‘Enslaved grandparent syndrome” – sounds extreme, doesn’t it? But that’s what some psychologists in Spain are calling the childcare burden faced by older people in that country, where 35% of people over the age of 65 take care of their grandchildren several days a week. In my London neighbourhood, the sight of a grandparent pushing a baby in a buggy, or a toddler in a swing, is fairly common, but in Madrid, even more so. The latest Europe-wide survey, in 2016, found the proportion of over 65s undertaking childcare at least several days a week in southern European countries – Spain especially, but also in Italy and Greece – is much higher than in France (13%) and Germany (15%) or the UK (18%).
This is the result of historical cultural norms of shared care between generations, but now some Spanish grandparents are fighting back. After working all their lives, and years spent raising their own children, they hadn’t bargained for spending their retirements engaged in unpaid childcare, and they are not alone in that.
Anyone who lurks on parenting internet forums will observe that these faultlines are emerging across the western world, with some parents saddened and frustrated at the lack of input or interest from grandparents (“they’d rather spend their money on cruises!”) and, on the other side, grandparents worn down and exhausted by the expectation, and sometimes entitlement, levied upon them by their children. I’ve seen memes and video content claiming that boomers are the most selfish generation of grandparents ever, but also had conversations with burnt-out older people who simply don’t have the energy to care for small, rambunctious children.
Every situation is of course unique, but it’s an issue that has played out in many families in one way or another, mine included. My mother was very present in the first year of my son’s life, and that time was very special for all of us. Yet I wish I had been more mindful of the toll caring for a small baby can take. I still carry some guilt for how I handled things, most of all the fact that she was sleeping on the sofa. She claimed that it was comfortable, but if I could go back in time, I’d have invested in a really good-quality sofabed.
“Looking after babies is for the young,” my aunt said to me. I spent my childhood in a small Welsh community where it wasn’t unusual to meet women in their early 40s who were grandmothers. As women have babies later and later, first-time grandparents are getting older, and with that, they have less energy and often greater health needs. There are many good reasons to delay parenthood – I did it myself – but it comes with a price, too. I sometimes wonder if I would have had children earlier, had I feared less the toll it would take on my education, career and finances, and had the system been more hospitable. It is not a system that was built for women of reproductive age, yet we are forced to try to work within it.
Let’s not forget, either, that this is a gender issue. Most often, the grandparent doing the childcare is the grandmother. Her own pregnancies and births may have brought their own health issues. Often, she will still be working. She may have other care responsibilities, either her own parents, a partner, or offspring. For women, retirement from paid work doesn’t mean the unpaid care work stops. I’m not surprised that Carmen Díez, one of the Spanish grandmothers interviewed, enjoys her peace, saying: “I love my empty nest.”
I don’t blame older women for fighting back, and in some cases saying that they deserve a salary. It doesn’t mean that they don’t love their grandchildren, and of course there are grandmothers – and grandfathers – who would be insulted by offers of payment. But even they would acknowledge that looking after small children can be physically and emotionally draining. My son now weighs more than 18kg, and I am lifting him daily. What grandparents are able to do does have limits.
Often, grandmothers are running themselves ragged to support their own daughters’ careers – it is the mother who so often pays the penalty, career-wise, still. Dr Terri Apter, the author of Grandparenting: On Love and Relationships Across Generations, has pointed out that it’s often the feminist grandmothers who help out the most, because they know what a struggle it is.
That capitalism thrives on the unpaid domestic labour of women isn’t exactly news, but the grandparental revolt is a new manifestation of it. Love shouldn’t come with a price, but the care work that comes with love: why shouldn’t it? Why should mostly older women be propping up insufficient childcare systems?
I don’t blame parents for being frustrated. Whether they are in Spain, Germany, or the UK, they have all to some extent been shortchanged on the expectation of a family life that is easier than the generations that came before. Almost every parent I speak to is completely burned out. Meanwhile, politicians try to work out how they can improve dwindling birthrates.
Despite the fraught internet forum threads, I don’t think what parents, and grandparents, want is actually all that different: quality family time that doesn’t feel like an endless slog, and a system that supports, rather than hinders, that. It’s sad that it feels so out of reach for so many.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
