A couple of years ago, my boomer parents moved from Oregon, where we live, to the East Coast. Because we live in a town with only a regional flight network, it takes two flights, several hundred dollars per ticket, and approximately 12 hours to reach them. They have one child (me) and one grandchild (my daughter). I remember telling my husband tearfully one night that I’d never in a million years be able to figure out why they were okay with the new reality: that instead of seeing their only daughter and grandchild at least once a week, they’d now be seeing us maybe once a year. At their age, that means they are likely to see us maybe ten or twelve more times before they die, if we’re lucky. So that’s heartbreaking. But, to be honest, even while they lived near us, they never once volunteered for childcare. We had to ask, every single time. I finally came to terms with the fact that they just don’t want to grandparent. I’d think my story was a one-off, but I hear the same thing from my friends. As just one example I could give, a married couple we know with two kids, both parents working full-time, has both sets of healthy, retired grandparents living within a 45-minute drive. Yet my friend reports that neither her parents nor her husband’s parents have ever offered to keep the kids for an evening so they can go on a date, much less for a weekend so they can get away together for the first time since their honeymoon. And certainly not during the workday. It’s like pulling teeth every time they have to ask one of the grandparents for help, with lots of hemming and hawing and complaining and guilt. Not to mention the third degree about how mom and dad are planning to use that free time. And these two particular kids are truly delightful! Our friends have now mostly given up asking for help. So I see how people can start to cling to the notion of a friend circle or chosen family, picking up some of that slack, even when that’s likely not ideal. For a lot of us, the boomer grandparents really have abdicated, as you noted, leaving the less-viable option as maybe the only real choice.
Disregard me if this is too much prying, but I'm so curious why they moved. I feel like most west coasters I know end up in places like AZ. Going all the way to the East Coast is SO far.
Not prying too much at all! My parents are southerners and moved from Oregon to North Carolina to (a) get back to a familiar, warm climate (at least as compared to dreary, dark Oregon) and (b) be around familiar kinds of people, other southerners with their warm, gossipy ways. I love Oregonians, but the weather and culture here means that casual, unplanned encounters are kind of hard to come by. I think they just really missed the random chitchat with strangers and having common cultural touchstones to gab about at the library, in line at the grocery store, etc. They just never really made friends their age here but already have a crew of buddies after having moved to NC just a couple of years ago. And I get it. I miss that part of the South too. And I want them to be happy and fulfilled in their daily lives. I just wish it weren't so very far away, and that they'd somehow made room in their worldview to take on their elder role for our family.
Yeah that totally makes sense. I grew up on the west coast and have worked with a lot of east coast people, and gradually I realized that there were certain cultural things that get baked in based on what feels like home. I could move to the east coast, but I don't know if it'd ever feel like home. All of which is a long winded way of saying, I can totally get why someone would want to move back to their home turf.
But also, it's so tough having family far away. I have some family on the east coast and we see them once a year if we're lucky. It's rough bc they're actually some of my favorite family members!
Oooof. It's heart-breaking and pretty infuriating to hear these stories (I've heard them firsthand, as well).
The Lamp piece he shared was quoted in another by Louise Perry (https://www.louiseperry.co.uk/p/we-will-all-become-boring) which you might find interesting for teasing this phenomenon out more. The quote I could not stop thinking about:
"But there is a trade off. At a societal level, we can be rich, or we can be communitarian. I don’t think we can be both – at least, not for long. The Baby Boomers came closest to enjoying both simultaneously, but only because they were born during an ideological changing of the guard. They enjoyed the high trust, family-centric culture cultivated by their parents and grandparents, and then got to enjoy the youthful rejection of all of that culture’s downsides. But that’s a trick that can only be pulled once."
It's interesting: I can only think of one millennial parent in my sphere who doesn't deal with this, and that person is a first gen immigrant whose parent moved here from the other side of the world to alloparent the grandkids. That particular story is a cool one, but pretty much every other parent I've talked about this with has said their own parents are weirdly disengaged. And I guess in the next decade or so they're going to find if that'll come back to bite them in old age (I suspect it will and the boomers will be the loneliness generation in history)
I loved that quote about being rich vs communitarian. I've been thinking about it ever since I first read it.
Me too - that quote has been circling around in my head for a couple of days. and maybe ... being communitarian IS being rich? And we've just gotten confused about what being rich actually is?
Nov 17, 2023·edited Nov 17, 2023Liked by Jim Dalrymple II
As for footnote 2..... we (and therefore our kids) see my husband's parents twice a year, since they are many states away. It's honestly pretty devastating when my husband thinks about it.
Also, a few weeks after I read about The Villages I saw someone on social media sharing photos from a family trip to visit their mother.... at The Villages. It was kind of a twilight zone moment where worlds collided. haha
Man that's rough re: your inlaws. We recently had a grandparent visiting who was shocked by how much the grandkids had grown. I don't think she even realized how long it had been since she had been up, and how much of her grandkids' lives she was just completely missing. It's sad.
Hopefully you've seen this by now, Jim, but please when you get the chance, we need your thoughts on this article. It address the village aspect and a lot of other things you post about. I'd be thrilled to hear your opinion on it.
So I've read through that, and I think it very accurately sums up the issues that led me to start writing this blog.
One thing that always feels underbaked in articles like this — and this is the case here too — is the "solutions" section. The solutions always feel vague, very pie-in-the-sky, and not likely to happen in a useful time frame. I suspect that's because the problem is so far-reaching; it has to do with the cost of housing, childcare, attitudes about old age, zoning and real estate development, etc etc. I suspect what's happened is we've accepted an anti-village worldview, and that has in turn informed every policy decision we make. Ergo, one or two good policies aren't going to reverse things because we're still operating in that anti-village paradigm.
I'm not sure what the solution here is. I guess my own solution was to write this blog to attempt to change minds, and to restructure my own life to prioritize the village in the hope that an individual solution will be more efficient and faster than a systemic one.
But I guess I do think that the cultural shift is happening. The Times article is a good example, as would be a book like Hunt Gather Parent. And I hope it continues!
A couple of years ago, my boomer parents moved from Oregon, where we live, to the East Coast. Because we live in a town with only a regional flight network, it takes two flights, several hundred dollars per ticket, and approximately 12 hours to reach them. They have one child (me) and one grandchild (my daughter). I remember telling my husband tearfully one night that I’d never in a million years be able to figure out why they were okay with the new reality: that instead of seeing their only daughter and grandchild at least once a week, they’d now be seeing us maybe once a year. At their age, that means they are likely to see us maybe ten or twelve more times before they die, if we’re lucky. So that’s heartbreaking. But, to be honest, even while they lived near us, they never once volunteered for childcare. We had to ask, every single time. I finally came to terms with the fact that they just don’t want to grandparent. I’d think my story was a one-off, but I hear the same thing from my friends. As just one example I could give, a married couple we know with two kids, both parents working full-time, has both sets of healthy, retired grandparents living within a 45-minute drive. Yet my friend reports that neither her parents nor her husband’s parents have ever offered to keep the kids for an evening so they can go on a date, much less for a weekend so they can get away together for the first time since their honeymoon. And certainly not during the workday. It’s like pulling teeth every time they have to ask one of the grandparents for help, with lots of hemming and hawing and complaining and guilt. Not to mention the third degree about how mom and dad are planning to use that free time. And these two particular kids are truly delightful! Our friends have now mostly given up asking for help. So I see how people can start to cling to the notion of a friend circle or chosen family, picking up some of that slack, even when that’s likely not ideal. For a lot of us, the boomer grandparents really have abdicated, as you noted, leaving the less-viable option as maybe the only real choice.
Disregard me if this is too much prying, but I'm so curious why they moved. I feel like most west coasters I know end up in places like AZ. Going all the way to the East Coast is SO far.
Not prying too much at all! My parents are southerners and moved from Oregon to North Carolina to (a) get back to a familiar, warm climate (at least as compared to dreary, dark Oregon) and (b) be around familiar kinds of people, other southerners with their warm, gossipy ways. I love Oregonians, but the weather and culture here means that casual, unplanned encounters are kind of hard to come by. I think they just really missed the random chitchat with strangers and having common cultural touchstones to gab about at the library, in line at the grocery store, etc. They just never really made friends their age here but already have a crew of buddies after having moved to NC just a couple of years ago. And I get it. I miss that part of the South too. And I want them to be happy and fulfilled in their daily lives. I just wish it weren't so very far away, and that they'd somehow made room in their worldview to take on their elder role for our family.
Yeah that totally makes sense. I grew up on the west coast and have worked with a lot of east coast people, and gradually I realized that there were certain cultural things that get baked in based on what feels like home. I could move to the east coast, but I don't know if it'd ever feel like home. All of which is a long winded way of saying, I can totally get why someone would want to move back to their home turf.
But also, it's so tough having family far away. I have some family on the east coast and we see them once a year if we're lucky. It's rough bc they're actually some of my favorite family members!
Oooof. It's heart-breaking and pretty infuriating to hear these stories (I've heard them firsthand, as well).
The Lamp piece he shared was quoted in another by Louise Perry (https://www.louiseperry.co.uk/p/we-will-all-become-boring) which you might find interesting for teasing this phenomenon out more. The quote I could not stop thinking about:
"But there is a trade off. At a societal level, we can be rich, or we can be communitarian. I don’t think we can be both – at least, not for long. The Baby Boomers came closest to enjoying both simultaneously, but only because they were born during an ideological changing of the guard. They enjoyed the high trust, family-centric culture cultivated by their parents and grandparents, and then got to enjoy the youthful rejection of all of that culture’s downsides. But that’s a trick that can only be pulled once."
It's interesting: I can only think of one millennial parent in my sphere who doesn't deal with this, and that person is a first gen immigrant whose parent moved here from the other side of the world to alloparent the grandkids. That particular story is a cool one, but pretty much every other parent I've talked about this with has said their own parents are weirdly disengaged. And I guess in the next decade or so they're going to find if that'll come back to bite them in old age (I suspect it will and the boomers will be the loneliness generation in history)
I loved that quote about being rich vs communitarian. I've been thinking about it ever since I first read it.
Me too - that quote has been circling around in my head for a couple of days. and maybe ... being communitarian IS being rich? And we've just gotten confused about what being rich actually is?
As for footnote 2..... we (and therefore our kids) see my husband's parents twice a year, since they are many states away. It's honestly pretty devastating when my husband thinks about it.
Also, a few weeks after I read about The Villages I saw someone on social media sharing photos from a family trip to visit their mother.... at The Villages. It was kind of a twilight zone moment where worlds collided. haha
Man that's rough re: your inlaws. We recently had a grandparent visiting who was shocked by how much the grandkids had grown. I don't think she even realized how long it had been since she had been up, and how much of her grandkids' lives she was just completely missing. It's sad.
Hopefully you've seen this by now, Jim, but please when you get the chance, we need your thoughts on this article. It address the village aspect and a lot of other things you post about. I'd be thrilled to hear your opinion on it.
https://www.businessinsider.com/millennial-gen-z-parents-struggle-lonely-childcare-costs-money-friends-2023-11
So I've read through that, and I think it very accurately sums up the issues that led me to start writing this blog.
One thing that always feels underbaked in articles like this — and this is the case here too — is the "solutions" section. The solutions always feel vague, very pie-in-the-sky, and not likely to happen in a useful time frame. I suspect that's because the problem is so far-reaching; it has to do with the cost of housing, childcare, attitudes about old age, zoning and real estate development, etc etc. I suspect what's happened is we've accepted an anti-village worldview, and that has in turn informed every policy decision we make. Ergo, one or two good policies aren't going to reverse things because we're still operating in that anti-village paradigm.
I'm not sure what the solution here is. I guess my own solution was to write this blog to attempt to change minds, and to restructure my own life to prioritize the village in the hope that an individual solution will be more efficient and faster than a systemic one.
But I guess I do think that the cultural shift is happening. The Times article is a good example, as would be a book like Hunt Gather Parent. And I hope it continues!