alt Hacker NewsReally 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.
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It used to be that YOU help elderly parents. And they they are the patriarch ruling familly and his wife at that time. When the grandma did that help with children, it was at her terms - she was the decision maker to large extend.
That arrangement is not working from both sides. Younger generation wants autonomy and expects parents to not try to run things, not to demand more contact then they want etc.
Which makes sense. But you cant have it both ways - both autonomy/independence and service.
Younger generstion has their period of low responsibilities - before they create familly. It is shifted to later years tgen it used to ... but it is weird to then get jealous over their parents having some free time after work.
I think one thing that has changed-both my parents and my wife’s parents are divorced, which makes things socioemotionally more complicated in terms of grandparental involvement in our children’s lives-it still happens, but I think it involves difficulties which didn’t exist for my own parents and grandparents when I was young, and were it not for those difficulties, it likely would happen more
Both grandparents divorced means you go from two family units involved to four-which in itself adds logistical complexity-and new partners doubles the opportunities for interpersonal conflicts