When passing near a playground any weekday afternoon you can see a typical postcard: grandparents taking care of their grandchildren after school.
What at first may seem like a nice picture, for some it has become an obligation, with consequences even for their health.
Cayetana Campo was clear from the beginning that she did not want to be one of those grandmothersand he communicated this to his four children when they began to have stable partners to avoid future problems.
“Yes, I was clear about it. I have four children and if you do it with one then you have to do it with all of them,” she explains in conversation with BBC Mundo.
For this 71-year-old woman, who lives between Benavente (in the north of Spain) and Madrid, it is one thing to help her children when a specific problem arises and quite another to be with her grandchildren at all hours.
“If one day they can’t and they need me to pick up the child from school, those things do. But picking up the child in the morning and having him/her all day until the parents return from work is definitely not true, because I have my life and since I retired I have time to do other things,” he says.
“I have seen grandmothers who pick them up in the morning, take them to school, feed them and sometimes even the children go on vacation and leave the grandchildren with them,” he adds about the elderly who become the main caregivers. of his grandchildren.
Although, she admits, her four children may have liked to have been able to count on her more, they did not take it badly. “For me, that of leaving the child with me and making his life, well, no. That’s why they have children, right? So that they can take care of them”.
“I’ve been busy for quite some time”
She believes that it is important to end the widespread belief that “you can have children and that your grandparents will take care of them, because that is not the case. I had four children and I worked, and they didn’t take care of them for me. You managed as best you could.”
“In my time there might have been a grandmother who might have been able to do more, but in general it was like what happened to me, that the grandparents weren’t there all the time like they are now. Now there are grandparents who are raising them themselves”.
Cayetana had her first child when she was 23 years old and her fourth when she was 41 years old. “I’ve been busy for quite some time,” says this grandmother who has six grandchildren, who first worked with her father in the family pastry shop and then with her husband in a butcher-deli shop.
Far from what you might think, he has a very good relationship with his grandchildren, with whom he spends quality time.
“We have a grandmother-grandchildren relationship. We enjoy together, that’s what grandparents are for,” says Cayetana at the same time that she tells how she distributes her time between helping her son in her store in Benavente, something she loves, and walking with her. friends of hers.
“In Madrid I go to gymnastics in the mornings at Retiro Park and in the afternoons, I either stay at home doing things or I meet friends to go to the theater or go for a walk,” he details.
She has many friends who, like her, refuse to take care of their grandchildren all the time, but she also knows grandparents who take care of their grandchildren full-time, because otherwise their children will get angry with them.
“They take care of them a little as an obligation and that cannot be either,” he comments. “Talking to people you realize that there is always someone enslaved”.
Fear of what they will say
But not everyone has Cayetana’s strength. Setting limits is not always easy and driven by a feeling of guilt, many grandparents end up immersed in a whirlwind of schools, extracurricular activities, meals, vacations and other activities, with hardly any time for anything else.
“They feel guilty for not wanting to take care of their grandchildren as much,” health psychologist Ángel Rull explains to BBC Mundo about the people who come to his consultation.
“They come as if there was something wrong with them for not wanting to take care of their grandchildren, for setting limits, for needing to have a little more space, to be able to travel.”
“That’s when we really restructure so that they know that what they feel is normal, but that socially we don’t talk about it as much, because we are traditionally obliged to care from silence, from ‘my obligation is to take care of you and I can’t complain about it.’ ‘”, he indicates about a topic that continues to be taboo, as BBC Mundo could see when searching for grandparents who had decided to set limits.
There have always been grandparents who refuse to be with their grandchildren all the time, but when asked if they would be willing to tell it publicly, the majority refuse. The fear of what they will say continues to have great weight. It is one thing to comment on it in confidence and quite another to tell it to the world.
“It’s very difficult for them to say, ‘Well, I don’t take care of my grandchildren,’ because it seems like saying that is like saying that you don’t want to contribute to the family,” he says. José Augusto García Navarro, president of the Spanish Society of Geriatrics and Gerontology.
Manuel Sánchez Pérez, president of the Spanish Society of Psychogeriatrics, sees it the same way:
“The very autonomous grandfather, who makes his life, who travels, who tells him not to start taking on that role of caring for his children, is still seen culturally as a grandfather, let’s say, selfish. A grandfather who prioritizes his own comfort, his own well-being and who, a little, leaves his children on the sidelines. It is an unfair assessment in many cases.”
“People who choose this type of position are defending their right to a decent, healthy retirement, and to be able to enjoy extra time. “It leaves them with the fact that they don’t have to work and that is perfectly legitimate,” he adds.
Experts insist that the key is to find a middle ground in which older people can enjoy their autonomy, their time and the health they still have and can also, to the reasonable extent, be a point of support for their children. However, on many occasions the balance becomes unbalanced.
The enslaved grandfather syndrome
In Europe, one in four grandparents takes care of their grandchildren and does so an average of seven hours a day, a percentage that increases during vacation periods, according to the Health, Aging and Retirement Survey carried out in the Old Continent.
The difficulty in reconciling work and family life due to a shortage of public daycare centers and long hours, job insecurity, as well as the lack of economic resources in many families and the increase in life expectancy, which in 2020 stood at 82, 2 years in Spain, according to official data, has made grandparents a key player in child care, reaching the extreme in some cases.
“Slave grandfather syndrome is that moral obligation, that pressure that grandparents feel to take care of their grandchildren.s, which can come directly imposed by their children or because they see that their children really need help, because they are in a situation of job insecurity or in a situation of need for conciliation that is impossible with the jobs they have,” explains García. Navarrese.
This need for families to rely on grandparents in raising their children is not something new, but it is a phenomenon that has increased in recent years. “It is a situation that, although it has always occurred, is being seen more and more frequently,” acknowledges Sánchez Pérez.
“It has been seen that a significant percentage of older people may be spending between 6 or 7 hours a day, which is almost a working day from any other job, taking care of their grandchildren. And in fact the proportion, according to different studies that have been done, of grandparents who do this voluntarily or out of pleasure or because they decide, is very small. Only 1 in 9 of those who do it with this intensity do it for pleasure, by their own decision,” she details.
“Now there are more cases, because there are more young people who have more precarious jobs and with more difficult conciliation, although the law attempts to achieve conciliation, in practice it cannot always occur. Furthermore, their purchasing power is lower and that prevents them from receiving support. I think it clearly happens for these two reasons,” explains García Navarro.
Meanwhile, Rull highlights that something important is that we are now aware of the problem. “In past decades we did not even consider that grandparents could be suffering. Now we do see that there is suffering and that is why we try to set limits.”
This happens, above all, in Mediterranean countries and Latin America. “In these countries there is more of a feeling that we are all family and everyone has to pitch in at any age,” says García Navarro.
Effect on health
“This moral obligation to take care of grandchildren often ends up resulting in a greater situation of stress from a psychological point of view that can have real repercussions such as anxiety. In some cases it can lead to insomnia and, above all, that feeling of being tired and overloaded,” he adds.
Insomnia and intense fatigue can lead to side effects such as driving mistakes or memory failures due to stress and anxiety. Besides, In the case of having ischemic heart disease, they may have a greater propensity to suffer a heart attack.
“Their physical health is always deteriorated because in the end what a person from a certain age suffers from is more fatigue, more pain or illnesses, which worsen and then on a psychological level, frustration appears very frequently, anger, anger, guilt, sadness, anxiety, stress. Normally they are emotions that range between sadness and anger,” says psychologist Rull.
“On a psychological level it would be close to what is known as burnout syndrome.when one is overwhelmed by a task with little gratification,” explains Sánchez Pérez, while insisting on taking into account that there is a wide variety of people over 65 years of age.
How not to fall for this
The Spanish Society of Geriatrics and Gerontology (SEGG) recommends taking care of communication with children to inform them of any problem that may arise.r, having one’s own space and time, knowing one’s health conditions and how far one can go, and most importantly, learning to say “no” to one’s children.
“It is important that you point out your limits from the first moment and make them clear from the beginning. Say, ‘I will be able to be with the grandchildren one day a week, which will be Tuesday’, for example, or ‘every day from 10 to 12, but then not’, because then exceptions will always come and you will often have to cover those exceptions, but make a very good agreement with your children. Say, ‘Hey, yes I want to or I don’t want to, but I do want to under these conditions,’” explains the president of the SEGG.
“It is also important that you understand that you are not doing anything wrong by doing that, but rather you are doing a very good thing for everyone, because when they are overloaded they also take bad care of the grandchild. There is nothing negative about setting boundaries,” she states.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/c1dkz8pgnmmo, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-10-23 10:10:05
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