Why grandparents are more important than ever

Vox

08-05-2025

is a senior correspondent for Vox, where she covers American family life, work, and education. Previously, she was an editor and writer at the New York Times. She is also the author of three novels, including the New York Times bestseller Outlawed.
Grandparents today are more active and able to play with their kids, experts say. lemono via Getty Images
This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox's newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.
We often hear about the isolation of contemporary American family life — the parents forced to go it alone, the kids stuck inside, the disappearing village. But there's another trend pushing American childhood in a more communal direction: Grandparents are playing a larger and more enduring role in kids' lives.
For starters, there's a demographic shift at play. As birth rates fall, the average number of grandchildren per grandparent has fallen as well. Susan Miller, a 67-year-old grandma in the Washington, DC, area, told me that while her mom had 13 granddaughters, she has four grandchildren. Having fewer grandkids 'gives you more time with them,' she said.
Longer life expectancy also means kids actually get more years with their grandparents than they used to, even though people are having kids later in life, according to Ashton Verdery, a sociologist at Penn State University. These trends are 'likely leading to deeper relationships between grandchildren and grandparents,' Verdery said.
Miller and her husband spend the summers in Minnesota with their grandkids, cooking, crafting, roughhousing, and putting on plays and puppet shows. Her 11-year-old granddaughter has 'my husband really wrapped around her finger,' she said.
'He'll dress up,' Miller said. 'He'll pretend to be a ballerina.'
Beyond participating in impromptu ballet performances, grandparents provide a host of benefits for kids. Across cultures, spending more time with grandmothers and grandfathers is linked to better educational and mental health outcomes, Verdery said. They can also offer kids a fresh perspective and sometimes come at child care with a more relaxed outlook than their stressed-out adult children, said Susan Kelley, a professor emerita of nursing at Georgia State University who has studied grandparents raising grandchildren.
But grandparents are also increasingly stepping in to plug holes in America's crumbling child care system, a role they're not always excited about filling. Experts say policymakers should embrace reforms that allow grandmothers and grandfathers to spend time with their grandkids because they want to — not because their families have no other choice.
Why grandparent relationships are changing
Close relationships between grandparents and grandchildren are far from new. 'Intergenerational caregiving by grandparents, especially grandmothers, reaches back to the dawn of our species,' Tobi Adejumo, a doctoral candidate at the University of Colorado Denver who has studied grandparent care, told me. Multigenerational households have long been common in many communities, with Asian American, Black, and Latino families all more likely than white ones to have grandparents and grandkids under one roof.
Still, the idea that grandparents used to provide a lot of child care isn't necessarily accurate, as Faith Hill reports at The Atlantic. In the early US, people often became grandparents while still raising their own young kids, limiting how much time they could spend with grandkids.
But today, smaller families and later childbirth mean grandparents are less likely to still be actively parenting. While the falling birth rate may be bad news for older adults who want lots of grandkids to spoil (or for those who end up not having grandchildren at all), it also means grandmothers and grandfathers have more quality time to spend with each child. While white grandfathers born in 1880 had an average of nine grandchildren, grandpas born in 1960 have fewer than six. The drop for Black men has been even steeper, from around 11 to around six.
The way grandparents and grandchildren relate to each other is also shifting. Older adults are more active than they once were, making them more able to play with their grandkids, said Donna Butts, executive director of Generations United, a nonprofit that works to connect children and older people.
They're also richer — prior to the 1960s, older age groups had the highest rates of poverty, but now they have the highest rates of wealth, Verdery said. So not only can grandparents buy their grandkids presents, but they can also take them on outings and travel to visit them more easily.
Meanwhile, skyrocketing child care costs and parents' increasingly demanding jobs have led to an increased need for help from grandma and grandpa, said Jennifer Utrata, a sociologist at the University of Puget Sound who studies grandparenting. More grandparents are responding to this need by providing child care on a regular basis, sometimes stepping in for multiple days per week, a phenomenon some call 'intensive grandparenting.'
While grandparent care has historically been more common in communities of color and immigrant communities, it's now on the rise among white, middle-class families, Utrata said. One 2023 poll found that more than 40 percent of working parents relied on their children's grandmother for child care, Hill reports.
Miller, the DC grandma, often cares for her grandchildren in the summer and on visits, including staying with them while their parents took a two-week trip. Her granddaughter becomes 'like a child, almost' rather than a grandchild when her parents are away, Miller said. 'She's comfortable with us.'
Grandparents aren't a policy solution
In addition to taking some pressure off parents, grandparents can have a big impact on kids' worldview, experts say. They can serve as role models but may also be less focused on work than parents in the middle of their careers, and more able to make kids the center of attention, Kelley said.
Spending time with grandparents can also transform a child's view of aging. People who have close relationships with grandparents will often say they 'don't look at older people as icky' but rather as 'vibrant,' Butts said.
Of course, grandparents can also offer high-quality, trusted care at a time when that's hard to come by. But regular caregiving can also be hard on grandparents, even if they're in good health. The demands of intensive grandparenting fall disproportionately on grandmothers, who can struggle to balance their own needs with those of their grandkids, Utrata said.
Some grandparents retire early to help with grandchildren, which can be a financial strain, especially in low-income families, Adejumo said. Many grandparents pay for necessities like food and diapers while watching their grandkids, adding to the financial stress.
Vice President JD Vance has suggested that grandparents could 'help out a little bit more' as a way of addressing the high cost of day care. But 'we should not be foisting our child care challenges on an older generation,' Utrata said. Grandparents want to help out, but they want it to be a choice, not 'the only way that their daughters are going to be able to work for pay.'
Affordable, accessible child care would help grandparents be involved in their grandkids' lives without pressure or exhaustion, Utrata said. Paid parental leave would also help since many grandparents are called in to be with babies when their parents have to return to work, Adejumo said.
In California and other states, grandparents can receive subsidies for taking care of grandchildren, but they are often too low to cover the real cost of care, Adejumo said. One sentiment she's heard a lot from grandparents: 'I would really appreciate a living wage.'
There's a growing recognition in American society that making sure parents are healthy and financially stable also benefits kids. Now, experts say, it's time to extend that understanding to grandparents, too.
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