Something was off at preschool pickup. I had been living in Singapore for a month, and every day, I was the only mother waiting outside the school for her kids. Instead, the parking lot was filled with silver-haired grandparents who had arrived promptly to retrieve children and ferry them home or to extracurricular activities. These grandparents, I eventually learned, weren’t doing this merely out of love for their grandkids. Many of them were also being paid.
In Singapore, according to a 2019 report by researchers from the Singapore Children’s Society and KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital, grandparents are the primary caregivers for at least 50 percent of children by the time they reach 18 months and a third of children who are 3 years old. This arrangement is born of a deeply entrenched culture of filial piety and intergenerational support, in which older adults care for young children and those children are expected to grow up to care for parents and grandparents as they age. It is also an arrangement that tends to be supported, in part, by an exchange of money.
Many adult children in Singapore routinely pay their parents a monthly allowance. That stipend is not always a child-care-specific paycheck; it can help cover bills, groceries, and other needs. But the allowance does recognize a fact of family life that tends to go unacknowledged in the United States: that the contributions of older people are essential labor that deserves to be remunerated. As Irene Hee, a Singaporean grandmother of three—whose daughter pays her a stipend and covers some of her expenses—told me of her caregiving duties: “It’s my job.”
Many Americans might balk at the thought of introducing money into this kind of family relationship. But most Singaporean grandparents who provide child care likely wouldn’t describe their allowance as a mere cash transaction. Rather, the benefits of this arrangement ripple through society: Working parents get affordable, reliable, and flexible child care; grandparents benefit from the financial support; and children grow up having a closer relationship with their grandparents than they otherwise would while learning the value of caring for family.
Americans, meanwhile, are already paying other people—a lot—to care for their children. According to 2022 data from the National Database of Childcare Prices, families with just one child spend 8.9 to 16 percent of their median income for child care outside their own home; in some counties, that figure rises past 20 percent. More than half of U.S. families who responded to a 2022 survey by the online marketplace Care.com said they were paying more than 20 percent of their annual income for child care. In 38 states and the District of Columbia, according to the Economic Policy Institute, child care for one infant costs more than public-college tuition. And that is when parents can find care. In 2018, the Center for American Progress reported that more than 83 percent of parents with children under 5 reported serious problems hunting down quality, affordable child care.
As The Atlantic has previously reported, American parents are relying on grandparents—especially grandmothers—for dedicated caregiving in ways that their counterparts in previous generations didn’t. Yet, unlike in many parts of the world, this caregiving is not typically treated and compensated as valuable labor. In the U.S., many people simply call it “help.”
Something resembling the Singaporean arrangement could be one way to offset these challenges. Granted, it could be difficult to replicate this model across the United States. For one, Singapore is tiny—at about 280 square miles, the island nation is smaller than New York City—and most grandparents live within a relatively short distance of their grown children’s families, making it easier for them to provide care. With the country’s interconnected highways and efficient public-transit system, a grandparent is almost never more than an hour away, which is not true for many American families. Singapore also offers a level of governmental support for family caregivers that the U.S. has struggled to match, hampered by policy hurdles and the country’s wide variation in cultural norms related to caregiving.
But Singapore still offers a useful case study in how paying grandparents might work. Its model is also a striking example of how the benefits of paid caregiving can flow outward—resulting in positive outcomes for children, increased stability for parents, and a deepening sense of purpose for grandparents.
I met Irene Hee while reporting for a book I was writing on the ways cultures around the world parent. She was one of the many older people I encountered in Singapore for whom grandparenting wasn’t a side gig or an act of charity but a livelihood with real hours, expectations, and responsibilities.
Hee’s workday is usually packed. Every morning, she takes her 1-year-old grandson for tummy time and cuddles at her house. In the afternoon, she picks up her 4- and 6-year-old granddaughters from preschool and drives them to Chinese extracurricular classes. She rarely takes a sick day. In return, her daughter pays for major purchases and appliances.
This sort of arrangement requires that grandparents braid their grandchildren into their daily lives. Their grandkids might visit markets and attend religious services with them. Children might watch and learn as grandparents play games such as mah-jongg or cards with friends. In this way, the time children and grandparents spend together becomes a kind of cultural bridge in which hobbies, customs, and sometimes languages are passed on to the younger generation.
Unlike the U.S.’s, Singapore’s government backs this form of caregiving with significant financial support. Families who wish to live within two and a half miles of a grandparent qualify for a housing grant worth the equivalent of more than $15,000, and working mothers who rely on grandparents or other family members to care for their children are eligible for up to $2,325 a year in tax relief.
Such incentives are unlikely to be politically feasible in the U.S. anytime soon. But the idea of increasing government aid for young families does have some bipartisan support. A proposal from congressional Republicans and Democrats would raise the child tax credit to $2,500 for families claiming one child and $4,000 for families claiming two or more kids, some of which could go toward paying for child care. It’s the kind of policy that should appeal across party lines: to conservatives espousing family values and progressives fighting for a strong social safety net. And although the credits might cover the cost of institutional child care for only a month or two in many states, they could potentially help fund months of grandparent-provided care.
The incentive of pay for grandparent caregivers could also help overcome the proximity challenge for some families, just as the promise of work in a faraway place has long been a motivation for people to move. That was the case for my friend Rebecca Maier and her family, who live in Seattle. As I recounted in my book, after Rebecca gave birth to her first child, during the coronavirus pandemic, she panicked when she discovered that her local day cares had waitlists up to three years long. Her mother-in-law, Robbie, offered to move across the country to help. In return, Rebecca and her husband decided to pay Robbie $1,000 a month for child care. “I had all these fears,” Rebecca told me. She wondered if her mother-in-law would start seeming like an employee, and worried that their arrangement might “become a transactional relationship.” But years in, she said, she has a hard time imagining her family life without it. “It quickly became clear that the quality of care our kids were getting was unbeatable.”
Compensation brought clarity to the arrangement. It helped everyone feel better about setting expectations, checking in regularly, and attempting to address disagreements before they might fester. It also gave Robbie a sense of recognition, Rebecca said, and the family a sense of shared purpose. “Our relationship has shifted,” she told me. “It’s almost like we are a communal unit built around the two girls.”
Paying grandparents won’t work for every family in the United States. Not all families have healthy relationships across generations. It may be difficult for some adults, both grandparents and their grown children, to embrace a more interdependent financial relationship if they’ve been raised according to traditional American notions about independence and self-sufficiency. Some grandparents may be unable or unwilling to provide daily care. Some might not be able or willing to move. And some parents simply may not have the money. Informal grandparenting care is especially common among low-income families, who may live in communities with few affordable care options and may not have the discretionary income to pay grandparents.
But for households whose resources and circumstances allow them to commit to paying for grandparent child care—and statistics suggest there could be millions of these families—this model is within reach.
According to a report published in 2019 in the Journal of Marriage and Family—which analyzed data from the 2013 Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a large, long-running study of American households—nearly three-fourths of adults age 25 or older live within 30 miles of a parent, a fairly reasonable distance for a grandparent to commute for child-care work. And given the amount that many American families already spend on child care, surely they could afford to pay grandparents a monthly stipend of, say, 10 percent of their income. (I should note that the reciprocal model can extend to family members besides grandparents, and even outside of biological families. In Mozambique, where I worked as a journalist, I saw parents with young children relying on elderly neighbors, who cared for children in exchange for groceries, phone minutes, or the unspoken promise of future support.)
My hunch is that many American parents have not yet started paying grandparents simply because the idea never occurred to them. Were they to try, they might find the benefits revelatory. There are, of course, the logistical advantages: Grandparents can generally offer flexible hours, provide a better caregiver-to-child ratio than any day-care center, and watch over kids in the children’s own home (no pickups and drop-offs required). Perhaps more profound, American households might start appreciating the social rewards of reciprocal care that many families in other parts of the world know well—families to whom the idea of a “care crisis” would most likely be unthinkable.
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