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Comment by foobarian | Hacker News Reader

I can't wrap my head around this insane US model that takes grandparents out of the picture. Maybe it's because moving is so easy? But grandparents love grandkids and they do it for free - it's a win-win.

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I would suggest that most grandparents don't want to look after their grandkids for 40 hours a week. And for that matter, many grandparents have jobs of their own – the average age of a first time grandparent in the USA is 50.

Their parents looked after their kids, it's just the most recent crop of grandparents that decided that it isn't their role anymore.

They'll nag you endlessly about when you'll be having more kids though.

Maybe the separate housing is the root of the problem. In more traditional EU societies, grandparents and parents live in the same house. This means one less set of people needs to generate income to pay for housing.

IME, that is quite unusual in Europe.

Given that every grandparent I know who is in their 50s or 60s are also still working full-time in the US midwest, grandparents aren't always an easy win. My mother would love to spend more time with my son but her job and her health make that an impossibility unfortunately.

Yep! We purposefully live within 30 minutes of both sets of parents, but due to covid and their own careers the arrangement didn't help us out as much as we had anticipated.

Good thing all grandparents are the same, or else our models of how the world should work would have to be a lot more complex

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