A few years ago, when Stacia Bourne and her husband would talk about having a second child, the conversation often turned to money.
"We were thinking we couldn't afford it," said Bourne, a University of Delaware psychology professor who lives in Maryland.
Their first child, George, was born in 2020 and started daycare when he was 2. "The cost for childcare for him is about the same as our mortgage," Bourne said. The prospect of taking on the expense of another child gave the couple pause when deciding whether to grow their family.
That was until Bourne's mother, Mary Jo Galusha, 67, made an offer: If Bourne wanted to have another baby, Galusha said, she'd retire and relocate from Idaho to the East Coast to help provide childcare.
Several months later, her phone rang. "I got a call that Stacia was expecting and that I better start planning on retiring," Galusha recalled with a laugh.
She retired from her job as a schoolteacher, packed up her belongings and drove cross-country in her red Volkswagen Beetle. The grandmother of five now lives in Newark, Del., and has since traded in the VW Bug for an SUV in order to fit two car seats in the back row more easily. Robin, who was born in late 2024, spends around 30 hours a week in Galusha's care while Bourne and her husband work.
"It's a joy," Galusha said. "It's like magic to watch them grow up."
Grandparents helping to take care of their grandchildren is nothing new. But the surging cost of childcare in the U.S. has made familial support even more critical for some parents who need childcare and may not otherwise be able to afford it.
According to the group Child Care Aware of America, the average annual cost of childcare for children under 5 in the U.S. in 2025 was $13,184. In some cases, even higher childcare costs can rival the price of rent or college tuition.
Families that are unable to shoulder those expenses or find open seats at daycare facilities are increasingly leaning on older generations for help, said Nicole Jorwic, chief program officer at the national caregiving group Caring Across Generations.
"The reality is that because this country hasn't invested in a childcare infrastructure that is flexible and affordable and reliable, grandparents are filling in the gaps that the service system leaves behind," she said.
A growing need for childcare
A heap of factors is making finding suitable childcare a necessity for a growing number of families across the U.S., said Madonna Harrington Meyer, a Syracuse University sociology professor who studies aging and grandparenting.
For one, the number of households where both parents work full time has steadily risen in recent decades. According to Pew Research Center, 52% of different-sex couples with kids had two parents working full-time jobs in 2025, compared with just 31% in 1975.
There has also been a steady increase in the number of single moms in the U.S. over the course of decades. And families of children with disabilities — of which there are a growing number nationwide — often struggle to find childcare providers that can offer the specialized care necessary.
"All of these things are reasons people turn to grandparents," Harrington Meyer said.
One of those grandparents is Jerry Larkin, 66, a former machinist who moved in with his daughter's family in Tulsa, Okla., during the COVID-19 pandemic to help take care of his twin grandsons, one of whom requires additional medical care.
Larkin said he used to think he was alone in devoting so much time to caregiving, until he learned through social media and elsewhere that many families struggle with similar issues and have come to rely on grandparents for an extra hand.
"Being raised in the '60s, there were a lot of stay-at-home moms and everything, so this wasn't really a thing," he said. "But now that everybody's got to work two jobs, it's become a thing."
Why grandparents help
Nowadays, millions of grandparents are pitching in to care for their grandchildren. One poll found that nearly half of respondents with grandchildren under age 18 took care of them at least once every few months.
According to an AARP report on grandparents from June, the top reasons grandparents provide care are the children's parents are working or busy, and it allows the grandparents to spend quality time with their grandkids.
The median amount of time grandparents spent caring for their grandchildren (excluding grandparents who are their primary caregivers as well as those who provide no care) is 200 hours per year, or roughly 3.8 hours per week, AARP data shows.
Harrington Meyer said parents often find it easier to have grandparents look after their children than other childcare arrangements, since they may already have shared parenting philosophies and since the care comes at no or minimal cost. (AARP estimated that grandparents provide around $731 billion worth of unpaid caregiving annually.)
"But perhaps the biggest benefit is that they are so flexible," Harrington Meyer added. "Unlike a formal daycare situation, often grandparents will come to your house, or they'll alternate between watching the children at their own house and at the grandparent's house."
And it's not just kids and parents who benefit, but also grandparents themselves. Older people may experience a mental boost by tending to their grandchildren, with one study showing higher scores on memory and verbal fluency tests in grandparents who provided care.
A sacrifice for grandparents
Yet caregiving is still work, particularly for older people who've raised their own children already and may be contending with health issues or other problems brought on by age. Watching grandchildren can take a physical toll on grandparents and may impinge on their social lives, especially if they've relocated to be closer to their grandchildren and moved away from friends.
When JD Vance suggested during the 2024 presidential campaign that one solution to high childcare costs was for more grandparents to provide care for free, critics pointed out that not all grandparents can or want to provide care, many older people need care themselves, and it would do nothing to address the lack of government investment in the childcare system.
Yalanda Lattimore, 59, thinks about the career trade-off she has made by volunteering to care for her 1-year-old granddaughter, Mavee. Lattimore provides "granny daycare" one and a half days each week.
She has worked as a blogger and podcaster in Atlanta and now also sells handmade soaps online. But when Mavee came along, Lattimore told her daughter she'd help provide care for the infant — even if it meant she had less time for her soap business and media career.
"I felt like I could make the sacrifice more than they could, and it truly has been a sacrifice," she said. "You just put things on hold, because your priorities are different."
U.S. workers are staying on the job longer than they used to, with more than 11.7 million Americans age 65 and older in the labor force last month, according to government data.
Lattimore said she hopes to work more but doesn't want to drive for Lyft again, which she did when she was taking care of her ailing mother. She has otherwise struggled to find a job that would let her take off one weekday for childcare and avoid lifting heavy loads.
"Where does flexibility exist at this point?" she said. "Is it anywhere besides the gig economy?"
Harrington Meyer, the Syracuse professor, said she has heard another complaint in her conversations with grandparents: that they are spending too much time with their "parenting" hats on and have fewer opportunities for carefree fun with the kids, a generally agreed-upon right of grandparenthood.
"They would say, 'I would love to take the grandkids to the zoo, but I'm too busy helping them with their calculus or too busy helping them get to flute lessons on time.'" she reported. "They were doing a lot of things that they regarded as parenting and didn't have as much time left over for a trip to the park or something fun and frivolous that they would like to do as grandparents."
Making it work
For Mary Jo Galusha, who moved to Delaware to help care for her grandchildren, the lack of pay for being with 23-month-old Robin is possible thanks to her pension from her years as a schoolteacher in Idaho. Her Newark home has a bedroom for her grandchildren, a playroom filled with Legos and even a crafting area for 5-year-old George.
Galusha and her daughter share a Google Calendar where they coordinate care for the kids, and the plan is for Galusha to look after Robin until she starts kindergarten. But Galusha and Bourne, her daughter, review the arrangement every six months or so, and Bourne acknowledges that there is little in the way of a backup plan.
"I'd much prefer to have my mom take care of Robin, but then you always worry, like if in six months she decides that she wants to move and be near another grandbaby, then we'll have to scramble and figure out something else," she said. (Galusha replied from across the table: "No plans for that.")
Lattimore, for whom being a grandmother has been an "amazing journey," relishes her days with Mavee. "What you really want is somebody to say you were there, that you were there for them," she said. "Those are the memories that I want."
But Lattimore points out that something has to give in the caretaking formula in general, where parents are often choosing between paying for care or staying home from work. Lattimore remembers trying to "climb the corporate ladder" while she was raising her four and said she wanted to try to spare her daughter the same dilemma.
"When my daughter got ready to start her family, I just didn't want her to go through that," she said. "I wanted her to have the balance. … If work-life balance exists for somebody, I wanted it for my daughter."
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