alt Hacker News> That’s normal and natural and the parents move onto a new phase too.
Is it really ? I would say the "natural" way of things is older generation gets supported by children and they help take care of grandchildren while their children are working. The whole late retirement/both parents working situation we have these days is reliably leading to a population collapse.
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Really couldn’t have put it better. When I was a child my grandmother retired and relocated 800 miles to help with my mother with childcare. Why? Because it’s why you do. It’s what all of her family did as far back as anyone could care to remember.
This world where your boomer parents retire to a beach house to drink margaritas, smoke designer weed, and play pickleball and ignore their offspring is the real aberration here.
> the "natural" way of things is older generation gets supported by children and they help take care of grandchildre
It's an ideal. Structuring society to require it falls down often because:
- people have kids later, making them too old to help
- disease and addiction can make grandparents unfit
- young families often must move to where work is, even if far away
- deeply in debted grandparents may be unable to afford to help
- grandparent's own care needs compete with those of their grandchildren, i.e. sandwich situations
- cultural expectations unfairly burden some over others, usually women