The New Age of Grandparenting

The gray-haired set isn’t what it used to be.

Compared with previous generations, today’s elders are more open-minded and more involved with their grandkids. But familiar stresses and power struggles remain. Read on for the revealing results from Good Housekeeping’s exclusive survey.

Last December, in one of her first moments with her newborn grandson, Patty cradled him close, inhaling his sweet smell and marveling at his tiny perfection. The baby, born a few days earlier during a blizzard, was now safely home in suburban New York. Gently, Patty laid her grandson on his stomach in his crib.

“Mom, what are you doing?” her daughter cried. “Don’t put him down like that — he’ll smother!”

Welcome to today’s world of grandparenting, a complex dance in which Baby Boomers and Gen Xers are navigating new roles and just trying not to step on too many toes. As grandparents, this generation of family elders faces a dramatically different world than the one in which they raised their own kids. As average life spans increase and grandparents report feeling younger and more vibrant than their own grandparents, their role in their grandkids’ lives will continue to evolve.

Recently the Good Housekeeping Institute surveyed more than 1,500 people about grandparenthood today, asking them to weigh in on everything from child care to social media. The results revealed that 68% of today’s grandparents considered themselves “cooler” than their own grandparents.

Certainly Boomer and Gen X grandparents embrace multiculturalism — an AARP national survey on grandparenting found that a full third had grandchildren of a different race or ethnicity. The vast majority of the AARP respondents said they would fully accept a LGBTQ+ grandchild, and they were also far more open to gender fluidity than previous generations.

Patty, the grandmother in this story’s opening anecdote, considers herself to be squarely within that open-minded demographic. (She asked us not to use her last name, for fear of offending her daughter.) After all, she spent “a summer of love” living on a commune in the 1970s. When Patty raised her children in the 1980s, the prevailing medical wisdom was that babies should sleep on their stomachs to prevent them from choking on their spit-up. Parents today have revised guidelines — babies who sleep on their stomachs are at higher risk for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

It’s not just medical understanding that’s evolved between generations. Changing demographics and parenting philosophies have transformed how grandparents relate to and stay connected with their grandchildren. Yet the basic fundamentals transcend time: Most grandparents see themselves as sources of knowledge and guidance and give their grandkids physical, emotional and financial support. But how involved grandparents are today, and the ways they get and stay involved, is a matter of constant rebalancing.

DIFFERENCES IN APPROACH

One way grandparents can help is to go easy on new mothers. Their hormones are still elevated, and new parents haven’t yet gotten their sea legs. Moms in particular often need reassurance that they are doing a good job and may interpret well-intentioned advice as criticism, say Nancy Sanchez and Marilyn Swarts, who teach a grandparenting class as part of the perinatal education program at Stanford Children’s Health in California. A mom committed to breastfeeding, for instance, might be crushed if her mother says, “Give that baby a bottle. She’s hungry.” Yet grandparents feel marginalized and unneeded if they’re told that their guidance is out-of-date or unwelcome. Emotions run high until the new roles are established.

“You remember when you taught your child to ride a bicycle and you just kind of hung on to the back until they got their balance?” asks Sanchez, a perinatal health educator and counselor. “That’s all you’re doing as a grandparent. You’re support ing them, helping them get their balance. But it’s their ride. This is their baby.” What’s more, Sanchez and Swarts emphasize that grandparents must respect their kids’ parenting decisions. And many grandparents report doing just that, following parents’ guidelines to the letter.

Michael McDaniel and Bob Benson have three grandchildren. The grandfathers — called “Daddy Mac” and “Big Papa” by the little ones — are scrupulously deferential. When they wanted to play a game with their granddaughter, for example, they checked with the parents about rules on winning and losing behavior.

“We ask questions because they raise their kids in a different way than we did,” Bob says. “I just want to make sure we’re careful to navigate how they want their kids to be raised so we fit into the plan.”

But grandparents’ not respecting rules was one of the biggest complaints from parents in the GH Institute survey. “Some of my children’s grandparents try to undermine my husband’s and my decisions,” one respondent said. “It crosses our boundaries of respect.”

One grandmother treats her noncompliance with a chuckle. At her house, she proudly displays a sign that says What Happens at Grandma’s Stays at Grandma’s. “If we want to stay up until midnight and eat candy in bed when she sleeps over, that’s part of the fun of being a grandma,” she says. (She too wished to remain anonymous.)

For Nancy Lee, the differences are cultural. Nancy, a social worker who lives in Long Island, NY, describes herself as a “FaceTime babysitter” for her grandchildren in Atlanta and Chicago. She reads and does crafts with her younger grandchildren and sends workbooks to the older ones that they complete together over video chats. But Nancy is Chinese, and her two sons both married women who are Korean. She refers to them as her “daughters-in-love,” and she loves how they bring new food and traditions to the family.

Not all gradparents are as open to new customs. Swarts says that in her grandparenting class, concerns often come up about which cultural traditions will be passed on. She advises parents to decide together which traditions they will maintain and then present a united front to grandparents.

GRANDPARENTING FOR HEALTH
On top of the other joys of being a grandparent, it’s good for your physical, cognitive and emotional health. AARP calls grandkids “the elixir of life,” and an AARP study determined that the greater the emotional support grandparents and grandchildren receive from one another, the better their psychological and physiological health.

“There’s a kind of magic about sharing moments with these tiny human beings who are part of me and yet their own stunning individuals,” says Jamila Rufaro, a professor who lives in California’s Bay Area. Jamila has a photo of her daughter-in-law sitting in front of her home computer, remotely teaching a high school lesson on Of Mice and Men, with 20-month-old Jorell on her lap. Meanwhile, Jamila was teaching remotely at Stanford University’s Business School. Eventually she juggled her own schedule to babysit Jorell and his 5-year-old sister, Ellora, two days a week.

Like Jamila, while they sometimes struggle to keep up, many grandmas and grandpas today love their roles. “There are a lot of grandparents now being faced with stark realities that are different from what they had thought the world would look like,” says Alison Bryant, who heads the research division at AARP. “But in the end, love triumphs.”