The two-way street thing reality of this is interesting to me. Or rather, which came first - the chicken or the egg - type of question? For instance, the Boomer generation had the benefit of that high-trust, familial society and then turned around and embraced a libertine individualism unlike anything seen before. (Paraphrasing from Louise Perry's incredible piece "We Will All Become Boring")
So, a lot of the messaging Millenials received was to do the same, family ties and proximity be damned. And we did. We moved away for college and work and then found spouses far from where we grew up or whatever. And now a lot of that can't be turned around and a proximate village remade again. So in my case, my family and in-laws are always eager to visit from hours or states away, but we will never have them as elders in our daily life unless either my husband and I move toward one of them (and we'd have to choose, and the niche field my husband is in makes that difficult).... or they move to us (also difficult but not impossible.)
What am I saying here? haha I suppose the whole ethos of doing what's best for *you* started further back than the current grandparents simply not being involved in the present moment (sure, it sounds like some honestly are awful even when they live nearby!) But the whole life trajectory many were raised to see as normal and good is ending up a pretty sucky deal for raising a family. And I suppose we as the current parents are implicated to some degree. When the messaging is to prioritize yourself and your desires ("don't let us get in the way!", that plays out for both the younger and older generations in different ways.
Yeah, I agree this has deeper roots than just the current generation of grandparents. In my mind there's a connection between this and the WEIRD psychology stuff etc that led to more and more atomized families over centuries. And I DEFINITELY agree that we (or, I) are implicated in the problem. I have made nothing but mistakes lol.
Your comment about never having the grandparents as elders makes me think about what type of modeling is going on for my kids. My parents are pretty decent boomer grandparents, but not village builders or elders exactly. Sometimes in moments of frustration I really do think of my nuclear unit as starting literally from scratch building a village, but I have to remind myself that it's not black and white, all or nothing. And I think my wife does a particularly good job at framing the things the grandparents in our family do as "elder activity." In other words, we wish they were more involved, but whatever limited leadership they're able to provided is ~framed~ (by us, or by my wife) as an act of village building. Hopefully, the kids will understand that — but who knows.
Attention: Village builders must prepare in advance for the reality that all people are difficult.
You must prepare in advance for the day when a neighbor does something that will tempt you to say, "Oh, now I know who they REALLY are."
Good people are going to do things that will make you sick with knowing that you've just been attacked; and there will be no way out except 1) war, or 2) to see the situation with their eyes, to forgive what happened/was said to the best of your ability, to retain the most basic civility (saying hello in passing, for example), and to refrain from dragging other "villagers" into the conflict. Even if you tell your story, you must not isolate the offender; and he must not try to isolate you. Six months will pass, or a year, and the baseline of "hello" will turn into something different, perhaps with a conversation and a more advanced stage of forgiveness. (It helps if he eventually needs something from you and must ask for it, or vice-versa.)
I have experienced--and heard tales of--attempts at village building out here in the mountains where I live (in France! haha. Small house / not a castle). Every story ends the same way, and I mean the same way: There is a conflict, the plenitude of a person is reduced into the fact of an offence, and the relationship is over. Over the course of a few years, most people are no longer speaking with most people, and maybe there are a few little factions that survive.
All the people of the village (or wide neighborhood) are good. Their values are the same, and their ideas are largely complementary. They clear footpaths together, help each other with building, even speak the same spiritual language--more or less.
They are friends. But maybe they start irritating each other over time, or some people take too much...eventually there's a blow-up: Serious matters like property disputes and infidelity, or petty final straws like a disagreement over the alleged synchronicity of an alienated third party's sudden phone call.
My husband says these village relationships should not be based on friendship. One of our neighbors similarly proposes that they should be based on mutual need, to the point that no one owns by himself even all the tools he uses.
I say, there's truth in these thoughts, because 1) Brotherhood is more fundamental than friendship, less exclusive, and also our reality, and 2) The physical fact of your need for help forces you to check the ego, which fantasizes relentlessly about becoming invulnerable through independence--just one of its siren calls. Let these villages be based on what you want, but at least with the understanding that you will offend and will be offended, and it will be painful indeed. To not choose war is powerfully effective but can feel most unnatural, especially in the most serious cases.
I'll be turning into an elder, soon. This is one of the things I've learned, that I'll be helping with. Even if I'm a human with continuing blindnesses, this is something I see better than the average young person.
PS I appreciated some of the other commenters touching upon this same theme.
Great thoughts, and much appreciated! Also I'm envious you are in france! I think the idea of mutual need is a really interesting one, and I especially loved this line: "The physical fact of your need for help forces you to check the ego." Completely agree.
This is not a new phenomenon that began with the boomers. Americans are a very mobile society and families are often dispersed. I am a boomer in my 60s. When my children were growing up, my parents lived a thousand miles away and my in-laws a couple of hundred. We would see my folks once or twice a year and my in-laws a little more than that, but they were never a daily presence in my kids' lives. Some of my contemporaries had relatives close but many did not. Even in my own childhood, my Greatest Generation parents lived hundreds of miles from their parents and grandparent visits were a twice a year thing.
Totally. America is a nation of immigrants, right? So most of us had ancestors who permanently moved on. I think now there are ways to mitigate this (cheap flights, zoom calls if you don't yet hate zoom). That said, I think there are advantages for families who maintain physical proximity, so I'm trying to think now about how to do that for my kids. We'll see if it works though!
I usually refrain from shitting on the boomers since most of what they're blamed for is not a matter of personal responsibility. However, on THIS issue, they deserve mountains of scorn. My parents being totally worthless grandparents is a matter of personal choice and as such I'm right to feel contempt.
Yeah, I think most boomers are know are actually good people generally, whether they're effective grandparents specifically or not. But it is weird to me how this seems to be a growing issue today — and does seem to have been in the past (I don't see a lot of great works of literature or film about deadbeat grandparents, for example).
Terrific piece you’ve written here, Jim. I am with you, an elder. I LOVE being involved with my two grandchildren. And I love posting my stories and thoughts about motherhood here on Substack, on Moms Matter. As an elder, like you, I truly feel that I have something to contribute, in fact, lots to contribute. I was an opinionated doctor and mother in past years, and now I am an opinionated retired doctor and grandmother. Having been around the block, so to speak,allows us to throw our two cents worth into the mix. Yes, good elders are valuable. (My parents were not, and I am determined to be!) Keep writing. ❤️
Oh my gosh this lady literally left the continent her child was on to go to a place with "a huge focus on family." This makes me so sad!
At the same time, I think we've created a culture where we communicate to grandparents/elders that we DON'T need them, unless they can get with our program and be more like us. The results are bad for everyone...
That's such a great point. And after living that way for a while, it can be really hard to change the way we communicate imo. Or at least, that has been my experience.
I think there is no one good solution to this problem, and many multifaceted reasons for its existence in the first place. I agree with what Haley said above, but I do think the millennial/younger generation may be very slightly to blame for this as well. So many in my generation are utterly wed to the idea of individual autonomy and convinced of their own genius when it comes to (gently) raising children to the point that they have no interest in what the older generation has to say or provide. The concept of “toxic family” and “boundaries” around people who are just, frankly, difficult (and what people aren’t difficult?) has been taken way too far. But on the other hand, a lot of the older people/boomers really don’t have a lot of wisdom or good example to offer. It’s hard to respect an old person who only wants to buy your kids loads of pointless toys and toxic Temu clothes, subvert your parenting, and provide a bad example of what an elder should be. We are blessed to not be in this situation personally, but in general, I guess I would say that the boomer generation is considered the “selfish generation”, but it seems that millennials are mostly continuing that in their own unique way.
I’ve been shocked by the lack of interest in their grandkids from our boomer parents on both sides. Especially the grandpas. I can’t understand it. What a squandered opportunity to do something meaningful with your elder hood. I think the boomers have been the most spoiled, and hence the most entitled generation of all time! You can also see this playing out politically here in Canada as they continue to vote for policies that enrich them at the expense of the coming generations.
I think that many people who "eat, pray, love" their way through life will eventually find that they've done so at the cost of meaning. With that said, I think there is also wisdom in recognizing that family-making is not the only kind of village which one can build and contribute to. The problem, which I feel you've illustrated, is a spirit of hyper-individualism, not strictly an absence of biological children or grandchildren.
Yeah, I know a lady in my neighborhood who lived a genuinely wild and interesting life, but who is more isolated than she'd like to be now. She didn't have kids nor want them, and being childfree actually gave her some interesting experiences she wouldn't have had otherwise. I think she'd be a fantastic aunt — so someone who plugs into a village without having had kids herself. The problem in her case is that she was an only child, and so now she has few people older younger and the same age as her.
I talk about the choices I made to live close to my grandchildren. Also contains some ideas for building cross-generational relationships/connections on personal, family, and societal levels.
Great post! With 3 boys under 10 it’s something I think a lot about. I had my first at 31 and have friends that waited significantly longer than that. I’ve often wondered when this trend of waiting much longer to have kids is 2-3 generations old will grand parents just be too old to play any significant role with grandkids. Say your Mom had you at 35, you have a kid at 35 - the grandparent is 80+ as the kid becomes pre-teen
In college I had this recurring debate with friends that started out as a joke/exercise in debating terrible ideas, which was that we should shrink generations to 15 years. You're a parent at 15, a grandparent at 30, great grandparent at 45, etc.
Obviously a thought experiment and not a real thing, but it did eventually occur to me that if we had such abbreviated generations you'd have so many people to pitch in and help that the workload would never be very tough.
Again, I'm not proposing this in the real world, but the opposite seems true as well. Longer generations are going to leave people more isolated.
So my grandma was just buried earlier this month, and I sat at her graveside service hearing all of these stories about how she and my grandpa were pillars of their community in central California. My grandma in particular was a real matriarch, and a theme throughout the proceedings was just how welcoming and inclusive she was to everyone and how supportive and protective she was of her family. A lot of it I knew secondhand, but it was so cool to talk to the actual people my grandma touched (distant cousins, family friends, etc.).
Thinking about how she was as my own grandmother, though -- and I don't know what exactly happened, most likely multiple things -- I'm not sure I can say that she acted as an elder to me necessarily. I imagine as she got older and her health got worse, things just became more difficult in general, and it was the same for my grandpa. But as their grandchildren, my brother, our cousins, and I maybe only saw them once a year, just on the holidays, rarely they traveled to us, so we mostly traveled to see them. The big meals my grandma used to prepare herself fell to my aunts to do, the grilling my grandpa used to do fell to my dad and uncle, things like that. It seems to me that the vigor and will they had to provide so much to a community had decreased by the time their grandchildren came around (and goodness knows many aspects of their community as a whole had probably changed, too, over so many years).
When I think of my parents and in-laws acting as elders to my kids, I don't think they really are either. We're sort of trapped in the same situation of mostly seeing them once a year. Most of them are still working, and all of them are long distance from us. And I can't say any of them are as active in their own communities as the previous generation; my dad is likely the closest they come because he had the example from his own parents, and he's the only one not working at the moment, so he has the biggest amount of time and energy to dedicate to that.
Boy, I dream of being the generation that breaks the trend. I'm already starting in a rough place by not having a village of my own right now. Yet like you said, I guess we have to be the ones that start it all from scratch!
Really interesting thoughts. I'm glad you mentioned the work thing, because in all of this debate that I've seen that is one point people have made: That many of today's elders are still very busy working and thus have less time to do elder-y things. Seems like that's definitely a factor for a lot of families (including mine).
But yeah, I feel like many of us are living an experiment right now where we're going to see if we can be the ones to reverse the trend toward being village-less. Fingers crossed!
The two-way street thing reality of this is interesting to me. Or rather, which came first - the chicken or the egg - type of question? For instance, the Boomer generation had the benefit of that high-trust, familial society and then turned around and embraced a libertine individualism unlike anything seen before. (Paraphrasing from Louise Perry's incredible piece "We Will All Become Boring")
So, a lot of the messaging Millenials received was to do the same, family ties and proximity be damned. And we did. We moved away for college and work and then found spouses far from where we grew up or whatever. And now a lot of that can't be turned around and a proximate village remade again. So in my case, my family and in-laws are always eager to visit from hours or states away, but we will never have them as elders in our daily life unless either my husband and I move toward one of them (and we'd have to choose, and the niche field my husband is in makes that difficult).... or they move to us (also difficult but not impossible.)
What am I saying here? haha I suppose the whole ethos of doing what's best for *you* started further back than the current grandparents simply not being involved in the present moment (sure, it sounds like some honestly are awful even when they live nearby!) But the whole life trajectory many were raised to see as normal and good is ending up a pretty sucky deal for raising a family. And I suppose we as the current parents are implicated to some degree. When the messaging is to prioritize yourself and your desires ("don't let us get in the way!", that plays out for both the younger and older generations in different ways.
Yeah, I agree this has deeper roots than just the current generation of grandparents. In my mind there's a connection between this and the WEIRD psychology stuff etc that led to more and more atomized families over centuries. And I DEFINITELY agree that we (or, I) are implicated in the problem. I have made nothing but mistakes lol.
Your comment about never having the grandparents as elders makes me think about what type of modeling is going on for my kids. My parents are pretty decent boomer grandparents, but not village builders or elders exactly. Sometimes in moments of frustration I really do think of my nuclear unit as starting literally from scratch building a village, but I have to remind myself that it's not black and white, all or nothing. And I think my wife does a particularly good job at framing the things the grandparents in our family do as "elder activity." In other words, we wish they were more involved, but whatever limited leadership they're able to provided is ~framed~ (by us, or by my wife) as an act of village building. Hopefully, the kids will understand that — but who knows.
Attention: Village builders must prepare in advance for the reality that all people are difficult.
You must prepare in advance for the day when a neighbor does something that will tempt you to say, "Oh, now I know who they REALLY are."
Good people are going to do things that will make you sick with knowing that you've just been attacked; and there will be no way out except 1) war, or 2) to see the situation with their eyes, to forgive what happened/was said to the best of your ability, to retain the most basic civility (saying hello in passing, for example), and to refrain from dragging other "villagers" into the conflict. Even if you tell your story, you must not isolate the offender; and he must not try to isolate you. Six months will pass, or a year, and the baseline of "hello" will turn into something different, perhaps with a conversation and a more advanced stage of forgiveness. (It helps if he eventually needs something from you and must ask for it, or vice-versa.)
I have experienced--and heard tales of--attempts at village building out here in the mountains where I live (in France! haha. Small house / not a castle). Every story ends the same way, and I mean the same way: There is a conflict, the plenitude of a person is reduced into the fact of an offence, and the relationship is over. Over the course of a few years, most people are no longer speaking with most people, and maybe there are a few little factions that survive.
All the people of the village (or wide neighborhood) are good. Their values are the same, and their ideas are largely complementary. They clear footpaths together, help each other with building, even speak the same spiritual language--more or less.
They are friends. But maybe they start irritating each other over time, or some people take too much...eventually there's a blow-up: Serious matters like property disputes and infidelity, or petty final straws like a disagreement over the alleged synchronicity of an alienated third party's sudden phone call.
My husband says these village relationships should not be based on friendship. One of our neighbors similarly proposes that they should be based on mutual need, to the point that no one owns by himself even all the tools he uses.
I say, there's truth in these thoughts, because 1) Brotherhood is more fundamental than friendship, less exclusive, and also our reality, and 2) The physical fact of your need for help forces you to check the ego, which fantasizes relentlessly about becoming invulnerable through independence--just one of its siren calls. Let these villages be based on what you want, but at least with the understanding that you will offend and will be offended, and it will be painful indeed. To not choose war is powerfully effective but can feel most unnatural, especially in the most serious cases.
I'll be turning into an elder, soon. This is one of the things I've learned, that I'll be helping with. Even if I'm a human with continuing blindnesses, this is something I see better than the average young person.
PS I appreciated some of the other commenters touching upon this same theme.
Great thoughts, and much appreciated! Also I'm envious you are in france! I think the idea of mutual need is a really interesting one, and I especially loved this line: "The physical fact of your need for help forces you to check the ego." Completely agree.
This is not a new phenomenon that began with the boomers. Americans are a very mobile society and families are often dispersed. I am a boomer in my 60s. When my children were growing up, my parents lived a thousand miles away and my in-laws a couple of hundred. We would see my folks once or twice a year and my in-laws a little more than that, but they were never a daily presence in my kids' lives. Some of my contemporaries had relatives close but many did not. Even in my own childhood, my Greatest Generation parents lived hundreds of miles from their parents and grandparent visits were a twice a year thing.
Totally. America is a nation of immigrants, right? So most of us had ancestors who permanently moved on. I think now there are ways to mitigate this (cheap flights, zoom calls if you don't yet hate zoom). That said, I think there are advantages for families who maintain physical proximity, so I'm trying to think now about how to do that for my kids. We'll see if it works though!
I usually refrain from shitting on the boomers since most of what they're blamed for is not a matter of personal responsibility. However, on THIS issue, they deserve mountains of scorn. My parents being totally worthless grandparents is a matter of personal choice and as such I'm right to feel contempt.
Yeah, I think most boomers are know are actually good people generally, whether they're effective grandparents specifically or not. But it is weird to me how this seems to be a growing issue today — and does seem to have been in the past (I don't see a lot of great works of literature or film about deadbeat grandparents, for example).
Terrific piece you’ve written here, Jim. I am with you, an elder. I LOVE being involved with my two grandchildren. And I love posting my stories and thoughts about motherhood here on Substack, on Moms Matter. As an elder, like you, I truly feel that I have something to contribute, in fact, lots to contribute. I was an opinionated doctor and mother in past years, and now I am an opinionated retired doctor and grandmother. Having been around the block, so to speak,allows us to throw our two cents worth into the mix. Yes, good elders are valuable. (My parents were not, and I am determined to be!) Keep writing. ❤️
Thank you, and it's so interesting how some of us have learned maybe what not to do from those who came before us :)
Oh my gosh this lady literally left the continent her child was on to go to a place with "a huge focus on family." This makes me so sad!
At the same time, I think we've created a culture where we communicate to grandparents/elders that we DON'T need them, unless they can get with our program and be more like us. The results are bad for everyone...
That's such a great point. And after living that way for a while, it can be really hard to change the way we communicate imo. Or at least, that has been my experience.
I think there is no one good solution to this problem, and many multifaceted reasons for its existence in the first place. I agree with what Haley said above, but I do think the millennial/younger generation may be very slightly to blame for this as well. So many in my generation are utterly wed to the idea of individual autonomy and convinced of their own genius when it comes to (gently) raising children to the point that they have no interest in what the older generation has to say or provide. The concept of “toxic family” and “boundaries” around people who are just, frankly, difficult (and what people aren’t difficult?) has been taken way too far. But on the other hand, a lot of the older people/boomers really don’t have a lot of wisdom or good example to offer. It’s hard to respect an old person who only wants to buy your kids loads of pointless toys and toxic Temu clothes, subvert your parenting, and provide a bad example of what an elder should be. We are blessed to not be in this situation personally, but in general, I guess I would say that the boomer generation is considered the “selfish generation”, but it seems that millennials are mostly continuing that in their own unique way.
I’ve been shocked by the lack of interest in their grandkids from our boomer parents on both sides. Especially the grandpas. I can’t understand it. What a squandered opportunity to do something meaningful with your elder hood. I think the boomers have been the most spoiled, and hence the most entitled generation of all time! You can also see this playing out politically here in Canada as they continue to vote for policies that enrich them at the expense of the coming generations.
Yeah I just don't really understand it. My grandpa was really involved for me, but I don't see that with the next generation. What happened????
I think that many people who "eat, pray, love" their way through life will eventually find that they've done so at the cost of meaning. With that said, I think there is also wisdom in recognizing that family-making is not the only kind of village which one can build and contribute to. The problem, which I feel you've illustrated, is a spirit of hyper-individualism, not strictly an absence of biological children or grandchildren.
Yeah, I know a lady in my neighborhood who lived a genuinely wild and interesting life, but who is more isolated than she'd like to be now. She didn't have kids nor want them, and being childfree actually gave her some interesting experiences she wouldn't have had otherwise. I think she'd be a fantastic aunt — so someone who plugs into a village without having had kids herself. The problem in her case is that she was an only child, and so now she has few people older younger and the same age as her.
I agree with your post 100%.
https://thehomefront.substack.com/p/an-interview-with-nandini.
I talk about the choices I made to live close to my grandchildren. Also contains some ideas for building cross-generational relationships/connections on personal, family, and societal levels.
I loved this. I should have linked it in the post, but I'll have to return to it in a future piece. So great on so many levels.
Great post! With 3 boys under 10 it’s something I think a lot about. I had my first at 31 and have friends that waited significantly longer than that. I’ve often wondered when this trend of waiting much longer to have kids is 2-3 generations old will grand parents just be too old to play any significant role with grandkids. Say your Mom had you at 35, you have a kid at 35 - the grandparent is 80+ as the kid becomes pre-teen
My grandparents were already in their late 60s when I (their first grandchild) was born.
Interestingly, they became MORE involved with their grandkids as they entered their 80s.
Not the norm for most folks, but I am happy they could (eventually) give their daughters and grandkids that kind of community/elder help.
In college I had this recurring debate with friends that started out as a joke/exercise in debating terrible ideas, which was that we should shrink generations to 15 years. You're a parent at 15, a grandparent at 30, great grandparent at 45, etc.
Obviously a thought experiment and not a real thing, but it did eventually occur to me that if we had such abbreviated generations you'd have so many people to pitch in and help that the workload would never be very tough.
Again, I'm not proposing this in the real world, but the opposite seems true as well. Longer generations are going to leave people more isolated.
So my grandma was just buried earlier this month, and I sat at her graveside service hearing all of these stories about how she and my grandpa were pillars of their community in central California. My grandma in particular was a real matriarch, and a theme throughout the proceedings was just how welcoming and inclusive she was to everyone and how supportive and protective she was of her family. A lot of it I knew secondhand, but it was so cool to talk to the actual people my grandma touched (distant cousins, family friends, etc.).
Thinking about how she was as my own grandmother, though -- and I don't know what exactly happened, most likely multiple things -- I'm not sure I can say that she acted as an elder to me necessarily. I imagine as she got older and her health got worse, things just became more difficult in general, and it was the same for my grandpa. But as their grandchildren, my brother, our cousins, and I maybe only saw them once a year, just on the holidays, rarely they traveled to us, so we mostly traveled to see them. The big meals my grandma used to prepare herself fell to my aunts to do, the grilling my grandpa used to do fell to my dad and uncle, things like that. It seems to me that the vigor and will they had to provide so much to a community had decreased by the time their grandchildren came around (and goodness knows many aspects of their community as a whole had probably changed, too, over so many years).
When I think of my parents and in-laws acting as elders to my kids, I don't think they really are either. We're sort of trapped in the same situation of mostly seeing them once a year. Most of them are still working, and all of them are long distance from us. And I can't say any of them are as active in their own communities as the previous generation; my dad is likely the closest they come because he had the example from his own parents, and he's the only one not working at the moment, so he has the biggest amount of time and energy to dedicate to that.
Boy, I dream of being the generation that breaks the trend. I'm already starting in a rough place by not having a village of my own right now. Yet like you said, I guess we have to be the ones that start it all from scratch!
Really interesting thoughts. I'm glad you mentioned the work thing, because in all of this debate that I've seen that is one point people have made: That many of today's elders are still very busy working and thus have less time to do elder-y things. Seems like that's definitely a factor for a lot of families (including mine).
But yeah, I feel like many of us are living an experiment right now where we're going to see if we can be the ones to reverse the trend toward being village-less. Fingers crossed!
So so good, Jim.
thank you so much!
Very thought provoking
Thank you!!