What keeps young families going? Grandparent power | Eva Wiseman

In a world of spiralling childcare costs, grandparents are worth their weight in gold – and not just because they’re there for the after-school pick-up

Grandparents give you cancer. Many of us heard this news on the radio last week as we bundled our children into their coats, their hats, the hat with ears, why do all kids’ hats have ears? What’s behind H&M’s grand plan to turn every child under five into a rodent by new year, they’re kids for God’s sake, let them live.

And the news was that, in a world where childcare costs are unaffordable, and almost 2 million grandparents have given up jobs to look after grandchildren, the twist is that as well as being essential, valuable cogs in the kids’ lives, these kindly pensioners are also killing them. Killing them with their sedentary lifestyles, their passive smoke, their bottomless biscuit jar. This study by the University of Glasgow was reported as though these people, with their yoga bodies – you know, grandparents really don’t look like the illustrations in the books any more, these days they’re younger than their daughters – had practically rigged their houses up like Macauley Culkin at Christmas, a series of terrible traps sure to result in obesity or death.

Our daughter has the rare privilege of spending whole afternoons with people who are obsessed with her

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from Children | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2Axjcjs