis, us in central Florida).
- All four lived within 30 minutes of each other and the rest of the extended family: 5 cousins on Mom’s side, 9 on Dad’s.
- All four would visit on an annual basis during early childhood - late '90s through mid '00s. Paternal grandparents would visit Florida around lunar new year or late summer (a vacation tradition dating back to Dad’s childhood in the '60s), maternal grandparents around the spring I think. We had season passes to nearby Disney World which were under $200 if I remember correctly.
- We would visit all of the grandparents most years for the winter holidays, our big weeklong vacation, until paternal grandmother died in 2013. Most of the week was spent at the maternal grandparents’ house, celebrating Hannukah or just shabbat. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were spent at the paternal grandparents’ house, or after grandpa passed away, apartment.
- There were a couple extended family vacations on Mom’s side, at least one of which involved the entire parent generation going to Crossroads in Chicago (Eric Clapton festival) while the grandparents babysat all the grandkids.
My father didn’t know his grandparents. They lived in China and spoke old Shanghainese. I think he met his paternal grandfather maybe twice… something about not being allowed to play with him because of tuberculosis. I’ll have to ask him.
My mother knew her grandparents very well, as all four lived within a short distance and lived very long lives. Her paternal grandfather lived to 100, while I met her maternal grandmother who visited us in Florida a couple times and died in her 90s, when I was four.
I once asked my maternal grandmother about her grandparents. She didn’t have much to say. She had stayed at her grandparents house a couple of times as a kid but never knew them too well. They would have spoken yiddish.
~Max
I heard an Italian-American comedienne on the radio today, saying she did not realize people could have grandparents who lived in different states until she was in her twenties.
In other news, Italian grandparents cannot legally force their grandchildren to visit.
Life expectancy at 60 was about 19 years in the 1970s, and is 23-24 years now. So theres been a few years added to senior years, but not a ton.