Many grandparents adore minding the grandkids — and many quietly feel taken for granted, expected to drop everything, several days a week, with no thanks and no choice. Is this just family helping family the way it always has? Or are some grown children treating mum and dad as free childcare and calling it love?
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Add your commentI love my grandchildren more than my own life. I also haven't had a free Tuesday or Thursday in four years and the last time I tried to book a holiday my daughter said 'but who'll have the kids?' Not 'will you be okay.' Who'll have the kids.
If you're a parent reading this: ask your mum and dad how THEY are, not just whether they can have the kids. And if you're a grandparent: it's allowed to say 'not this week.' Love that can't say no isn't love, it's a job nobody applied for.
Reading these from the other side. I'm 38, two jobs, childcare costs more than my rent, and without my mum we literally don't eat. It's not that I don't see her sacrifice. It's that I'm drowning and she's the only rope. We're BOTH being failed here.
I do it for free and proudly. These are the last years my legs work well enough to chase a toddler. I'll rest when I'm gone. Right now I want to be the smell and the song they remember when they're 50.
the word missing from this whole thread is THANK YOU. not money. just a card. just 'i couldn't do this without you mum.' do you know how far that sentence goes? we'd carry the world for it and most of us never hear it
my kids never even ask if i'm tired. but my granddaughter drew me a picture that said 'best nana in the wuld' and i've kept it in my purse for two years. you do it for the small one, not the grown ones, and that's the secret
There's a world of difference between 'Mum, could you help us out, we're struggling' and an assumption with a rota attached. One is family. The other is staff. And too many of us are too soft to say which one we've become.
There it is. My only grandchild is 4,000 miles away and I'd give my right arm to be 'taken for granted' on a wet Tuesday. The ache of being NOT needed is so much worse than this thread realises.
I did 20 years of work, raised my own three, and I'll be honest, I did NOT retire to do it all again. I want to do the fun bits and hand them back. That doesn't make me a bad grandmother. It makes me a finished mother.
Read that and burst into tears. My nan was exactly that — the smell of her kitchen, a specific hymn she hummed. She's been gone 12 years and I'd trade everything for one more 'free babysitting' afternoon with her.
68. Minding two under five three days a week. My back is gone, my own friends have stopped inviting me anywhere because I'm 'always busy with the kids,' and I'm lonelier now than before I 'helped.' Nobody warns you about that.
That comment changed my mind halfway through. I was all set to say 'ungrateful kids' and then I remembered childcare costs more than some salaries now. The villain might be the price of nurseries, not the daughter.
My dad watched my sister's three for years 'for free' then needed care himself and she couldn't be bothered. Watch who shows up when the helping flows the OTHER way. That's when you learn what it really was.
My mother-in-law moans she's 'used' for childcare and also has a meltdown if we book a babysitter instead of her. Some grandparents want the title AND the complaint. You can't be the indispensable hero and the victim at once.
Boundaries solved it for us. Mum picked her two days, in writing, and we respect them like a job we'd never dare cancel. Everyone calmer. Turns out resentment grows fastest in the things nobody dared say out loud.
And do you know how guilty we already feel asking? Sometimes we don't gush the thank-yous because saying it out loud makes us feel like the failures we already feel like inside. Grace runs both directions.
The money point is real though. If a grandparent gives up part-time work to mind kids, that's THEIR pension shrinking to subsidise yours. 'Free' childcare isn't free. Someone always pays, usually the quietest person in the family.
OUCH. But fair. My mum is exactly this. Furious when we ask, furious when we don't. We genuinely cannot find the door that doesn't have a 'wrong' on the other side.
66 here and I'll say the quiet part: I sometimes resent it AND I'd be devastated to lose it. Both. Love is rarely clean. Anyone telling you it's simple has either never done it or isn't being honest.
My parents BEGGED to have my kids more. Begged. Said it kept them young, gave them purpose. Some of you would kill for grandchildren nearby and here's a thread half-complaining about the gift. Read the room.
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