Man Calls Out His Boomer Parents Who Never Help With Their Grandkids Despite His Dad's Parents Watching Him His Entire Childhood
His grandparents played a day-to-day role in his life. But his parents can't be bothered.
Monkey Business Images / Canva Pro Many millennials, Gen Zers, and even many Gen Xers grew up with our grandparents playing pivotal roles in our lives.
But more and more, that is proving not to be the case now that these generations are parents themselves. And one dad on Reddit is fed up.
The dad is angry his boomer parents never help with their grandkids.
Sadly, his frustrations seem to be part of a growing trend. All over social media, from frustrated tweets to myriad TikToks and even an entire r/absentgrandparents subReddit, many parents of young children say they feel abandoned by their boomer parents because of their seeming disinterest in grandparenting.
Many of them share similar frustrations to the ones this dad shared in the r/BoomersBeingFools subReddit — they can't be bothered with their grandkids despite knowing firsthand how much help parents need when their kids are small.
His own parents leaned on his grandparents for help throughout his childhood, including for daily tasks like school runs.
The dad and his wife are in their mid-30s and have a soon-to-be 10-year-old daughter. He wrote that his childhood was "great" and that his boomer parents "never let me go without." But part of the way they were able to do that was by leaning on their own parents to help them rear their kids.
"I and my half-sister were pawned off on my grandparents EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT I can remember for a sleepover," he wrote. "Saturday mornings were spent at their house," and on most Sunday mornings "we were back over there for breakfast."
For many parents reading this that probably sounds like a utopic dream, but it didn't stop there. "My grandfather took us both to school EVERY SINGLE DAY without fail," and that's why he had a close relationship with his grandparents.
But his own boomer parents are barely even in contact with their grandchildren and often refuse to help them.
"Fast forward to now," the dad wrote. "The first half of her life they would come see her [or I would] take her over to their house at least [once] per week," he went on to say. But they rarely offered more than that. "No sleepovers, no meals. Nothing," he said.
Now that his daughter is older, "they see her only around holidays. Never call her, only text me [once] per month or so to check in."
His mom still works from home, but his dad is retired. Still, "they put in zero effort to see their ONLY granddaughter, never ask if we need a break, never ever offer ANYTHING in a way of assisting."
Even when he has asked, he's gotten pointed refusals. "I asked grandad when he retired if he could assist in the taking to school [and] watching her so we don’t spend our savings on daycare and just got a flat out 'no,' he’s retired and doesn’t plan to do [expletive]," he went on to say. "Apparently it does NOT take a village to raise a child."
He braced for backlash from his fellow Redditors for his blunt takedown of his daughter's boomer grandparents. But the response was much the opposite.
Many parents expressed similar frustrations with their kids' boomer grandparents.
"My kids once exclaimed 'You have a mommy?!??!!'" wrote one parent on Reddit whose boomer parents have fallen into the absent grandparent trend. "Our parents badger us to have kids yet don’t want to provide the same support they got," another wrote.
"My parents harassed me for years to have kids," another mom chimed in. "I’m pregnant now and they’ve [moved] to Florida to hang with the rest of their boomer buddies."
There's no hard data on the subject, but these absent boomer grandparents are not necessarily the rule.
Lots of boomer grandparents do indeed recognize today's economic challenges and are stepping up to the plate, and several people on Reddit spoke glowingly of how lucky they are to have involved boomer parents as grandparents.
Still, mental health professionals like Los Angeles-based psychologist Leslie Dobson, say many millennial clients feel "abandoned" by their boomer parents now that they have kids of their own.
And with childcare costs completely out of control in America, this is becoming untenable for many, if not most. Even more frustrating is recent economic data showing that, at least compared to the rest of us, boomers are flush with cash.
They own half the wealth in the country according to the Federal Reserve, though it's important to note that the number of boomers who are or at least feel incapable of retiring due to economic forces is also skyrocketing.
Any way you slice it, the situation sounds like a mess, and as nearly always, it's like the people suffering the most are the kids themselves — both from the loss of the grandparent bond and from having to endure their parents' stress from the lack of help.
The "village" is definitely a thing of the past, it seems. Only time will tell what impact it's having.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.