Working Grandmas Are Still Doing the Child Care Juggle

Wall Street Journal

25-07-2025

I recently asked Google to show me pictures of a grandmother. It shot back pages of kindly old women with clouds of gray hair and orthopaedic shoes. None looked like Sharline Andersen, 60, an energetic events director in Fresno, Calif., who raised four daughters while working and is now a grandmother of 12, including half a dozen step-grandkids. 'I don't see retirement as anything close to my future,' she says. 'I feel like I have a lot of energy left and a lot left to give.'
Andersen was among the millions of young moms who poured into the workplace in the 1980s and 1990s. Their generation came of age when the 'Mommy Wars' demonized them and experts ominously warned that they would ruin their kids. Decades later, many are still at work—and determined to 'break that cycle' of 'doom and gloom' as Andersen puts it, now that their grown kids are becoming working parents themselves.