Grandmothers at Work

A study of the lived experience of working grandmothers in early twenty-first–century America.

Young working mothers are not the only ones who are struggling to balance family life and careers. Many middle-aged American women face this dilemma as they provide routine childcare for their grandchildren while pursuing careers and trying to make ends meet. Madonna Harrington Meyer’s Grandmothers at Work explores the lived experience of working grandmothers. While all of the grandmothers in the book are pleased to spend time with their grandchildren, many are readjusting work schedules, using vacation and sick leave time, gutting retirement accounts, and postponing retirement to care for grandchildren. Some simply want to do this; others do so because their adult children need assistance and may have less security and flexibility on the job than do their mothers. Most of the grandmothers expect to continue feeling the pinch of paid and unpaid work for many years before their retirement.Grandmothers at Work provides a unique perspective on a phenomenon faced by millions of women in America today.

Winner of the 2014 Richard Kalish Innovative Publication Award presented by the Gerontological Society of America