My son, my working mother and childcare

“What are you going to do with your free Fridays?” I unthinkingly asked my mum when my son started primary school eight years ago. In my fantasy, she would pop to the nail spa or perhaps meet friends on the day she used to spend looking after her grandchild.

“Work,” came the snap reply.

In order for me to work five days a week, she had been fitting her illustration jobs around hours spent in the playground, the city farm and cafés. She was lucky to have the flexibility afforded to a freelancer — but it came with a cost. At weekends and evenings, she would be hunched over her drawing board to make up the time.

At least she did not pay a financial penalty by reducing her hours, unlike other working grandparents who do regular childcare. In caring for toddlers, some find themselves returning to a work-life conflict they thought they had put behind them. One woman I spoke to said that minding her grandchild brought back a familiar tug of guilt — the feeling she was failing at being a good employee, while wanting to help her daughter.

I once had the audacity to ask my mum whether ice cream was a good idea just before dinner

The role of grandparents in plugging childcare gaps is huge. A survey last year by insurer SunLife found that half of grandparents in the UK have a regular role in doing so. I’ve met many families in which grandparents travel long distances to help reduce the burden of childcare fees, or rise early to get kids ready for school.

In 2010, a Spanish union urged so-called “babysitter grandparents” to strike in order to highlight the role they played in helping the economy to function. In the UK, the government and the main opposition party have both in the past floated the idea that shared parental leave — paid time off work for parents in a child’s first year — could be transferred to a grandparent. While this proposal ultimately came to nothing, it highlighted the growing importance of the role.

In 2018, a survey by Gransnet, an online forum for grandparents, found that 21 per cent of grandparents had given up work or reduced working hours in order to help out with looking after children. Since then, the severe shortage of childcare has worsened, with grandparents in the UK, Europe and beyond increasingly feeling they should step in.

Longer working lives and the need to retain older staff mean some employers are now considering paid grandparental leave as an employee perk. US lender Fannie Mae offers one day off, while tech company Cisco offers three in the first year of a grandchild’s life.

In the UK, Saga offers a week. When the benefit was launched in 2021, Jane Storm, then chief people officer, said the company, which offers insurance and holidays to the over-50s, wanted to “show that age is no barrier to continued professional success”.

The benefits of grandparent help were clear to me: my mum saved me thousands of pounds in childcare fees. She also provided a bit of breathing space in the working week. On Fridays, I did not have to dash out of the office and sprint to collect my son before the nursery closed. And, no matter how annoying it might be for her, my mum was not going to charge me £15 extra for late pick-up.

But the arrangement is more than financial or practical. I wanted my mum to have a good relationship with my son. My own grandparents had lived in another city — too far for regular childcare and I did not really know them.

Those early years that my mum looked after my son proved a good foundation for their later relationship. Even now that he is in senior school they meet once a week for a bowl of spaghetti. They know each other’s foibles and interests.

Grandparents can be good for a child’s health. One study found the nurturing bond can “reduce risky behaviour, including smoking and drug use among teenagers . . . improve nutritional outcomes, reduce the likelihood of childhood obesity, and be associated with better mental health in grandchildren”.

Nevertheless, another found that “grandparents were inadvertently having an adverse impact on their grandchildren’s health, especially in the areas of weight and diet — through ‘treating’, overfeeding, and lack of physical activity”. Such findings will be a shock to no one who has discovered their child with their feet up in front of the telly, being served platters of cakes and biscuits in case they feel peckish while watching Peppa Pig.

I once had the audacity to ask my mum whether ice cream was a good idea just before dinner. “Children like it,” she protested — a position I cannot remember her defending as a parent.

Because here’s the rub: your parents are not actually working for you. Lay down some rules if you like, but God knows whether anyone sticks to them. And, really, does it matter?