Through her teens, Hannah Domoslay-Paul had a great-grandmother on each side of her family. One of them was always crocheting, and as a girl, Domoslay-Paul would sit and watch her nimble hands construct the most delicate lace doilies. The other was a retired schoolteacher; at family events, she would tell stories or just list off all the counties in Michigan—the kind of thing students learned back when she was leading the classroom. Even their most mundane activities, to Domoslay-Paul, were enchanting.
Now Domoslay-Paul is a graphic designer in Pensacola, Florida, and she herself has six children: four with her late first husband, and two with her current husband. On the morning that I spoke with Domoslay-Paul, those kids were in Michigan with their great-grandmother, a 92-year-old in excellent health, picking strawberries to take home and make jam. They visit her every summer; they play cards, water the flowers, and even haul hay like Domoslay-Paul did when she was around their age.
Domoslay-Paul is grateful that her kids are growing up in a four-generation family as she did—but that experience is actually less rare now than when she was a child. For centuries, living long enough to become a great-grandparent was uncommon. The role was niche enough that kin researchers rarely studied it. But now many more people are reaching old age; even with people having children later on average than those in previous generations did, great-grandparenthood is becoming remarkably unremarkable. Ashton Verdery, a Pennsylvania State University sociologist who’s part of a four-generation family himself, estimates that from 1996 to 2012, the number of great-grandparents in the United States increased by 33 percent, up to 20 million from 15 million. And according to Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, who studies kinship at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, American 15-year-olds today have an average of 2.85 great-grandparents—a figure that has been inching up since at least 1950 while the mean numbers of siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins have fallen. He expects that the overall number of great-grandparents will continue rising, not just in the U.S. but in countries across the globe.
In some ways, this is a beautiful development: Imagine your own children’s children’s children someday learning about history not from textbooks but from you, the person who lived it. But aging inevitably entails frailty, and caregiving often falls to one’s children; when it comes to great-grandparents, their children are seniors themselves. Sociologists have long worried about the “sandwich generation,” meaning the people who are simultaneously caring for their young kids and their own aging parents—a situation that can significantly strain one’s mental health (and savings). Now they’re seeing a growing number of people in a sort of triple squeeze, helping care for their grown children, their grandchildren, and their own parents. This cohort is called the “club sandwich generation”—and they’re stretched exceedingly thin.
Zuzana Talašová, a doctoral student at Masaryk University, in the Czech Republic, likes to do a little experiment. When she asks people what it means to be a parent, everyone seems to have an answer. When she asks what it means to be a grandparent, she finds the same. But she doesn’t get any cohesive response when she asks what great-grandparents do. A lot of people tell her plainly: “I don’t know.”
In the absence of a strict cultural script, great-grandparents are in a strange position. Many of them didn’t grow up with any such living elders and thus have no models to look to. They might never have expected to get to this point at all. But many of them end up serving an important function—one that is not practical, Talašová told me, so much as “emotional, symbolic, or narrative.”
Great-grandparents are, as Merril Silverstein, a Syracuse University sociologist, told me, “the peak of the family pyramid”: a kind of mascot for the whole lineage, and commonly a source of great pride. (Women live longer on average than men, so often that figure is a great-grandmother—a matriarch.) Many of them show up to special occasions and tell stories of national and family history. Verdery’s kids have blond hair and blue eyes—but when they spend time with their great-grandmother, they get to hear about her childhood in Japan and her immigration to the United States. They love feeling connected with not only their great-grandma, Verdery told me, but also the whole line of ancestors she brings to life for them. Domoslay-Paul’s grandfather died last winter, but when he was alive, he would drive her kids around his hometown, telling tales as they went. “‘That’s the house that my grandfather lived in. And that’s the house where I was born,’” she told me he’d recount. “‘When we were kids, we got drunk over there and then had to get sat by that outhouse because we were in big trouble,” and “That’s where my brother’s buried. He died when he was a year old.’”
Stories like these can give some perspective. Great-grandparents are a reminder that things change—that our lifetimes are enormously brief, but also that we are one link in a long line of generations, a part of something bigger than ourselves.
In some sense, great-grandparents are acting in a capacity quite like grandparents might have in the past. In the U.S., grandparents tended to be seen as familial authority figures and storytellers. Now, as I’ve reported, their role has evolved. Many of them are deeply engaged in the everyday bustle of raising their grandkids—because child-care costs keep climbing and the demands of parenthood keep growing, but perhaps also because more of them are staying active long enough to be able to help. As Silverstein told me, “Maybe an 85-year-old great-grandparent is as healthy as what used to be a 70-year-old grandparent.” That is: maybe not quite fit enough for anyone to ask them to pick up the great-grandkids from soccer practice, but hopefully strong enough to enjoy the birthdays, the holidays, the visits with no purpose other than to be together. Domoslay-Paul has observed that such a position can mellow out people who might’ve been harsh as parents. Instead of worrying about “who needs to go to the doctor, who needs new pants,” she told me, “you’re able to just give the love.”
Grandparents, then, may actually be in the most difficult position within the four-generation family. In one 2020 qualitative study, researchers interviewed working grandmothers in four-generation families; the participants described being so busy caregiving that they had no time for medical appointments or tests, even though they could feel themselves aging and their body changing. Sometimes, their different roles—mother, grandmother, child, not to mention employee—would come into direct conflict; they were needed everywhere at once. “Who do I need to help first; for whom should I be more available?” one woman in the study wondered. “I respond not to my own agenda but to other people’s agenda.”
I heard something similar from Jerri McElroy, a fellow with the nonprofit Caring Across Generations who lives in Georgia. McElroy is a full-time caregiver for her father, who has dementia and epilepsy and who lost his ability to speak after a seizure in 2018. She lives with him, her daughter, and her grandson—and has five other children and five other grandchildren as well. She has learned that when she’s watching her grandkids and her dad, it can help to include the children in his care, as if it’s a game—to get them excited to check up on him together, or let them carry a towel. She has mastered the juggling act, but it’s never gotten easy. “When I think about certain seasons of life,” she told me, “it’s all a blur. I don’t even know how I got through.”
Great-grandparents are a kind of microcosm of the larger picture of extending lifespans: On the one hand, around the world, “aging is a big success story,” Silverstein told me. The grandmothers from the 2020 study were exhausted—but still grateful that their parents were alive. They viewed their circumstances not only as a duty, the author wrote, but also as a “privilege.” On the other hand, many societies—including the U.S.—have left family members to care for one another largely on their own, without guaranteed parental leave, child-care subsidies, or any cohesive, accessible system for tending to the proliferating elderly. Populations are transforming radically, and policies aren’t keeping up.
If lifespans continue extending in the way we’d expect, four-generation families will become only more common. The future may be old. But it also might be more interconnected. As much as people talk about the U.S. and other countries becoming ever more individualistic, generations of American kin are arguably growing closer on average, researchers told me, and becoming more generous with one another. Silverstein said that because today’s grandparents are so involved with family life on the whole, both logistically and emotionally, we might expect that great-grandparents will keep becoming more tied in as well.
That shift is bittersweet. With an aged loved one, impending loss is always close to the surface. But great-grandkids stand to benefit from being immersed in the normality of aging and death. They get to observe firsthand how time works: what it takes, but also what it gives. Domoslay-Paul’s grandfather, born in 1930, rarely spoke about emotions. But she remembers that after her first husband died, her grandfather talked to her two oldest sons, who were 6 and 7 at the time. He told them that his own parents had died when he was not much older than them—eight decades earlier. “I know this is hard right now,” he said, “but I got through it.” They could see for themselves that he had.
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