They started talking about “The Age of Grandparents” as early as 2018.
There will be more grandparents soon, predicts demography. The Economist, through studies by the Max Planck Institute of Demography, foresees a couple of billion more grandparents by 2050.
There will be more weekend lunches with lolo and lola, more veteran brains to help with homework, and a fount of doting gifts on birthdays and Christmases. More “gifted” children could be raised from this kinship arrangement.
Philippine population is expected to peak some time only in 2092, a distant 70 years from now. In that period, working age population will still grow, even as more children are being born. The presence of grandparents is balming such population pressures. And no one is more relieved about this than single mothers, who need the most help from grandparenting. It is the moms, after all, who balance childcare and employment.
The great “Apostolic” mission represents a cultural shift. Filipino boomers grew up watching over their siblings, as the broods of yore run to about nine or ten children. Now, in their senior years, they are raising the Gen Z and alphas. Not that the latter are orphaned by their Gen X or millennial parents—but when the aphorism insists “it takes a village” to raise children, the entire clan is already on it, and perhaps the entire species as well.
Lola and Lolo, with their softer approach to parenting, provide a surplus of affection, or even outright shouldering of responsibility. Under their offer of free childcare are schooled children, fed and brushed and costumed for Linggo ng Wika and other school occasions. The trend is seen at the school gates, where many grandparents await the dismissal of their charge. Meanwhile, mom and dad scrape up a living in their day jobs.
Second parenthood?
It’s difficult to narrow down to simple reasons the involvement of grandparents in the lives of their apo.
Psychologists float the idea of a second wind in parenting as essential to self-construction and legacy building.
Evolutionary studies emphasize the roles of elder members of the species (particularly females) in the care of the young to ensure species survival.
And historically speaking, elders have been a reference for social codes and refinement of thought as our species evolved into complex, communicative beings. Filipino ethnolinguistic groups generate wisdom from councils of elders to resolve community conflicts.
Yet, in societies outside the Philippines, grandma and grandpa have not always been around.
Grandparented children are a wondrous phenomenon mostly in Western societies, where nuclear families are prized as independent units. Couples and their children are expected to live apart from their parents.
Retirement homes, pensions, and a generally functioning welfare and social security system give seniors a degree of independence in the twilight years. Meanwhile, daycare and other infrastructural conveniences — proximity of home to school, a reliable public school system — are a convenient confluence for parents to do the parenting.
Here in the Philippines, grandparents are not the mythical presence known only from our parents’ stories. We live with them, and they’re part of the nuclear family.
Grandparents are such a running thread in Philippine society that the fabric would unravel without them. At the heart of it is the unshakeable idea of proximity and cohabitation. Time was when it would have been unimaginable to turn over care for aging parents to retirement homes (if any at all, here in the Philippines).
It could also work the other way: grown children do not move out, and when they do marry no one will judge the choice to move even their families into their parents’ house. The motivation behind this seems far more complex than economics. If ever it is, no one is doing a cost-benefit analysis.
As such, the kinship norm of matrilocality or patrilocality (living with either the mother’s or father’s side of the family upon marriage), includes grandparents in domestic obligations. Yet, curiously, even married adult Filipinos living apart from their parents could drop off their children at lolo’s or lola’s when they are busy. It’s a relationship that’s almost a given in Philippine society.
There have been radical whispers of compensating grandparental childcare, just as there has been increasing clamor for recognizing maternal care.
For where the mental load of parenting threatens to spill over, grandparenting plugs the gaps. It’s the details of child rearing versus the simple provision of needs. The warm, lovingly prepared after-school snack, the been-there-done-that of practical matters like raincoats, schoolbags, and what might be too much ice cream.
Expat Grannies
And it’s not just Philippine infrastructure making an urgent need for “apostolic” missions. Filipino emigrés, especially child-bearing women, know the drill in developed economies. After successfully crossing borders and securing legitimate jobs abroad, they could still find institutional mechanisms such as daycares and more generous parental leaves (which also include paternity leaves in some European countries) insufficient for the entire mental load.
It’s common for OFWs, or the mothers among them, to expatriate their own parents in search of childcare support.
(Frances Mae Ramos is a writer, painter, and French language coach)
