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

of course she does, with same result, children are tiring and she wants to express that on social media. Look, this isn’t a problem to solve, it just is. People are annoying, and they were before social media too but we were often only exPosed to it in person.

I do think your situation sounds quite unusual OP and I wonder if that is impacting your view. Multiple children with large gaps, a big mortgage later in life and affordable on 1.5x FT income, and a young parent with very little support.

I imagine it’s difficult to relate to younger adults becoming parents for the first time now.

It doesn’t sound like your DC expect unreasonable support with your GC, and are happy to support you with your DC. GP help seems to be a particular topic that’s getting a lot of interest now, but the reality is that many families would struggle on less than 2 full time incomes - I know DD and her DP would when they have a child. And childcare is expensive if you need the full day covered, even with the funding, when everything else is so expensive. GP helping when they are happy and able to is a massive help, and most people who get this help are appreciative of it. There are of course extremes and CF, like there are with many things in life.

Being a parent in both generations I agree it’s not easy now either but people do expect a much higher standard of living, my dad would bike 10 miles to work but people wouldn’t generally accept doing that nowadays. My point was more that millennials seem to think it was easier back then, which it wasn’t. Also the fact that the wasn’t such a huge disparity between housing costs in different areas of the country so you could live in London 40 years ago in an average Uk salary but now you would be living in poverty in a bedsit (unless getting some kind of state subsidy)

I'm not sure it is unusual. When I was tiny we'd go to the launderette every week and everything else with through the twin tub and spinner or was hand washed. That was with washable nappies too.
TV arrived 1976 and washing machine 1978.

We were similar to other families locally.

My DH turned down his dream job because it would mean living in the SE which is just astronomical, so we’ve made compromises to live in an area of the country we can live on 1.6 salary, even though most of our family live in the SE

I mean...It's all relative.

The pandemic was bloody awful for me - I was widowed during it - but previous generations have suffered much worse. I thank God that I didn't go through what my parents' generation endured.

Sorry to hear of your loss 😔 I did know a couple of people who lost loved ones and we felt awful for them and our challenges absolutely nothing compared to what they and people like yourself went through

Our grandparents brought me and my sister up from the ages of 3 and 1 (our parents divorced, our father moved 100s of miles away and remarried several times, our mother has a personality disorder and dipped in and out of the home when she felt like it but basically didn't like being held responsible for anything).

I think if we hadn't had a stable home with our grandparents we would have grown up very dysfunctional. Even now as working functional adults in our 50s we both have some issues left over from our childhood. (Grandparents were complicit with our mother in preventing us from having contact with other family members like uncle and cousins until adulthood) I'm so glad our grandparents stepped up to provide us a home.

I'm a boomer, (boo, hiss), and my parents were 1910s, I don't recall ever not having some form of washing machine, I remember the one with a roller that twisted to over the sink and I enjoyed turning the handle, it then became an electric roller, then a twin tub with a spin dryer etc as the years passed. My late MIL, same time frame, never had a washing machine, it wasn't necessary because her mother never had one apparently, but there was an enormous mangle in an outhouse.

Thank you.

A bereavement like that is horrible no matter when it happens though the isolation exacerbated things. However, the point that I'm trying to make - clumsily, I think - is that the pandemic was a trying time for everyone but other generations have genuinely had it much worse: possibly I'm more aware of that because - being a typical Boomer, I had parents and grandparents who lived through the war and I'm particularly aware of the horrors that my dad's family endured.

I had an uncle who died in his 20s, when I was an infant, because he was in Eastern Europe during the war and he sustained a catastrophic back injury after an encounter with a soldier who was stealing from the family: he was a child when he was injured and it caused him breathing difficulties as he grew.

There are other stories which I won't share here.

I know that my grandmother had a mangle and my mum had a twin tub. When I took on a mortgage in '86 and interest rates went up I simply couldn't afford to buy a washing machine. ( I eventually took out a planned overdraft with my bank, but had to wait for at least a couple of years.)

Telling people to compare like that doesn’t help them with current struggles though. My friend had an awful childbirth experience recently. It would have been worse in the pandemic, and worse 100 years ago, or in a war zone. Does it help her if I tell her that, make her feel like she lacks resilience or whatever? No. These comparisons are not helpful. Saying “move to a cheaper area” or “get on your bike to get a job” are silly oversimplifications of complicated current issues. Saying that the pandemic was better than war is true, but doesn’t help if someone had a suicidal teen at home, or a violent partner, in the pandemic. Reading a clickbaity article and extrapolating to modern parents being entitled because it wouldn’t have been possible written 40 years ago is silly - news/media was completely different 40 years ago so different kinds of pieces were written

That a significant number of parents (definitely not all) are expecting too much of grandparenting role

Surely if your family was going to the launderette every week they could have afforded a washing machine, in the 1970s they could be rented, most kitchen equipment could be rented in the same was as a TV was rented.

Right. But you don’t actually have a comparison to 40 years ago. Because no one was paying attention to it.

I think most of it comes down to the cost of living.
No-one's mum worked when I was a child (a long time ago!) Nowadays, they pretty much have to. Although I do think sometimes people put themselves under pressure. I don't drive, don't go abroad, don't have tattoos, don't go to the hairdressers or gym.. not everything is a necessity!

’Expected’ and ‘necessary to have children’ are very unfortunately becoming blurred by the cost of living crisis. And further upwards on the trajectory we have the upcoming situation of grandparents literally being unable to provide childcare due to the pension crisis and cost of living.

My grandparents were far more involved with me and my brother than either my parents or my in laws are with my children.
My maternal grandmother picked us up from school every day, cooked our dinner and took us to dancing/football etc because my parents were at work. We stayed at my paternal grandparents’ house every Saturday night while my parents went out. They did the school holiday childcare between them.
My parents on the other hand don’t do any childcare. My mum had my 13 and 11 year old when their younger brother was born, and my MIL had them all overnight once when we went away to wedding. That’s all.

@Morningtee Some millennial/Gen z parents seem to think they’ve got it so much harder than previous generations, I’ve got adult DC and young children and so am not out of touch with the demands of modern parenting at all and was a parents in the 1990s too so can compare how parenting has changed in the last 30 years. We only fairly recently bought our house too so our mortgage is as extortionate as any other young parent’s. My boomer parents never even got the opportunity to buy a house, let alone even owned a washing machine

What on earth are you even trying to say?

For boomers and Gen X, average house prices were about 4 times the average annual salary.

Now the average house is 8 times the average annual salary.

I can't even buy a house and you're calling me entitled?

Naah, sod that. Grandparents should say 'my house, my rules'. Otherwise get to fuck and hire paid help - and then try to be late once or twice coming home and see what happens with the overtime fees.

Also, if parents are not going to show gratitude for providing child care, grandparents should refuse to provide help. And by showing gratitude I do not mean some shitty bath oil or slippers or a bottle of shitty wine, I mean a cruise or a foreign holiday or something monetarily substantial.

Adult children must not forget this is not some joy but a massive favour and huge responsibility, and that a proper grandparent would provide a service that no Norland nanny ever can, because unlike a paid nanny, they are invested in your child and would never strap a baby to a beanbag, etc.etc.

I don’t think any of us would lack sympathy for the people in either it the examples you gave and not recognise how dreadful these times were for a minority of people but I don’t accept the statement that typically parents these days have it harder overall due to having parented during the pandemic. Yes it was hard in some ways but the examples you gave are absolutely the exception rather than the norm. I’m a parent with young children in the here and now. Most of us are just doing the best we can and it’s challenging but not more so than in any other time in history. My point is parents don’t have a right to expect their parents to take on a parenting role just because it’s hard. Yes absolutely if my DC went through exceptional circumstances not of their own making then I would look to step in to provide that support

Yes absolutely 🤣

No, they see the CFs on here who believe they are entitled to it

and your point is?

Gen X are usually parents, not grandparents surely? In primary anyway, most of the parents at our school were born in the 80s (so millennials) but some late 70s, so Gen X. Fair enough, some people have kids young, but I don't think there's much of an age gap between most of the parents at our school and you, so they are unlikely to have massively different views, and most people seem grateful for grandparents being involved. I'd never dream of treating them like staff, not that I have staff.