Grandchildhood: Care and relationality in narratives of three generations in Sweden

Theoretical points of departure

The theoretical concept of relationality is central in Childhood studies, relating to questions about ontological grounding, argued to have the possibility of a ‘decentering of the child subject/object and the child position’ to move ‘the analytical focus toward the relations and the situational relational effect.’ (Bodén and Joelsson 2023: 2; Alanen 2020). This is in line with the theorizing in Sociology of family and personal life guiding this study, as it enables an analysis that captures ‘the enduring importance of kith and kin in our lives’ (Twamley et al., 2021: 4; Mason, 2004; Roseneil and Ketokivi, 2016), by calling attention to different relational layers in people’s narrations: people tell ‘complex and lengthy stories’ where relations to others are embedded in and intertwined with one’s own (Mason, 2004: 166). In addition, by departing from a concept of care that transcends the dichotomy of emotion and labour (Finch and Groves, 1983; Graham, 1983), and by seeing care as a sentient activity (Mason, 1996), we can make visible the ‘thinking’ and ‘knowing’ activities of care such as: ‘attending to, noticing, hearing, being attuned to, seeing, […] [the] needs, health, wellbeing, behaviours, likes and dislikes, moods, individuality […] of specific others [or] thinking through, working out, organising, planning, orchestrating relationships between oneself and others [...and] relationships between others’ (Mason, 1996: 27). Seeing care as a relational activity allows a focus on the ways in which care is done reciprocally, avoiding too singular a focus on one party as a ‘giver’ (active) and the other as a ‘receiver’ (passive) of care (Wærness, 1984; Eldén 2013). This relates to a childhood sociology perspective, seeing children as active in constructing social life (Christensen and James, 2008). While grandchildren are traditionally conceptualised as recipients of grandparent care, our focus on the former’s narratives shows children’s active doings of care in relation to grandparents.

Data and methods

The data comprise interviews of informants from three birth cohorts: 18 women and 10 men born in 1940–1955, 10 women and 5 men born in 1966–1985, 12 girls, and 8 boys born in 2001–2015: altogether, 63 individuals. The oldest generation were at the time of the interview grandparents themselves, the middle generation were adult children, and the youngest were grandchildren (including bonus relationships ¹ ), and some of them were related to one another.

The oldest birth cohort, interviewed first and recruited through pensioner organisations, posters, online and social media advertisements, and snowballing, have diverse class backgrounds and share the experience of having had grandchildren or bonus grandchildren growing up in Sweden. ² If the informants in this cohort agreed, we contacted their adult children and grandchildren, but we also recruited to these groups independently. Everyone in the middle cohort were born in Sweden, and a majority had studied at university level. In the youngest cohort, all participants were born in Sweden, three had parents born abroad, and their parents differed in terms of class background. In the recruitment process, we asked for experiences of intergenerational care throughout the life course – both positive and negative – which is reflected in our data.

The semi-structured interviews with the adult participants had a biographical point of departure: participants were asked to talk about who took care of them, and who they took care of, at different stages of the life course. This gave us long and detailed narratives, on average 2 hours. In addition, 25 participants chose to be interviewed twice, and we also used different techniques to support the narrations, such as the life-line technique (Sheridan et al., 2011). The interviews with children related to narratives of their childhood, and we used visual methods in the form of a draw-your-day method and concentric circles of closeness (Eldén, 2013). ³ Our theoretical points of departure informed both the choice of methods and the process of analysis: through providing participants with tools that invited them to reflect freely on overarching themes related to care, as well as zooming in on particular significant life events and everyday care practices, the methods enabled narratives where care as sentient activity, as well as narratives of complex relational layers, could emerge. In analysing the data – practically done through repeatedly reading field notes, transcripts, and visual material – we used the theoretical points of departure as ‘sensitising concepts’ (Charmaz, 2006) which informed our coding, while also allowing for nuance and the identification of both similarities and differences between garandparent-grandchild care in the cohorts.

Biographical interviewing has been identified as particularly helpful in capturing the ‘complex moving picture of social change and connections with networks of kin, economic trends’, and ‘other large scale events or processes’ (Smart, 2011: 20; see also Brannen, 2013: 49). Retrospective memories of past practices and relationships – both those which are distant and those close in time – are always understood in relation to the present. In our analysis, we do not see memories as ‘truths about the past buried within the data’ but ‘as accounts from the past shaped by concurrent ideals’ of grandparent-grandchild relationships (Vasbøe and Hegna, 2023: 6). In addition, ‘individual memory is profoundly social because it relies on communication to become a memory and on context to be meaningful’ (Smart, 2011: 18). Collective understandings of past intertwine with individual narratives of being a grandchild, in this case notable in the older cohorts’ experience of living in an expanding welfare state and its effects on intergenerational care practices. This enables us to paint a vivid picture of the ‘lived experienced’ of being a grandchild, based on the memories of older and younger generations. Further, in contrasting the memories from different generations, general patterns stand out, which provides overarching images of both change and continuity.

In our analysis we have chosen to present detailed narratives of a few participants from each generation. ⁴ The cases relate unique details of the individual narratives, while simultaneously capturing dimensions apparent in all narratives of each cohort, indicating the characteristics of being a grandchild in Sweden at a particular period of time. This enables an in-depth analysis of narratives of grandchildhood, intertwined with a discussion of both the social and historical context and a general presentation of the features of the overall data.

Grandchildhood in the 1940s–1950s

When members of the oldest cohort in our study tell their memories of being a grandchild, they relate to a period characterised by major changes in Swedish society. After the Second World War, ideals of social equality was beginning to be realised in political initiatives targeting families and children. A ‘good childhood’ was beginning to be seen as a ‘social right, and in large measure irrespective of income and social standing’ (Sandin, 2011: 114). The view of children was marked by, on one hand, the state’s increased interest in forming its future citizens, coupled with suspicion of the family’s capability of giving children a proper upbringing. At the same time, children were seen as different to adults. Childhood was defined as ‘a special part of life’, as ‘a period of limited capacities, and growth and adulthood the very norm to be attained in due time’ (Sandin, 2011: 113). This is also a time when the family was increasingly being defined as the nuclear family, in which the ideal was a male breadwinner complemented by a housewife. While these ideals were also being contested (Myrdal and Klein, 1957), social policies were primarily aimed at enabling women to stay at home (Lundqvist, 2011: 59), and the concerns of society focused on the relationship between mothers and their dependent children. In 1956, kinship relations were taken off the political agenda, visible in the removal of the legal responsibility for adult children to care for aging parents (Ulmanen, 2015: 19).

Between closeness and authoritarianism

Gunilla, born in 1952, starts by saying that, as a child, she was taken care of by her stay-at-home mother. However, upon closer examination, it becomes obvious that her mother also worked outside the family: aside from taking care of her four children, she cleaned houses in the evenings. During her first years, Gunilla and her (then un-married) mother lived in the maternal grandmother’s flat, and Gunilla was taken care of by her grandmother. Gunilla greatly admired her grandmother, who had been a single mother taking care of her children while also providing for them financially.

Eventually Gunilla’s parents married, the family moved to a flat in the inner city, and Gunilla had to leave the grandmother’s place. The parents put great responsibility on Gunilla to care for her three younger siblings. When she was 10 years old, the parents also made her take over some of her mother’s cleaning jobs in the evening after she finished school, since the mother’s body was worn out by childbirths and hard work. Gunilla relates being very unhappy with this, not least because the money they saved was meant to realise the parents’ dream of buying a house outside the city, a project Gunilla did not agree with: she wanted to stay close to her friends and her grandmother. Gunilla does not have any memory of other grandparents, but her maternal grandmother continued to play a very important part in Gunilla’s life all through her childhood. She talks about her as a ‘safe haven’ to which she escaped on weekends when the opportunity arose:

I went to my grandmother’s place a lot over the weekends, because this was my safe haven, then it was just her and me […] I was there, at her place, stayed overnight Saturday to Sunday, and we were just sitting there, having coffee, watching TV, it was my safe haven to be there with her. […] and at the same time, for her, I was someone who came to visit, who was there with her.

Gunilla’s narrative reflects several dimensions that occur in interviews with the oldest cohort in our study, of what it was like to be a child and grandchild in post-war Sweden. Some of the features are closely bound to the working-class position of her family, for example the economic necessity for women to work to provide for the family, which is often obscured by the discourse of the housewife. Narratives of children’s own doings of both paid work and unpaid care work are also common.

Without exception, one or more grandparent – most often a grandmother – features in the narratives of older generations, but compared to the narratives of later generations, the number of grandparents is fewer. This is not surprising, as life expectancy was much lower then, and many of the older participants in our study did not experience more than a couple of grandparent relationships. In addition, many tell of grandparents being in poor health, especially those who had been in working-class professions, as their long, hard lives left little energy and ability to engage in grandchildren’s lives.

Gunilla portrays her grandmother in a positive light, and while many of her peers share this image, several also tell of grandparents being strict, as persons they felt they needed to respect, and were sometimes in awe of. Zack, for example, born in 1942 in a well-off business family in the countryside, recounts the memory of his paternal grandmother who never took care of him, despite living in the same house.

[S]he was not that engaged with us, she never pampered us or anything. We were scared of her and she was so powerful and strict. On Christmas day, she always served hare, and this hare had been hanging outside on the balcony, and we children, we were so young and we just felt sorry for the hare. So, we wouldn’t eat it, and she thought we ought to.

The experience of distance and fear that is part of the participants’ descriptions of being a grandchild reflects the then-dominant hierarchal ideal of children and adults, of children’s worlds and children as a category defined as ‘different’ to adults, as occupying a space separate from the adult world – one to which adults did not pay much interest (Sandin, 2011). The authority of adults marked distance, and this could also characterise grandchild-grandparent relationships. However, at the same time, contrasting narratives such as Gunilla’s also show possibilities for children to carve out a more equal and reciprocal relationship to adult kin, and grandmothers especially seemed to hold this position.

Grandchildhood in the 1970–1980s

As with the post-war period, the 1970s–1980s was a decisive time in the history of the Swedish welfare state. Several major societal changes were in motion, including increased urbanisation (Statistics Sweden, 2015) and continued efforts to achieve social equality, for example through expansive education reforms (Edgren, 2019), but also efforts increasingly striving towards gender equality. This included a clear political aim to increase women’s participation in the paid labour force, greater stress on dual-earner/dual-carer families, and expanded public childcare (Lundqvist, 2011). It was now the individual – not the family – that was the primary corresponding unit of state intervention, which made women more independent and increased divorce rates. This led to a broadened understanding of the concept of family, which now also included single mothers. In addition, the introduction of statutory leave for all (1978), together with better living conditions for families, made it possible for more people to go on holiday and to invest in children’s leisure time.

During this time, greater attention was directed towards children’s role as family members and citizens. They were no longer understood as a different category but rather as ‘similar’ to adults: as ‘competent’ and independent actors towards which society corresponds. Children had views which had to be taken into account, and their integrity was to be guarded. This was apparent, for example, in the ban on the corporal punishment of children within families (1979) (Sandin, 2011: 130).

Towards independent relationships, and increasing expectations of closeness

Cecilia was born in 1972 in the smaller city where her paternal grandfather and grandmother also lived. When she was one year old, the family moved to another city for her father’s work. After Cecilia was born, her mother became a stay-at-home-mother, despite having a higher educational degree than her husband. However, and similar to narratives from the previous generation, Cecilia’s mother actually did continue to work: she was a dagmamma, taking care of children from the neighbourhood in their home, in exchange for money. Later, when Cecilia and her siblings started school, she took up other part-time employments. The family moved to a number of different places because of the father’s work until they finally settled in a small town.

The family’s moves meant that, through much of Cecilia’s upbringing, they lived far away from both paternal and maternal grandparents. Compared to Gunilla, all of Cecilia’s grandparents were alive during most of her childhood, an experience she shares with the majority of the informants in this generation. Cecilia regards her paternal grandmother as one of the most important people in her life.

Oh my grandmother, this woman! […] She has really been there for me! When I was little, she used to take care of me [when they lived close to each other]. Then, we used to go visit her during the summer, when my father was working and we had school holidays, sometimes me and my sister went there for a week or so, just the two of us.

Cecilia describes vividly how her grandmother played with her when they visited, she used to make a hut in the living room where they had fika (cookies and lemonade) under a blanket, and she read to Cecilia. Cecilia describes the relationship as reciprocal, with mutual recognition of their importance to one another. The regular visits and contacts continued all through Cecilia’s childhood, and also through her teenage years. As a young adult, Cecilia called her grandmother at least once a week. Her paternal grandmother’s care has had significance for Cecilia’s own ways of doing care: she sees the grandmother as an ideal for her own caring self.

Cecilia mentions neither her paternal nor maternal grandfather much, but her maternal grandmother figures prominently in her narration. This relationship is described very differently from the one with her paternal grandmother. During Cecilia’s childhood, the maternal grandmother never came to visit. Cecilia felt that she was not particularly interested in her; the grandmother never read her a story or hugged her. Cecilia was dissatisfied with this, and she recalls a particular occasion when the family was on their way to visit the maternal grandmother:

I remember how I then decided to take command of the situation […] When we sat in the car I said: ‘I think I am going to hug grandmother when we arrive’, and I think my mother got really nervous. ‘Hoho, no, don’t do that. Hohoho, she has never hugged a child in her whole life.’

Cecilia’s narrative brings to the fore several important aspects of being a child and a grandchild in the 1970s–1980s. The fact that women began to work outside the home to a greater extent than before is visible in all interviews in this cohort, but the narratives also show that the mothers continued to be the primary carers and their paid work was conditioned in relation to their responsibility for caring for children. While some of the younger respondents remember being in public day care, most do not, reflecting the fact that such facilities were still scarce and expensive in the beginning of this period, and expanded greatly only during the 1980s–1990s (Tallberg Broman, 1995).

Notably, few in this generation talk about being cared for by grandparents on a regular basis, although, compared to previous generations, their grandparents were more often still alive. In several narratives, adult children talk about their parents moving away from their place of birth, either for work, like in Cecilia’s case, or for studies. This meant that few describe daily or weekly contact with their grandparents. Instead, children in this cohort relate a narrative that is rare in the oldest cohort: of visiting and spending time with grandparents for longer periods of time on school holidays, often without parents present. This, in combination with increased opportunities to stay in touch by phone, seems to have made it possible to form a relationship to the grandparents independently of parents. Interestingly, as Cecilia’s narrative indicates, there seems to have been a growing expectation and interest on the part of children to have a close relationship to grandparents – or at least grandmothers. While Cecilia succeeds with her paternal grandmother, her attempts to get close to her maternal grandmother fail, indicating the necessity for reciprocity in a good, caring grandparent-grandchild relationship (Mason, 1996). However, the fact that she tries and that she, and several other participants from this cohort sees, it as her right to have this good relationship, in contrast to the narratives of the older generation, can be interpreted as a change towards a more active role of children in families (comp. Gullestad 1996; Sandin, 2011: 129; Brannen et al., 2000).

Grandchildhood in the early 21^st century

All of the participants in the youngest cohort in our study, born between 2001 and 2015, have to some extent been enrolled in public day care. They are growing up in a time when dual-earner/dual-carer family and gender equality ideals are strong and politically supported, visible in, e.g., high numbers of women involved in the labour market, and the ‘daddy quota’ in parental leave (1995) (Klinth, 2002). However, gendered norms still prevail, as do gendered practices, and women are still primarily responsible for carrying out care and household work (Kaufman and Grönlund, 2020).

Compared to previous generations, there is an increase in the recognition of different family forms, including the right of homosexual couples to have children (Kolk and Andersson 2020). This broadening of family forms has potentially changed what it is to be a grandchild. Divorce and re-partnering – combined with longer, healthier lifespans – makes it more likely that a child will have many potential grandparents around, and also puts new types of grandparents on an equal footing with biological grandparents.

The view of children as competent and autonomous is now highly visible in both politics and family practices (Sandin, 2011). In 1990, Sweden ratified the UN Convention of Children’s Rights as law. Research shows that Swedish parents are increasingly affected by normative frameworks on parenting as ‘intense’, expressed in the need for parents to make the right choices on behalf of their children, fulfilling a ‘child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive, and financially expensive’ (Hays, 1996: 8, italics in original) parenting ideal, which often entails structuring and orchestrating the child’s time with enhancing activities and ‘quality time’ (Kaufman and Grönlund, 2020). Combined with the increased prevalence of dual-earner full-time employed parents, as well as increasing demands in the labour market for flexible work (Roman and Peterson 2011), this has put pressure on families with small children, leading grandparents to help out in their adult children and grandchildren's everyday lives (Björnberg and Ekbrand 2008; Herlofson and Hagestad 2012). This is visible in the emergence of the first care reform since the 1950s that is not tied to the child-parent relation: from the beginning of the 2010s, an expansion of ‘temporary parental benefits’ made it possible for others than parents – including grandparents and other relatives – to get financial support for caring for a temporarily ill child.

Everyday care and children’s relational competence

Irma is a 12-year-old girl living in a larger city with her two mothers; both are highly educated and worked full-time during Irma’s upbringing. They shared parental leave equally between them, and Irma has attended day care since she was 18 months old. When Irma was five, her mothers divorced, and now Irma splits her time between them. Her mothers have new partners, and Irma has formed close relationships with both of them, and also with their parents – Irma’s bonus grandparents. Irma has many grandparents and bonus-grandparents in her life: in her interview, she tells of no less than nine people whom she considers her grandparents.

The weeks Irma stays in her mother Ilse’s home, Irma tells us that she often visits one of her grandmothers and a bonus-grandfather living nearby, and, once a week, she also stays overnight at the grandparents’. When she stays at her other mother Ingrid’s home, two of the grandparents on this side of the family also live nearby, and Irma spends lots of time with them.

Being a grandchild comes out as a very pleasurable and positive experience for Irma. She describes staying at her grandparents’ place as a relief, a break from her parents, and a chance to spend time with someone who really knows her well.

I think it’s very fun, it’s very nice to get away from your parents sometimes, when you are tired of them. Then I have someone who still knows me, and maybe knows me a little better, almost. And you do not get tired of grandparents.

Irma reflects a lot on how she attends to the different needs of the grandparents in her life, such as adjusting to the age of her grandparents when it comes to their energy levels and what activities they can do together. She is well aware of her importance in her grandparents’ life. She sees herself as not only being taken care of by them, she is also caring for them. ‘It’s a very nice feeling to be able to help,’ she says, ‘that you can help them, and that it is helpful for them just that I am there with them.’

All of the grandchildren participating in our study tell similar stories of helping out in their grandparent’s everyday life, both with practical chores such as gardening, cooking or shopping, but also by ‘being there’. Sometimes, ‘being there’ entails doing fun activities together, like having a fika, (coffee and cake) playing cards or watching TV together. From the perspective of the grandchildren these are described as fulfilling activities in themselves, but they also often acknowledge that the activities are done for the sake of the elderly. In doing so, they can be argued to be part of a ‘displaying’ (Finch, 2007) of grandparenthood/grandchildhood: activities together convey and confirm their positions, and their joint endeavour of entering into these categories towards one another. Sometimes, displaying also entails an outside audience, as Irma recognises.

[T]hey want it to show that they have grandchildren in the house, who spend time there. So, then I should do something with the magnets on the fridge, rearrange them, or I should paint something on a closet door or something. I help them with that, so to speak.

When planting traces of ‘grandchildren-presence’ in the home of the grandparents, Irma is helping the grandparents displaying their grandparenthood to friends and visitors. As is apparent also in our interviews with grandparents, the position of being a grandparent is today aligned with a certain status (Anving et al., 2023). When Irma participates in this displaying practice, she gives the grandparents status in the eyes of others, while also engaging in an activity that correlates with her own experience of feeling valuable as a grandchild.

All narratives in this cohort reflect the taken-for-granted acceptance of children being in day care today, but in addition, in comparison to the older cohorts, the grandchildren portray grandparents as much more engaged in their everyday lives. Grandparent and adult-children informants confirm this narrative, and tell about frequently ‘helping out’ with practicalities around the grandchildren, complementing public day care institutions, and in several cases this also involves making arrangements to move geographically closer to one another, to enable this engagement.

This cohort more often mention grandparents of both genders as being significant and involved in their care situation. However, the character of the care engagements differs in the grandchildren’s narratives, exemplified in 10-year-old Petra’s description of activities she engages in with her grandparents when visiting their summer house.

At grandma and grandpa’s place, me and my grandma we usually bake together or make dinner. […] They have a separate house in the garden, and grandma and my [little] brother sleep there, while grandpa and I sleep in the main house. Me and grandpa, we watch Pirates of the Caribbean and eat snacks, even though grandma says we cannot [laughs], but he is so mischievous!

While the grandfather represents the rule-breaking fun activities, it is still her grandmother that Petra considers to be ‘closer’ to her: they call each other often, and she is the one Petra confides in with the secrets she does not want to share with her parents. This image of grandmother care as a more encompassing organisational responsibility and as emotionally close, and grandfathers’ engagements as ‘fun’ is – with a few exceptions – present in the grandchildren’s narratives, and is also confirmed in the interviews with grandparents and adult children.

Most significantly, the narratives of grandchildren in this cohort reflect clearly children’s competence and capability in relation to care-doings, and also their expectations that the care situations they engage in with grandparents should be reciprocal. Relationships with grandparents comes out as offering the possibility of creating space for oneself together, where practical ‘helping out’ as well as emotional recognition – of having a fundamental and positive feeling of ‘being there’ together – extends in both directions.