ANGELA KIM spends two days a week baby-sitting for her 2-year-old grandson, Noah, while her daughter, Andrea, a doctor, works nine-hour hospital shifts.
Only Mrs. Kim, 57, lives in Houston and her daughter and grandson live in Dallas — 250 miles away.
This long-distance child care arrangement means that on Tuesdays Mrs. Kim wakes at 4:45 a.m. to catch a 6:30 a.m. Southwest Airlines flight to Dallas Love Airport, where her daughter and Noah pick her up at the curb.
At the hospital, her daughter hops out of the car to make her 8 a.m. shift and Mrs. Kim slips into the driver’s seat. Then she and Noah drive to his preschool, and after that, home, where Mrs. Kim fills her grandson’s next two days with brown rice, seaweed and Konglish, a mix of Korean and English.
On Wednesday night, Mrs. Kim does the trip in reverse, catching a 7:30 p.m. flight to the Houston airport, where her husband picks her up.
Terri P. Tepper of Barrington, Ill., made a similar trek every week for a year to help care for her granddaughter so that her daughter could pursue her career. Beginning in 2001, Ms. Tepper flew to New York on Sundays and returned to Chicago on Thursdays.
“It was cheaper than getting a nanny,” said Ms. Tepper, 64. The round-trip tickets, which her daughter paid for, cost between $190 and $230. “I actually saved them a lot of money,” Ms. Tepper said. Her daughter later made partner in her consulting firm.
Even at a time when grandparents are more involved than ever in the lives of their children and grandchildren, the efforts of Mrs. Kim and Ms. Tepper are extraordinary. But many grandparents these days are making extreme efforts to help their children bridge the work-life divide.
“To me, grandparents are like the family National Guard,” said Andrew J. Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who studies intergenerational issues. “They are ready to step in when there is a need, and as soon as that need is met, they are ready to leave active duty.”
“In low-income families,” he continued, “it may be the grandmother down the street who helps out. In high-income families, it is the grandmother in a neighboring city who helps out.”
Intercity commuting is just one way they provide that help. Grandparents are also taking time off from work, retiring early, moving to the United States from overseas or selling their home to be near grandchildren.
The greater involvement results from a confluence of factors, including the financial burdens of child care and anxiety over the quality of care. But most notably it is influenced by a generation of grandparents who have the time and the financial wherewithal to pitch in.
“This is the first generation where we have so many older people living long enough, being healthy enough and being affluent enough to provide these services on a large scale” since women entered the workplace in large numbers, Dr. Cherlin said.
But the involvement cuts across the economic spectrum. According to the census, 19.4 percent of preschool children with working mothers were primarily entrusted to grandparents in 2002, the latest year for which there are statistics. Grandparents took charge more often than fathers (18.2 percent), day care (19 percent) or hired help (9 percent). In 1995, grandparents ranked third behind fathers and day care centers, at 15.9 percent.
There are no figures on how many grandparents go to extremes, because they can afford to, to care for their children’s children.
“We call them grandboomers,” said Amy Goyer, national coordinator for the AARP Foundation Grandparent Information Center, which has noticed heightened interest in information and services for grandparents. “They have more disposable income. They may have planned better for retirement.”
For example, Judy Chen of Seattle could afford to take a year off as a hospital researcher to move to the Bay Area to baby-sit to help her daughter, a corporate lawyer. Her career was better able to absorb the timeout, she said: She was close to retirement, but her daughter was on a fairly strict career track in her firm.
“Compared with her job, I have to sacrifice a little bit,” Mrs. Chen said.
Besides, she said, echoing a sentiment expressed in similar terms by other Asian and Latino grandparents interviewed, “I am a Chinese mother.” Stepping in — even moving in — is customary in cultures that stress intergenerational familial obligations. In Mrs. Chen’s case, her sense of obligation to her daughter trumps that to her husband, who was left home alone for a year. “He is lonely, but he has a job,” Mrs. Chen said.
Mrs. Chen’s daughter and son-in-law were reluctant to hire a nanny, feeling uncomfortable with strangers raising their son. They said they also worry about day care, expressing a widely shared parental anxiety that was only heightened by a National Institutes of Health study published this year that found some evidence of increased behavior problems among sixth graders the more time they had spent in professional day care.
Were it not for the help of her mother and mother-in-law, Andrea Kim said, she would have quit her residency rather than put Noah in day care two years ago.
“I couldn’t bring myself to do it,” said Andrea Kim, who had already invested nine years in college, medical school and a residency at that point. “I had a lot of guilt.”
And so she proposed the flying granny nanny scenario to her mother. “It was a joke when I first mentioned it, then it turned into a plea,” Andrea Kim said.
Some weeks, her mother or her father, Augustine, 61, fly to Dallas, scoop Noah up at the airport curbside pickup and take him to Houston on the next flight.
“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Kim, the grandmother. “Somehow it works out.”
As for the expense, the family waits for an e-mail alert that Southwest is offering a sale, then buys $1,000 worth of tickets. It’s still expensive, but less so than professional child care, which would cost her daughter and her husband, Tim, $160 to $200 a week.
Noah’s other grandmother, Nita Thomason, who lives in the Dallas area, watches him for another three days of the week.
Mrs. Kim was initially reluctant to take on the burden; she was very busy volunteering for her Southern Baptist church. But then she realized that her daughter was serious. “She was desperate,” she said. “As a mother, I thought, ‘She needs my help more than any other time of her life, and this is something I can do for her.’ ”
Ted Curtis, 62, said that his daughter Beth Horowicz, a corporate lawyer, also didn’t feel comfortable leaving her daughter, Addison, in day care. “She never really adapted,” he said of Addison, who was painfully shy and often clung to her mother’s leg.
So a few years ago, Ted and his wife, Laurie, retired, sold their house in Maine and moved in with Beth and her husband, Ben, outside Baltimore to help raise Addison. The Horowiczes bought a new house for the extended family. The grandparents’ presence has changed Addison, coaxing her out of her shell. “It took a while to get her to open up, and now she talks and talks and talks,” Mr. Curtis said. “It’s a whole different child.”
The Curtises were eager to be closer to their grandchildren, as their children are scattered across the country. “It was hard to be distant grandparents up in Maine,” said Mrs. Curtis, who now baby-sits for another granddaughter in Baltimore as well.
Some grandparents find lending a hand fulfilling. Kay Govoni of Burlington, Mass., retired 10 years ago so she could take care of her grandchildren full time.
“I do think that a lot of people my age are beginning to see that, O.K., we’ve retired, and so what do you do with your life: spend it all in a selfish let’s-go-play, let’s-go to-Florida, let’s-go-out-to-dinner lifestyle?” she said. “That gets old hat very fast.”
In many ways, being a grandparent is an extension of being a parent. Mrs. Kim said, “My friends ask me, ‘Is this for the grandbaby?’ I thought about it and I know it’s more about my child than my grandbaby.”
Mrs. Curtis said: “I think it’s really hard on young women now. They’re expected to do what my generation dreamed of doing.”
And, she said, she believes it is her duty to help her daughters fulfill the ambitions she herself encouraged. “I feel like I am responsible to some extent that they are pursuing the professions they have,” she said.
Beth Horowicz is grateful to the Curtises for keeping the household running by cooking dinners, doing the laundry and sending the thank-you cards. “They are the glue that holds things together,” said Mrs. Horowicz, who, thanks to them, even has the luxury of a morning run.
Ben Horowicz said that when he mentioned to friends that his in-laws were moving with them, “It would be followed by a moment of silence.” But over time, his peers have changed their opinion, he said. “A number of friends have expressed jealousy that we seem to have a manageable existence.”
