Our traditional, storybook images of grandparents no longer seem to apply in 21st century America.
Rocking chairs, firesides, baking cakes, flowery bonnets, and pocket watches—they’ve all but disappeared, even among those who represent the rural culture of the country.
To be downright honest: up until only a single generation ago, our grandparents represented everything that was reassuring and unchanging in a child’s life.
Now, the second-most binding familial relationship is becoming rare.
One of the reasons is that the demographics of grandparenthood have changed drastically during the past 35 years. The average age that a woman has her first child has risen from 23 in the 1960s to 27 today. The average is predicted to reach age 29 by the end of the decade.
So even at 60, plenty of people still have no grandchildren. The anecdotes I hear from friends and acquaintances suggest a deep sense of loss, an aching void in the center of their lives.
Until as recently as the mid-1980s it was normal to become a grandparent before the age of 50. But no one from the older generation can count on being a grandpa or grandma any more.
A growing number of retired people now spend their extra cash or pension money on cruises, holidays and second homes in the South.
They flee in droves to spend their declining years watching the sun go down over Myrtle Beach or the Florida Coast—two favorite retirement spots for the elderly of Southern West Virginia.
But are they happy?
Visit practically any local restaurant and you can witness toddlers whose every step is followed by yearning eyes from sad, would-be grandparents, most of whom would willingly have forgone the new affluence in favor of access to grandchildren of their own.
Not that grandparenthood is all sweetness and light. We all know what it’s like to try to get a 3-year-old to go to bed without first reading a series of bedtime stories, kissing Teddy night-night, fetching a glass of water, singing songs, and waging the battle of the Titans.
Still, there’s joy in watching one’s children’s children grow up. The endless fascination of observing how family likenesses and character traits are passed down, the telling of family anecdotes and history, the bedtime stories and poems—the layers of utterly dependable love and grounding that grandparents provide—all this, rather than the Riverboat cruises and apartments in Florida, should be the great compensation for growing old.
Yet the family is taking on new forms, shifting and changing shape like an amoeba, absorbing a new partner, a child or two, perhaps discarding them later to take in new members, relying on lovers, friends, and neighbors for the solidarity of its everyday functioning.
All this has happened during the past 35 years—hardly more than a single generation.
Those of us born around the time of the Second World War were the last of the “seen but not heard” generation.
We were taught to be well-behaved, respectful, and obedient to adult authority. Our childhood was governed by rules, routine, and manners.
For us, the words “because I say so!” were reason enough to obey.
Today’s children argue back or simply refuse, leaving grandparents bewildered or cross, not least because the parent is quite likely to side with the child.
Today’s avid little consumers are far more materialistic than their grandparents, whose modest offerings may be ignored or even rejected
It’s not uncommon for teenagers to take $20 to the shopping mall and come home broke with nothing to show for the money spent.
For an older generation accustomed or compelled to be frugal, this behavior seems the epitome of madness.
Even when it comes to reading or playing games, grandparents often find themselves on the other side of a cultural gulf. Only a minority of over-60s are computer-literate, whereas most 10-year-olds are quite comfortable frolicking on the web and the internet.
The old card games such as Rook and Setback and Rummy—games played endlessly in the days before TV—are rarely played today, and many children (used to the breakneck speed of computer and console games) lack the patience to learn them from grandparents.
In the end, what grandparents really morn is losing the chance to hand down the family history: its anecdotes, jokes, memories, and faces in photograph albums.
Children need to be anchored in their past, and for the young this is a real deprivation.
The old people, meanwhile, have been deprived of their posterity, the only form of immortality open to them.
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Top of the morning!