Working Moms’ Tips on Using Grandparents as Caregivers

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Either before or during the pandemic, have you considered using grandparents as caregivers for your kids? If you’re doing it, how is it working for your family — and if you’re hesitating, what are your biggest concerns? After all, depending on your relationship with your parents and/or in-laws, it can be a comfortable, convenient arrangement or a source of conflict, or sometimes both. Our Week in the Life of a Working Mom series has become a reader favorite over the years (and we’re always looking for submissions!), and we’re taking advantage of the many posts we’ve published to highlight the info and advice these working moms have generously shared. Our first topic was working moms’ tips on how to manage au pairs, and today we’ll share Week in the Life reader tips on using grandparents for childcare. 

Here are six working moms from our Week in the Life series who have used grandparents as caregivers: 

1. O., a communications manager in Arizona, with a husband who is currently a student and one daughter (6 months)
2. L., an appellate attorney for the federal government in Washington, D.C., with a husband who is a biotech executive and two sons (ages 3 and 5) 
3. C., a family law attorney for a small town firm in Minnesota, with a husband who is a guidance counselor and three kids (ages 3 months, 3, and 5) 
4. Em, an in-house attorney for a corporation in the Midwest, with a husband who is a project manager and one son (age 2) 
5. C., a corporate auditor in Texas, with a husband who is a doctor and two daughters (ages 4 and 8) 
6. Christa, a doctor at an academic medical center in Florida, with a husband who works in IT and a daughter (2.5 years old) 

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Details on Family Arrangements with Grandparents as Caregivers

Here are some of the details of the arrangements these families have with grandparents (as well as other family members): 

• A grandmother picks up the kids three school days a week, which includes driving them to activities. She is compensated for gas and given a credit card for kid-related expenses (events, supplies, dinners/snacks). She brings the kids home to give them dinner, help with homework, and do the bedtime routine, and she also does school drop-off one day a week. 
• A grandmother cares for children in her home on weekdays, usually 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. 
• Many family members live in the same neighborhood as the reader and her husband: her sisters and their husbands and children, her brother and his children, two grandmothers, and many aunts, uncles, and cousins and their children. (Wow!) The reader’s older sister cares for her kids during the school year (Monday–Thursday). When she works from home on Fridays, her mom or one of her sisters will take care of her kids when she has important work calls. 
• One set of grandparents babysit during the reader’s weekend volunteer work (the times her husband joins her), as well as when she and her husband spend time with friends, sans kids. 
• A set of grandparents (who live two hours away) provide emergency childcare.
• A grandmother flies in from out of town to stay with the reader’s family during busy work times when she and her husband need extra help — about two months in total in a year, e.g., for a month at a time.

If you’d like to be featured (anonymously or otherwise) for a Week in the Life of a Working Mom, please fill out this form! You can see all posts in this series here.

Thoughts from Working Moms Using Grandparents as Caregivers

Here’s what the readers had to say about using grandparents (and other family members) for childcare: 

• “I work for a global company and my role requires travel across the world; if not for being able to leave my children with family I’m not sure I could hop on a plane to Europe or Asia and feel comfortable being so far away.” 
• “We’re unbelievably lucky that my mum is so close and available to watch our daughter during the week.”
• “Grandparents typically have a different parenting style than parents do, which is confusing for the kids to have different sets of rules. The way a mother parents her children is a non-negotiable to the mother, and when disagreements about parenting style come up with a caregiver they might be more easily resolved when the caregiver is not family. This can be a source of tension but at the end of the day I think the benefits outweigh the challenges.” 
• “[Our kids] will be ‘parented’ [by my sister] the same way that they are in my home, they play with their cousins all day, and they spend time almost every day with my parents and two of my grandmothers. In the last six years, we have only run into a few situations where I had to have uncomfortable conversations with my sister regarding childcare-related issues. At the end of the day, there is no one that I would rather have my kids with while I am at work.” 

Have you used grandparents as caregivers — or other relatives? How has it worked out? What are the pros and cons? What advice do you have for other working moms interested in having grandparents as caregivers? 

Stock photo via Stencil.