Grandparents often spend more than 17 hours a month and £20 per day looking after their grandchildren but receive no financial reward, says research which suggests many are being exploited by their families.
And?
It\’s your damn genes you\’re caring for, it\’s what, in Darwinian terms, you are here on this earth to do: raise your own progeny and help to raise those of your progeny.
Get on with it and stop moaning please.
It is somehow sickening seeing the extent that some people seek to integrate normal family operations into the machineries of the State. My father in law (Godlovehim) never tires telling his daughter that if he knew Grandchildren were so much fun, he would have had them first.
With the same logic who should pay us parents?
Hah! In many countries, Russia being one of them, it is expected that the grandparents will raise the kids whilst the parents work. My mother-in-law is going to be demanding her expected workload on the day my wife pops a sprog.
In Russia most grandparents still have jobs when their children produce grandsprogs so they cannot be looking after them. Don’t buy into propaganda, for goodness sake.
As it happens some grandparents are exploited and some love it. Those who are exploited can get out of it by suddenly deciding to go round the world or take up all sorts of new courses or finding that they prefer to live several hundred miles away from their offspring after all. Those who love it will do it, comforted by the thought that at the end of the day they can hand the tired, fractious objects back to their parents who will have to deal with them. Heh!
Helen
Before having a pop it might pay to do a little research: I think you’ll find that Tim Newman is based in Russia. With a Russian wife. And a Russian, soon to be Babushka, mother-in-law.
In my area of the USA, it is very common for one of the grandparents to provide daily care for their grandkids, and (estimating) about 10% of my children’s mates were being raised by their grandparents. Some seem thankful, some seem to resent it. Some are paid for it.
My sister’s six-year-old is the light of my parents’ lives. I honestly believe she’s extended their lives by several years. Now that the great-grandchildren are coming thick and fast, they couldn’t be happier.
That’s not all.
When we were little, our Dad used to go to work and bring money home, and our Mam used to cook meals for us, buy us shoes and coats, and they used to take us for picnics on the beach. And they never sent us the invoice.
Of course, that was on planet Earth. Not everybody comes from there…..
Is not grandparent child care a rather doomed idea.
With the disappearance of marriage. The high divorce rate. the erosion of death and disease. Plus the fact that any male interested in childcare is immediately suspect. And the notion that everyone must work and so be a taxpayer
– any ‘it is your genes thing ‘ must be a feeble idea.
So volunteering for things is akin to exploitation. Had I but known! I’ve been so abused…
£20 a day seems a bit blimmin steep though.
Typically, grandma is looking after the pre-school and infant school children. I think that £20 must include rather a lot of petrol money, because it takes a lot of nippers to eat their way through £20 a day.