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When I was a child, I could always count on my grandpa having Fudgesicles in the freezer. Back then, it didn’t register that this endless supply of summer treats was really free childcare for my parents. The distinction would have been meaningless to me, anyway. I spent time with my grandparents because they were my grandparents. Nobody explained to me that someone’s schedule was being accommodated; it was simply a fact that my grandparents were intimately involved in my life. I love them and liked it that way.
Parents and grandparents online are now litigating what I have decided to refer to as the Great Grandparent Debate. Naturally, everyone has chosen the most uncharitable possible version of everyone else’s argument.
Young parents say they wish their children’s grandparents were more inclined to be helpful, that grandparents today seem uninterested in family, preoccupied by vacations and lunches and free time. When they do show up, they’re scrolling social media. Grandparents, or more specifically, the people defending them, retort that grandparents have lives of their own and no one is entitled to their time.
This is true. Grandparents are allowed to travel, have friends, hobbies, rest, and generally remain human after their own children reproduce. Some of them are still working, some care for aging parents, and some have health limitations that make chasing children around all day genuinely challenging.
Still, there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what young parents are asking for here. My observation is that for most, the frustration is not that their parents won’t organize their lives around their grandchildren, but that the kind of family they grew up in disappeared precisely when they needed it themselves.
Like me, many of today’s parents recall childhoods marked by afternoons at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. They remember grandparents at baseball games and birthday parties and regular family dinners. They are bewildered to discover that their own parents seem not to remember those things — or at least not to recognize that they were once the beneficiaries of precisely the kind of help they now dismiss as entitlement.
This debate has centered on the question of whether or not grandparents “owe” anyone free childcare, but that is the wrong frame. Of course they don’t. Family units, though, do not exist by the measurements of individual rights and enforceable debts.
“I don’t owe you anything” is, in fact, a very poor foundation for a family.
Families can be demanding. They can take advantage of one another. Sometimes, yes, we do need boundaries, but a family is not a series of negotiated boundaries between autonomous adults. Brought to its logical conclusion, this way of thinking produces something that hardly resembles a family at all. Babies enter the world contributing nothing and requiring nearly everything. This alone tells us that family is an institution governed by something greater than transactional exchange. Eventually, if we are fortunate and have stewarded our relationships well, care reverses as we age.
The point is that nobody’s ledger ever balances neatly. Nor should it. Relationships, and most importantly family, are a form of inconvenience. Thinking of others’ needs and going out of your way to meet them is inherent. Boundaries are not to be understood as the organizing principle for family, but rather a tool, something occasionally necessary within family. Boundaries exist to preserve healthy relationships. They do not relieve us of the obligations that relationships entail.
My grandparents have given to me in ways I could never repay. Now that I have a child of my own, I understand that their generosity was also a gift to my parents. And I think it is reasonable to hope that the same spirit of generosity will pass forward, extending from generation to generation. This is the strange economy of family. It is also why I am reluctant to accept the increasingly common idea that a parent’s work is finished when his children reach adulthood. We benefit from sacrifices made by the generations before us, and in turn are called to make sacrifices for those who come after.
The responsibility of a parent shifts with time, of course. Grandparents should not be expected to jump in and raise an entirely new generation. But grandchildren are not an entirely new obligation, either. They are not imposed separately upon grandparents, but an extension of the family they have already spent decades building.
The task of a parent is lifelong. Perhaps later expressions of devoted parenthood require remaining the kind of parent whose presence makes the weight of family life a bit easier to carry for your own children. The goal of raising independent children is really more about maturation than total freedom.
In any case, the data suggest this problem is not nearly as universal as the internet would have us believe. Research from the Institute for Family Studies finds that 71% of mothers with children under 5 receive at least some help from extended family. For all the online hand-wringing and boomer-blaming, American families still run on a remarkable degree of unpaid acts of love.
Still, the anecdotes emerging from this debate reveal something worth examining, particularly the theatrics of it all. There is a world of difference between a grandparent who cannot watch the children on Saturday and one who makes a production of reminding everyone that she has already “done her time” or, worse, agreeing while making sure everyone understands what an imposition the grandchildren are. Generosity offered resentfully becomes its own kind of burden.
Surely there is room for a little more grace on both sides. If you can help, say yes and mean it. If you can’t, say no graciously. And if you are fortunate enough to receive that help, accept it with gratitude. Family life is demanding enough without keeping score on every favor.
I suppose what troubles me most about the Great Grandparent Debate is the suggestion that the obligations of family are somehow exhausted once we have fulfilled our own immediate responsibilities. For all our talk of what families owe one another, we seem remarkably eager to wipe our hands clean and declare our obligations fulfilled at some point.
Perhaps, then, we have been too quick to concede the central premise of this debate. Do grandparents owe their children free childcare? Not in the contractual sense. No one is entitled to demand 40 hours a week from Grandma. But in the deeper sense of what family entails, I am not so sure the answer is no.
We owe our families things that cannot be invoiced or neatly measured. We owe them our presence, consideration, and willingness to be inconvenienced. We owe some portion of our time and attention that others once so generously gave to us. And when our children become parents themselves, I think we owe them more than a pat on the back and the assurance that our work is finished.
Grandparents need not surrender independence. But we should not confuse independence with exemption. Family is not something we retire from. It is something we remain responsible for and dutiful to, even as our place within it changes.
The Great Grandparent Debate has revealed a strange understanding of family that allows us to benefit from the sacrifices of one generation while declaring ourselves off the hook for what comes next. We ought to aspire to leave our children more than fond memories of a family that once knew how to show up for one another.
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Danielle Franz is the CEO of the American Conservation Coalition.
This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
