Are Grandparents Destroying the Child-Raising "Village" Parents Need?

Or is this a late-stage capitalism problem?

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In the past week, I can’t stop thinking about a Business Insider story titled, “A boomer grandma advises on how to set boundaries with millennial kids when it comes to babysitting.” The story follows a Boomer grandma who is now advising “guilty grandmas” to charge their kids for babysitting the grandkids, among other tips.

Yesterday, my editor for Business Insider (who also edited the pieces I’m mentioning here), posted in a Facebook group I’m in about another similar story—this one titled, “Boomers seem to have traded in the child-raising village for traveling. Now millennial parents say they have no one to support them.”

I’ll be honest: I am having a really difficult time not spiraling into a rage about all of this.

Millennial parents ask, Where’s my village?

Ever since giving birth at the start of the pandemic, the #1 difficulty I hear fellow parents talk about is how we no longer have a “village” to help us with childcare.

There are many reasons for this, including that many of us move away from where we grew up and lifestyles and parenting styles are simply different today than they were in the past. So we don’t really have a natural built-in village the way generations of the past did when they pretty much stuck to living in their same or nearby hometowns after becoming adults and subsequently parents.

It’s a systemic issue for sure.

But I’ve also heard from many friends about how difficult it is to get support from grandparents—even those nearby—when they need it.

In my own experience, my mom was only able to visit for a few days before Christmas 2021 and left on December 23rd because she and my dad were planning a Christmas Eve party for their friends. My dad didn’t even come for this visit. Additionally, when she and my grandma came for a visit in 2022, they opted to spend the majority of their visit touring Colorado after my son came down with a terrible ear infection that sent him to bed for two straight days—then they complained that they didn’t get to spend more time with him.

Meanwhile, during this visit, I kept asking them to stay home with me and my son, and even suggested many light activities we could do. If nothing else, we could have played together at home during the many times his medicine had kicked in and he felt temporarily better. And I begged them several times to just hang out with me on the couch, where we could have watched movies and simply hung out together. That would have provided me and my son with a lot of comfort. Spending time together could have just included snuggling and comforting a sick 2-year-old. It’s not that they were obligated to stay and help me with my sick child (while my husband was out of town) but if they were here to visit him, as they said they were, then why was snuggling and light play not enough?

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

Are Boomer Grandparents Just “Too Busy” to Help?

I didn’t realize what a big problem this is until I read those two stories, saw myself in them, and watched as dozens of comments rolled in from frustrated parents feeling this way, too.

We don’t have a village because of the way life is these days. But… could we have more of a village if grandparents weren’t “too busy” to help their kids in the same way that they received help from their own parents?

I don’t want to vilify Boomer grandparents because this shit’s complicated. I totally understand why it feels like they should be paid for caring for young children for many hours and days. And as someone who loves to travel as well, I get wanting to travel in their later years—especially if they didn’t get to earlier in their lives.

But I also feel like something is amiss here.

The same grandparents who want to be paid for babysitting their own flesh and blood never did such a thing when their (now adult) kids were being taken care of by their own parents. I mean, don’t we all have memories of spending hours and days and sometimes weeks or months and grandma and grandpa’s house as kids? Surely, Boomers weren’t paying for this valuable childcare—yet they now demand being paid.

Additionally, one grandparent in the story talks about how there was one night when he had nothing to do despite being there to visit his kids and grandkids. He blamed it on how, in today’s parenting, “life revolves around the children, and you’re either on board or you’re not.” But I want to ask: What exactly was his family so busy with that he couldn’t join? And… is he not on board to do something that his grandkids enjoy doing? This just doesn’t add up for me.

I personally can’t think of any event or activity that we do with our kid where we couldn’t easily bring a grandparent along. I’m sure there are some, but I can’t currently imagine what those would be.

Towards the end of the article, there was talk about how Boomer grandparents want freedom in their later years because they got their kids through high school and college, through their pregnancies, through their marriages, and feel that “now they finally reached adulthood and this capacity to be independent.”

And I have to ask: How exactly do these grandparents think they got us through college when most of us are riddled with college debt? And I don’t even understand the marriage comment but for pregnancies? Well, that’s what we’re complaining about! And if asked, I’m sure most Millennial parents would say that they need help and support after pregnancy, not during.

Is this actually a problem of late-stage capitalism?

The more I think about this issue, the more I am apt to not blame “too busy” Boomer grandparents or village-less Millennial parents but rather the blame for this problem lies with the late-stage capitalist system we’re currently living in.

Think about it: We’re taught that time is money and that almost everything we do is transactional.

We pay money to gain knowledge and then we in turn take that knowledge and turn it into work for which we then get paid. If we want more money, we work harder or longer hours or get additional degrees to advance our knowledge so we can get promotions and whatnot. Capitalism teaches us that we have two goals in life: To work to survive and to have children who will then also turn into workers.

Everything is something we either create for money or pay for with money. I particularly like this definition of late-stage capitalism from the University of Sydney:

“Late capitalism is characterised by a globalised, post-industrial economy, where everything – not just material resources and products but also immaterial dimensions, such as the arts and lifestyle activities – becomes commodified and consumable.”

And apparently, that applies to our families, too.

I don’t know what wires got crossed where but I have a very difficult time not thinking, “But don’t you just want to help your kids and spend time with your grandkids because you love them?”

Maybe that’s a harsh criticism but also, what about the love?

Has our capitalist mindset even invaded the heart that’s at the core of families and communities to the point that we can’t just do something because we simply care about other persons? I’m reminded of the excellent essay, “I Don't Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People,” which is basically my philosophy for disliking the Republican Party.

I hate to point out—but it must be said—that the Boomer generation had every advantage that Millennials don’t. They went to college and university for cheap, were able to buy a house in a decent neighborhood even when just starting out in life, had their parent’s support to raise kids, and worked for most of their lives at stable jobs that provided them with pensions and a retirement plan. Plus, from the article:

“While other generations are struggling to get by, boomers are seemingly living better than ever.

A May analysis from Bank of America on consumer-spending habits found boomers were outspending other generations on travel and dining out. And why shouldn't they? According to the Federal Reserve, baby boomers own more than $78 trillion in assets — that's around half of all wealth in the country.”

Boomers makeup 20.58% of the U.S. population and yet have half of all wealth in the country. Meanwhile, the same data from the Federal Reserve shows that Millennials own $13 trillion in assets—less than even the Silent Generation and earlier. And that includes Boomers owning almost four times the real estate assets that Millennials do ($18.57 trillion vs $5.08 trillion, respectively). That’s a pretty stark difference.

I do want to add to that the fact that, yes, the economy is difficult right now and many retirees can’t survive on their pensions and 401Ks alone—so perhaps asking your child to pay you minimum wage to watch the grandkids full-time isn’t so bad. But I’m guessing these are not the same grandparents who are jetting off across the world and making it difficult for their kids to ask for support.

What will happen when Boomers need senior care?

I want to ask these same Boomers demanding to be paid for spending time with their grandkids what their plans are for when their health begins to fail. Are they saving any of the money they’re currently spending on travel for when they need elderly care? Or will they demand that their Millennial kids foot the bill for that, too?

The average cost of assisted living facilities in 2023 is $4,774 per month but some can cost $7,000 to $10,000 per month.

I’m honestly not sure what Boomers will do when it’s their time to get senior care. But I can imagine it may be a hard sell to their Millennial kids currently struggling with childcare costs and feeling abandoned by their parents because the older generations want to travel to then turn around and need to pay for the care of these same parents who refused to help.

We already know that Gen X has a Sandwich Generation problem. But what will happen when Millennials enter this stage of life? Feeling abandoned by their parents right now isn’t likely to make them feel particularly generous when those same parents need them.

Know the worst part? Even as I write this, I feel myself falling into the same late-stage capitalism problem of tit-for-tat and making family care into the same pay-for-play consumerist bullshit that’s causing this crumbling of the familiar “village.”

Although humans have long traded with each other, late-stage capitalism has sent us into such a consumerist frenzy that we’re looking at another person and not even considering their basic humanity. Instead, we ask, “Can you pay me for that?”

When I brought up these articles to my therapist, I asked: “Whatever happened to just doing something because you care about someone?” They quickly replied, “That doesn’t exist anymore.”

SIGH. What a depressing thought.

Perhaps George Carlin said it best when describing Baby Boomers in his 1996 show Back in Town, “Whiny, narcissistic, self-indulgent people with a simple philosophy: GIVE ME THAT, IT’S MINE! GIVE ME THAT, IT’S MINE!”

And so I leave you with that depressing thought, and no real answer because so much of this is a systemic problem but also a generational one.

Instead, I’ll just repeat what Carlin said at the end of that YouTube clip: “Fuck these Boomers, fuck these yuppies, and fuck everybody now that I think about it.” Amen.

Join me in conversation… What do you think about the two articles I mentioned, where Boomers are traveling and asking for financial compensation to watch their grandkids? Are you a fellow Millennial parent who’s having this issue too? Do you think late-stage capitalism is largely responsible for the crumbling of the “village” we parents desperately need? I’d love to hear from all of you!

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Talk soon,
Irina (she/her) - raising a March 2020 gen alpha kid