Not your father’s grandparents

Earl Fowler

It’s not a mainstream trend or anything. But it’s not a freaky coincidence either.

We are not your father’s grandparents. Or even our own.

One of the things I’ve noticed lately is that friends are becoming first-time grandparents relatively late in life — in their late sixties or early seventies — rather than in their fifties as my wife and I did.

It’s not hard to figure out why. To pursue educational opportunities, careers and simply to set aside a nest egg, women have been putting off having babies since the oldest Baby Boomers lit the torch on the Statue of Puberty. That’s especially true for the young adults of today, who have little hope of owning a house unless their parents are in a position to help with the formidable downpayment.

According to Statistics Canada, the average age of first-time mothers in this country had steadily increased from 23.5 years of age in 1965 to 29.4 in 2019. In 1965, the average baby was born to a 28-year-old mother. By 2019, the average age of childbearing for Canadian moms was just south of 32.

Canada is in no way an outlier here among Western countries. According to a School of Public Policy paper I just read, the average first-time mother in Spain in 2019 was 30.8 years old, the average Italian 31.0.

We Boomers, too, tended to be older than were previous generations in starting our families. And it doesn’t take that Grade 11 slide rule, last seen mouldering away in a cardboard box behind the furnace, to figure out that if a woman born in 1950 has her first child at 40 and her daughter does the same, she’ll be 80 when holding that first grandchild for the first time in 2030.

Anyone have the faintest idea how to use a slide rule any more?

The postponement of family formation has all kinds of social policy implications, naturally, but one that I haven’t seen addressed at all is the ineluctable effect on the grandchild-grandparent dynamic.

There are plenty of notable exceptions, of course. But as a rule, grandparents in their forties and fifties are likely to be more energetic and plugged into whatever it is kids are apt to be enthused about — the pop stars de jour, music, video games, superhero movies and so on — than seniors more obsessed with hip replacements and telling windy, ostensibly instructive but increasingly irrelevant stories about  the way things used to be.

For thousands of years, before the breakneck pace of technological advances rendered most traditional knowledge obsolete, the way things used to be for the grandparents was still pretty much the way things were for their grandkids. Revered elders had valuable information to impart: traditions, skills, knowledge, life lessons, hard-won wisdom.

Today, we useless old farts stand blinking uncomprehendingly before video game consoles and peering cluelessly at content on social media platforms, eliciting only smirks and pitying glances when we venture a guess that TikTok is a breath mint and Bad Bunny an Energizer battery that leaks.

Though my grandsons pretend to enjoy it when I pretend to enjoy watching them blow the bloody heads off adversaries in realistic military war games, they have little tolerance for my enthralling stories about my all-time high score on Ms. Pac-Man.

“Or was that Pong? Jeepers, the nifty, neato way we manoeuvred those in-game panels by moving them vertically against the screen with little plastic levers like Q-tips to hit that ball thingy back and forth! Still gives me chills. No, wait. My suspenders have come loose again, dagnabit!

“Oh, and Dilly Bars were bigger then and pretty girls on roller skates brought trays of Mama and Papa burgers to your car if your dad flicked the headlight on. At our grandpa’s, radios were furniture. Radios? Gadzooks! You don’t know what a radio is?”

I gave up on the pop star world in 1969, the year The Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar” was named No. 1 on Billboard’s year-end countdown, so I acknowledge right off that hopper that I’m not qualified to opine about new groups that these kids listen to like The Doobie Brothers or Aerosmith.

Say, anyone see where I put the darn Q-tips?

The point is: There’s a widening generation gap there, by gum, and the memory millions of the current crop of children will have of their grandparents will be of us growing older and frailer, increasingly out of touch and losing our fastballs, instead of the people they would have met if the difference in our ages had been 50 years instead of  70.

While younger iterations of grandparents were invaluable in helping to raise their children’s children, and many still are, more and more of us will be in need of care ourselves by the time those kids are old enough to figure out what’s going on.

As a mitigating factor, older people today are generally healthier and more active than the seniors of yore. We also live longer. The life expectancy in Canada in 2024 is 83.11 years, up from about 68 in 1950.

Which brings us to another paradigm shift. Not all women are delaying having babies, of course, but even those who start young are generally having fewer.

When I was a kid, it was common to have 20 or 30 cousins but rare to still have one’s great-grandparents around. Today, in those families where both the Boomers and their children had babies while still in their 20s, it’s rare for those youngsters to have more than a handful of cousins but almost routine for one or more of the great-grandparents to still be kicking.

Well, breathing. Through an attractive nasal cannula.

In a sense, families have gone from a pyramidal, three-generation model — with grandparents at the top and plenty of children at the base — to spare, vertical ladders spanning four generations, with great-grandparents at the top and fewer children on the bottom rung.

Fewer. Or none at all.

The third big change is that for entirely understandable reasons — overpopulation, climate change, pestilence, unending warfare, famine, pollution, the breakdown of civilization, Trump vs. Biden — choosing not to have children is no longer the difficult or socially unacceptable option that it had been throughout almost all of human history. It makes an awful lot of sense.

Some of my friends chose not to have children 40 years ago. For others, it’s their children who have decided the buck stops here — not to mention 3.7 billion years of evolution of life on Earth. Voluntary childlessness wasn’t unheard of in our day, but it’s way more of a thing today than it used to be.

As is all the weeping and gnashing of teeth by grandparents who don’t want to be defined by traditional grandparent names, such as grandpa and grandma or papa and nana or bubbe and zayde, on the cry-me-a-river ground that “I’m not that old.”

Some want to be called by their first names or by cutesy titles like “glam-ma.” I just read of a pair of geezers in denial who want to be addressed by their grandkids as the “duke and duchess.”

Land sakes! In the first place, names that seemed cute when your grandson was two will come across as borderline creepy when he’s a teenager. And second, cutesy names are — in not so modern parlance — bandages on amputated legs. If your kid has a kid, you are that old, granddad. And as your own grandparents used to suggest whenever things started to get out of hand, you should be seen but not absurd.

Which brings me to my final point. And I do mean final.

In the mid-20th century, when most of the grandparents of today’s grandparents rounded their little lives with a big sleep, they tended to pass prematurely from the stage with a fatal stroke or heart attack beyond the ken of medical science at the time. Or at least beyond the ability of Gladstone bag-toting physicians to repair.

Today, we’re far more likely to scar our young progeny for life with slow, senescent, doddering descents into dementia or ALS or any of the thousand unnatural shocks that wrinkled flesh is heir to. A consummation devoutly to resist.

But I hate to end on such a downer. Remember that it’s always darkest before the dawn and that as celebrated Canadian philosopher Jim Carrey once reflected, “Maybe there is no actual place called hell. Maybe hell is just having to listen to our grandparents breathe through their noses while they’re eating sandwiches.”