A friend of a friend is having a baby and, as part of the preparations – the building of a cot, the buying of a pram, the… I don’t know, the sageing of the cervix – she has booked her parents in for something called “grandparenting classes”. If you are anything like me, upon reading that phrase your mouth will have formed a sort of figure of eight shape and you will have made a sound like a bear. Wait, let’s rewind.
A combination of soaring childcare costs and the bottomless “cost-of-living crisis” (I refuse, sorry, to write this dystopian phrase without quote marks that ensure it is read with appropriate horror) means grandparents are doing a lot more babysitting than ever before. One study suggests a quarter of grandparents are providing up to 15 hours a week – a similar number say they are retiring early to help children who are trying to work despite a costly and inflexible childcare system. One in 10 are doing full-time childcare and of those grandparents still in work, two-fifths sacrifice up to three weeks of annual leave to do so. After bringing up their children, this generation’s “silver army” has been enlisted to also bring up their children’s children. Which is, sometimes, a privilege and a joy, and other times, a tense imposition that causes resentment, guilt and hushed arguments that have the flavour of bad gin.
I should know. I have two children with the unimaginable luck to have four healthy grandparents who live locally, whose houses they swim through artlessly, leaving devastation in their wake. In the past we’ve had structured childcare plans with them – now it is casual, but no less gorgeous. Yesterday my mum and I were at the cinema, when my partner texted saying he had to go out. I was desperate to see the end of the film, so my mum leaned over and said she’d go and look after the kids until I got home. That kind of thing. But when our parents babysit for stretches of time – which they do gracefully and with love – we see their faces at the end and we recognise the wide-eyed look of existential exhaustion, and we’re reminded that these were meant to be their post-care years, when they could relax. But sorry, no.
I called my mum to ask about grandparenting courses. Turns out, they’re a whole thing. Grantenatal classes cost around £40 a session (though I hear rumours of a course that costs £300 – I guess this is for luxury babies) and she knows a couple of people who’ve done them. Do they learn, I wondered, how to offer 16 desserts a day? Do they learn how to secrete tissues in their sleeve? Well there’s some CPR training, apparently. A bit about not keeping the baby too warm. But it’s designed around newborns and, as she pointed out to me, it’s a whole other story as the children grow up. Much of what you need to learn then, she said pointedly, is how to just shut up.
How to become a perfect vessel, how to not take things personally, how to navigate the ethics of giving “treats” and accept your role as a kind of middle manager in a company that loves drama, but has no HR department. You need three recipes, she says, and all of them are for plain pasta. And you have to try your very best to respect your children’s rules. You must avoid saying, “Well, when you were their age I didn’t [insert action currently being discussed at a high pitch in the kitchen] and you turned out fine” even if they are [quoting her here] “influenced by whatever ‘You’ve got to put them in a car seat’ nonsense that’s around at the time.” Then she said something else about love or delight but, of course, I’d finished listening by then.
The courses in grandparenting older kids, I imagine, would be similarly parent-focused. It’s not the babies they need to learn how to nurture, it’s this tricky new relationship with their child. Like NCT classes, there would be lessons in how to breathe through the pain. How to respectfully smile through the fact that you cancelled plans, because your daughter has to work, by which she means “playing on the internet and writing in bed”. How to breathe through the impulse to offer your opinion on, for example, the brevity of your granddaughter’s top for fear of receiving a lesson in body shaming when in fact actually it’s very cold outside. How to accommodate all kinds of allergies, even imagined ones, and how to keep loving your adult child even though their parenting makes an absolute mockery of you.
I was vaguely outraged when I learned of these courses. Not only is my generation leaning heavily on parents to help us survive, but we are forcing them to prove they’re good enough first? I softened after hanging up the phone. I was reminded that the anxiety around parenting is not limited to those approaching it for the first time – instead this fear can linger and mutate. So if a class gives someone more confidence to grandparent happily, then I’m in. After all, these are the people keeping our families upright. The true test is in dealing with these dickheads they raised first time round.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on X @EvaWiseman