Wild expectations of grandparents

[Morningtee]

Just reading an article from the I paper called ‘the do’s and don’ts of grand parenting as children go back to school’ I’m sure the article was written with well meaning intent but as a Gen X I’m just increasingly shocked at some of today’s young parents expectations of grandparent role. Even a paid childminder wouldn’t put up with some of the advice in the article. I had a great relationship with my grandparents but they didn’t play the role that seems to be expected of modern grandparents which seems more about serving the needs of entitled millennial/Gen Z parents than the grandchildren. Indeed a number are quite happy to destroy the entire relationship between grandchild and grandparent if their wild expectations are not met

It is behind paywall
can you paste the article so we actually know what your talking about @Morningtee ?

we didn’t even have a car growing up in the early 1980s

How old are you? I was born in 80 so 46 and can’t get my head around being a grandparent at this age!

1970s

You surely realise that the gulf between the working class and middle class Boomers was actually quite wide back in many parts of the UK in the 60’s and 70’s, don’t you?

I’m a Gen X and grew up in the 1960’s/70’s and we still had an outside toilet as the only toilet, a coal house inbetween the toilet and the house and no indoor central heating until my older adult brother helped my dad fit the central heating themselves in the early 80’s.

Baths once a week in a tin bath front of the fire was quite normal. My best friend at primary had an indoor bathroom upstairs with a toilet which was considered very posh!

Not much point posting a thread about an article but not linking or pasting the contents of the article.

I think there’s more expectation of grandparents to help now that the cost of childcare is so high, and the cost of living means more and more two parent households are both parents working full time or close to it.

Most people I know have had help with childcare from their parents (apart from ones that lived far away), and as far as I know their parents were happy to help.

They also help their parents out.

I don’t think it’s unusual or a problem for a family to help each other out.

There are a lot of these types of thread at the moment. Someone likes to rile people up (grandparents and parents both)

clearly the parents of millennials/GenZ did a terrible job, raising such selfish and entitled adults. Hopefully as they are so involved with the grandchildren they will do a better job second time round, clearly the millennials/GenZ selfish and entitled parents could never be up to the job in the first place

You seem to find this unbelievable! I'm in my 70s and didn't have a washing machine until my first child was 3. I washed her nappies by hand and made sure she was potty trained well before she was 2.
Edited to add we started married life in a flat with an outside toilet and no running hot water.

This is the part I never understand that you see on here all the time: my parents don’t want to see my child often enough, so to spite them I shall make it NEVER 🙄🙄

I think there is some truth in that, to our boomer parents we were the most special things in the world but they were careful about making us think we were the most special things in the world. However I think my generation of parents have just wanted to make their children feel like the most special thing in the world, our lives revolve around them and we’re always there for them etc but yes maybe are then surprised they’ve actually internalised that. Despite that it’s ironic this generation of young adults seem less happy overall

You must live in a bubble! I became a Grandma at 43, it's not impossible

I saw my only set of grandparents in the school holidays because mum went back to work when I was about 11 so I was shipped off to stay with them for the majority of school holidays and I hated it. They lived about 3 hours away by bus.

Mum did a full time job in an office as she had done a series of night classes in shorthand and typing. After work, she came home to make dinner from scratch peeling spuds etc, clean the house, do the laundry and dad went to the pub 6/7 nights a week after his dinner. He was a lazy arse but it wasn’t much different to other local families back then. We did eventually have a car but only dad could drive. He wouldn’t let mum learn so she only learnt to drive in her 60’s after he’d died.

I have a teenager at home and adult DC and grandchildren who we see about once a year as we live in a different country to them.

I was 3, 1976, when we got a second hand twin tub, no proper washing machine until 1981 and I remember buying it with dad. Remember most mums were at home but money was so tight, no meals out, not even coffee, take squash and a picnic, perhaps a flask on day trips, jumble sales, hand me downs… different times

My maternal grandmother was very ill when I was a baby and never fully recovered her strength, nobody would expect a man to care for kids then so my memories are of us helping them rather than any help for us, paternal grandparents were aloof. I haven’t lived near my parents in my adult life so help very limited, my kids paternal grandparents weren’t that interested despite proximity. We’ve already got parameters in place that we won’t be offering childcare on a regular basis, though none of the kids are local anyway

Absolutely, I’m just so glad my boomer parents weren’t like that else we would of missed out on so much, they didn’t expect anything of my GP and never in their wildest dreams would they of thought of cutting off contact (obviously there probably would of been a few extreme exceptions) but it just wasn’t something people thought of doing in those days. I can think of loads of things our GP did/didn’t do that modern parents would think of justification for going NC these days and doing so would of done us no favours as the grandchildren

I think too many parents tiptoe round the dc to everyone's detriment.
My dc when a young adult was complaining about my parenting one day, I told her that I did the best I could with the experience and finances available to me at the time.
She's a dm herself now and finally gets it.

Most parents of young children are not cutting off grandparents. You are placing too much weight on threads you see on here where people will be either (1) at the end of their tether (2) at the more deranged end of the spectrum. Most people are behaving normally and not abusing your generation’s generosity.

Sounds very similar to my parents lives, they had a washing machine by the late 1970s which my mum felt very lucky to have and obviously took a huge load off her what with having several young children to care for, they had a landline for the first time in the early 1980s, we were by no means poor compared to other families. Definitely knew families who were much worse off than us. I really think they need to do a series where they get modern parents to live the lives of a 1970s young working class parents as many seems to have absolutely no idea. My youngest is 3 and I’ve seen massive improvements in the life of being a parent even since the 1990s

Somethings were harder, some things were easier. With a massive amount of variation between families depending on circumstances. But who cares and what difference does it make.

It seems like you just want to complain about the younger generation based on your stereotyped perception of them.

It isn't just that. It's changing social expectations. In addition to the scarcity of childcare and the sheer expense of it.

When I was a child, it was quite normal to be a latchkey kid from 9/10. These days it's unacceptable to allow a child alone at home at that age. Rightly so. I did some really stupid stuff and I'm lucky I didn't cause myself major harm!

We demand that parents both work full-time but there isn't full-time childcare available without eye watering costs involved.

My boomer parents have lived in a council house all their life and were never entitled to any benefit other than the family allowance, which wasn't even paid for the oldest child back then. Dad was an unskilled labourer for over 50 years and is still paying weekly rent at 90. Mum was a housewife. I only knew of a handful of schoolfriends whose parents bought their homes. Younger people have no idea how difficult life was for the majority of working class people.

True most people are no going NC but it’s definitely the extreme end of prevailing trend of young people expecting far more from their parents than previous generations did, I can’t imagine the same article being written in the 1980s, it isn’t just this article but what I see and hear all the time

But that is a societal change. In other cultures, heavy, daily grandparent involvement is normal. Maybe we are moving towards that.

My Grandparents played no real role in our lives. We used to visit them at their house once a week. That was it.

When one of my siblings had children, his in-laws did everything for them: school-runs, childcare in school holidays, weekend sleepovers, cleaning, laundry and gardening. Our Parents didn't do anything for him or the grandchildren; my sibling really struggled with the difference between the sets of Parents.

I think there is a 'happy medium' between the two. I wouldn't expect or want anyone to do housework for me - just my personal view. Not that my Parents ever would have done anyway!

I wonder whether it’s the films that depict 1980s life from a very wealthy middle class American perspective (think home alone etc) that make today’s generation think that’s what life was like for families then but in reality it’s like comparing a current celeb fly on the wall series in 30 years with typical family life today

is that completely true though? Or do you just have more access to the opinions now. Your childhood, your previous parenting, you didn’t see what parents were saying or thinking at the time beyond your own circle - there wasn’t social media, mumsnet, a particular trend for articles about it as we are seeing currently.
sure you may have raised a particularly entitled generation, but without the articles/posts you’re reading would you see it with your own children and experience? I don’t know maybe you would. Maybe back in the day mothers who didn’t get the help from their parents that they saw others getting did complain, without it being publicly available in the internet. Maybe the grandmothers who were helping back then were exhausted and secretly hated how much they were expected to do, and had they been able to post on the internet about it they would have done - it’s only now that a generation of grandmothers has the opportunity to get their opinion heard
im just really dubious about all these threads suddenly coming from a particular POV.
and no, I don’t have grandparent help for my children and nor did I expect it, so this is not defensiveness