The game has demographics at its core. Today there are around 14 million grandparents in the UK. Children routinely reach 18 with all four grandparents still alive. “It’s a huge difference to previous generations and has so many implications,” says Prof Shireen Kanji of Brunel University. In 1962, men on average died at just 68, with women living five years longer. Today, 60 years on, both expect to live a decade extra. All the more time to play with – or look after – the grandkids.
Another historic change occurred in 2020 when, for the first time, the most common arrangement for couples with children was for both to work full-time. Today, three quarters of mothers with dependent children (75.6 per cent) work full- or part-time, up from two thirds in 2002. The numbers in full-time employment have increased by half in just 30 years. Only 41 per cent of women born in 1958 were in a job two years after having their first child. For those born just 12 years later, the rate was again up by almost a half, to 58 per cent.
Fewer children
That’s had a huge impact. Women are now having fewer children, later in life. In 2018, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) noted that output in regions where few women work, like the Middle East and North Africa, could increase by 60 per cent if that changed. Even in Europe it reckoned there was still room for output to grow by more than 10 per cent if more women worked.
But in Britain the economic gain of women working has been many families’ pain. Last year, analysis showed that, at £271, full-time nursery for a two-year-old costs 65 per cent of an average parent’s weekly take-home pay. In parts of London it’s above 70 per cent. No wonder that the main reason given by women in a House of Commons report last year for not working is that they are “looking after family”. That’s 1.4 million women. Or that, for the first time in 30 years, there’s been a sustained rise in women leaving work to look after their families.
Free granny care, then, can be not just convenient, but worth a fortune, too. The average yearly cost of part-time (25 hours a week) childcare for a two-year old is around £7,000, for full-time care it’s about £13,000. The granny effect is uneven, however. The age at which people are having grandchildren is creeping up, meaning that “some parents today find themselves in a ‘sandwich generation’ [looking after children and their own parents],” says Kanji, “while others of a similar age may be benefitting from a lot of grandparent childcare. It’s a vivid contrast.”
Significant impact
The effects are significant. “There is a big range of impacts grandparents have,” says Peter Smith, Emeritus Professor at Goldsmiths and himself a grandfather. “Finance is an obvious one – they might put some money away for their grandchildren. They can be confidants, often for adolescent children to talk to. They provide stability, especially if parents’ relationships are in difficulty. They act as family historians. But an important aspect is childcare.”
“Women’s lives – and it is still mostly women – are being transformed,” says Kanji. More than half of grandparents help look after their grandchildren from time to time, she says. But critically, her research has shown that up to a third of mums who work do so because of granny care: “That is really, really high.” Yet the exchange is not always good for the grannies’ own careers.
“There’s lots of evidence that women’s participation in the labour force declines very rapidly when they become grandmothers,” says Kanji. Smith adds that young grannies “perhaps in their 50s, can feel [childcare] to be a burden” as they are also trying to juggle their own jobs. For those who are older, perhaps in their late 70s or 80s, “it may be too physically demanding or an imposition. Yet for those in their 60s or early 70s, it’s usually great”. These, then, are the Goldilocks grannies: not too young, not too old, but – from the viewpoint of midlife parents desperate for help – just right.
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