What No One’s Saying About Grandparents and Childcare

If there’s one thing parents can all agree on, it’s that childcare is a never-ending puzzle. With anywhere from 65 to 85 days off school each year—not to mention the rising cost of daycare—many families inevitably lean on grandparents to fill in the gaps. In fact, a November 2024 National Poll on Healthy Aging found that nearly half of grandparents (49 percent) with grandchildren under 18 provide some form of care, and one in five do so at least weekly. But when we say “grandparents,” who are we really talking about?

For my husband and me, with both sets of parents living thousands of miles away, grandparent help is more of a rarity. On the two (!) occasions in the past six years when we’ve had a grandparent pick up a child from school or stay overnight, it’s always been grandma. Which made me wonder: when policymakers and society at large suggest that grandparents can offset our childcare deficit, is that really just another way of saying women will step in…again?

To dig deeper, I polled 30 families who rely on grandparents for childcare, whether on a weekly basis or just once in a while. My first question was simple: Which grandparent helps out more often?

The results weren’t surprising: 63.3 percent of respondents said grandma, while just 6.7 percent said grandpa. Thirty percent said both.

The disparity extended to trust, too. Fifty-seven percent of parents said they’d trust grandma with any childcare task, compared to just 27 percent who felt the same about grandpa.

Take Megan, who moved across the country to be closer to both sets of grandparents in Florida. “Neither grandfather does anything,” she admits, adding that her mother-in-law—formerly a kindergarten teacher—shows up every week with snacks, crafts and new toys, while her own mom is also “great and very sweet.” As for the grandads? “My dad is barely around, and when he is, he only visits for like 10 minutes so it’s not enough to really do anything with them. My father-in-law will take out his iPad or phone to show them videos.” (In fact, 80 percent of parents in my survey said they trust grandma to enforce screen time rules, compared to just 53 percent for grandpa.)

Of course, not all families have the same experience. Rachel, a mom of two in New York, says her father-in-law is the one who really leans in: “He is OK letting my son talk about Pokémon for hours and even makes extra effort to learn the rules. He'll sit and make conversation for hours and even do bedtime.”

And yet, when you look at the data side by side, an interesting picture emerges:

What parents trust grandma to do:

• Dressing kids (100%)
• Cooking meals (100%)
• Handling the bedtime routine (97%)
• Giving medicine (87%)
• Managing screen time rules (80%)
• Watching kids overnight (93%)

What parents trust grandpa to do:

• Dressing kids (67%)
• Cooking meals (63%)
• Handling the bedtime routine (70%)
• Giving medicine (63%)
• Managing screen time rules (53%)
• Watching kids overnight (70%)

The one category where grandpa has a slight edge? Driving. Eighty percent of parents said they trust him behind the wheel, compared to 77 percent for grandma.

It seems like the real story here isn’t that grandparents are stepping in to fill the childcare gap—it’s that grandmothers are.

All this isn’t to discount the work that many grandfathers do—whether it’s being the go-to grandparent for childcare or just being the fun one who shows kids how to pull his finger. When my own father-in-law came for a visit recently, he didn’t change diapers or make dinner for my kids, but he did play with them endlessly (and sure, show them videos on his phone). And this gave me the opportunity to cook dinner without interruptions which was, frankly, amazing. So to be clear—all help is helpful. And yet, anecdotal evidence and my (admittedly not super scientific) survey does tell us something.

It seems like the real story here isn’t that grandparents are stepping in to fill the childcare gap—it’s that grandmothers are. And until we acknowledge that, we’re just outsourcing the cracks in our childcare system to yet another generation of women.