Has this always been going on? [Details in description]?

I know a few that are like that. My cousins are being raised by their mother’s parents as my aunt and uncle are no longer alive. Others are raised by their grandparents as their parents (or parent!) are/is too busy working, or have issues that make it better all around for the grandparents to raise the child. Most often (in my experience/observations) that is because it’s a single mother under the age of 21, which is something that didn’t happen quite so often in the past.

It has always happened, but I think it’s on the rise.

Growing up as a teen in the 80’s, I didn’t know anyone like that. Seems to me this is a marker of later generations with senses of entitlement that reason out they should be able to pursue their dreams and passions at the expense of others around them, shifting their responsibilities to others and being fine with it.

I see a lot of that where I live now, several generations of slacker kids with parents and grandparents who will never get to retire. In my family, we think this is pretty shameful and selfish. We expect everyone to take themselves very seriously when it comes to making babies. I remember my grandmother telling me my generation would be able to choose everything to the point it would be near impossible to ever be as destitute and trapped by biology as in times passed.

It is a growing trend.

“One child in 10 in the United States lives with a grandparent, a share that increased slowly and steadily over the past decade before rising sharply from 2007 to 2008, the first year of the Great Recession, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.”

Pew Research

My grandparents have played a very important part in my life and that of my brother, sister and cousins. I have played a very important part in the life of 5 out of 6 of my grandchildren, including having them live with me when their parents needed help.

This business of a nuclear family of two parents and two or three children living alone in a home is a recent development since the 1950’s. Before that, several generations lived together, and in many places, still do.

I do not think it is a new trend, so much as a growing trend. When I was in school, you didn’t really have that. Furthermore, a single parent not by the death of one of them was uncommon too. The gutting of the nuclear family, and it relative unimportance to many, as well as shifting marriage to a mere commodity, left many children in the hands of a single parent, unfortunately usually the mother. Who had no real resources to care for the child or because of ideology that keeps her regulated as a child instead of the biological young lady she is, her income opportunities are lessened even further. Then when you regulate sex to a mere commodity and you had all the fixings for this grandparents raise the kids brew.

Sure back some time ago, many generations live under one roof or in the same area, but cars, jet travel etc. made it easy to scatter to the four winds of the nation, or the world, for that matter. Those days are pretty much dead as the nuclear family is headed, or females marrying when they were late teens and early 20s. Today it is more about, ”getting mine”, and enjoying one’s self, and if part of that enjoyment produces a child, suck it out, or pawn it off on the grandparents, they always said they wanted one anyhow, usually.

Awesome answers, Thank you guys.

It didn’t happen much when I was a kid, but I lived with my grandparents for some time as a kid and I knew others who did. Now when my grandfather was a kid during the depression, it happened a lot—and not just grandparents. Kids would go live with whoever could afford to take them in while their parents looked for work or fed the kids they could afford to feed.

It happened enough that one of my grandfather’s brothers just assumed he would get to raise one of my uncles. He was a bachelor and was hoping that he could have one of his nephews to be like a son to him. I thought it was preposterous of him to want that. But then I found out that my grandfather’s uncle got one of his cousins and so he assumed that would continue.

I think this only seems like a more recent development because there are less ‘full’ houses now. Instead of having houses of three generations plus extended family, it’s more common for just two generations to live together now. Children in the past may have been raised predominantly by their grandparents, but since they all lived under the same roof it didn’t seem odd.

I’m really just speculating here. Not sure if this is actually the case

The difference between old fashioined family living and now is that then, single kids stayed home until married more and young marrieds often moved in with other family members until secure. Nowadays you’ve got singles not giving back to parents, delaying indepence so they can “party on” while their parents foot the bill for the kids’ lifestyles and letting parents/grandparents raise children they have haphazardly.

Maybe because the parents don’t have enough time, or maybe they think the grandparents are better to raise them.