By Joanne Lipman

I recently asked Google to show me pictures of a grandmother. It shot back pages of kindly old women with clouds of gray hair and orthopaedic shoes. None looked like Sharline Andersen, 60, an energetic events director in Fresno, Calif., who raised four daughters while working and is now a grandmother of 12, including half a dozen step-grandkids. "I don't see retirement as anything close to my future," she says. "I feel like I have a lot of energy left and a lot left to give."

Andersen was among the millions of young moms who poured into the workplace in the 1980s and 1990s. Their generation came of age when the "Mommy Wars" demonized them and experts ominously warned that they would ruin their kids. Decades later, many are still at work -- and determined to "break that cycle" of "doom and gloom" as Andersen puts it, now that their grown kids are becoming working parents themselves.

Andersen sees her role as "validating [her daughters] as moms" and setting an example. "I'm grateful that my daughters have been able to see me in a career," she says, and now "see that you can be in your 60s and be a grandmother and still be very active in their lives, and still have a very strong and successful career."

Like Andersen, most Gen X grandmas are in the workforce, as are close to half of Boomer grandmothers, according to AARP, an organization that represents older Americans. These women are redefining grandparenthood, managing to be both more hands-on with the grandkids and more professionally ambitious than previous generations. In some cases it's a financial necessity, given how child-care costs have well outpaced inflation.

But there's an added, often overlooked, dimension: These grandmas remember all too well the struggles and stigmas they faced, and they are determined to ease the way for their working-parent kids.

"We appreciate how hard it is. It is so freaking hard," says Carol O'Keefe, 64, a St. Louis litigator who raised four children while building her legal career. Last year, she decamped to New York City for two months after her first grandson was born. She worked remotely while helping her daughter-in-law by day and handling infant feedings through the night. "I love that baby," she says, "but it's as much or more about helping out your kids as it is about the grandbabies."

These grandmas are offering the kind of practical support and cheerleading that they lacked as young moms. In the 1990s, just 2% of companies offered paid maternity leave, and even unpaid leave wasn't mandated until 1993. News reports were full of dire predictions about the damage they would inflict on their kids.

A 1990 article in Children Today darkly predicted that the "unbridled careerism" of working women would irreversibly harm their children. A 1991 Fortune cover story asked, "Can Your Career Hurt Your Kids?" The answer: "Yes." By 1998, an Arizona public official declared in this newspaper that two-career families are "a profound tragedy whose bitter fruit will be reaped for decades to come."

"Good grief, it's amazing our kids are alive," laughs Christi Shoppach, 62, an executive assistant with the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne. She vividly recalls the accusatory looks back when her three now-grown sons were toddlers in daycare: "Absolutely, I felt the working-mom stigma with each of my kids."

Today, as a grandmother of three who works remotely from Austin, she has the flexibility to help with her newest grandchild or pick up her 8-year-old granddaughter if her parents are in a bind. "I can be a little bit more relaxed...and be proud of my kids and what they do, and maybe offer some wisdom," she says.

When her youngest grandchild was born last fall, Shoppach was also able to take five paid days of "grandparent leave," which SentinelOne has offered since 2022. Several other companies have created similar programs in recent years, including Booking.com (two weeks), Cisco (three days) and HireVue, which coined the phrase "grandternity" leave for its five-day leave. The time off is available to grandparents of both genders, though the employees who have taken advantage so far tend to be women.

Andersen, the corporate events director, was the first HireVue employee to take grandternity leave, pioneering the policy in 2013 before it became official. She took another four leaves over nearly a decade.

When her daughters were young, Andersen read parenting books obsessively and felt the "pressure to be this perfect mom," she says. "I remember just kind of being overwhelmed...I definitely had a lot of working-mom guilt." Today, three of her daughters are working mothers too. "I must not have messed them up," she says wryly. "It didn't turn out too bad."

The dire predictions about career women wrecking their kids' lives did in fact turn out to be wrong. Harvard Business School's Kathleen McGinn, who has researched working mothers over two decades, has found that their adult daughters earn more and are more likely to hold supervisory positions, while their adult sons do more household chores and spend more time with their families than those whose mothers didn't work outside the home. Perhaps more to the point, she found no difference between happiness levels regardless of whether mothers were employed or not. "Zero effect," she told me. "Your mom's employment isn't going to make you happy or unhappy."

Researchers have found that today's working grandmas are a hands-on bunch. Syracuse University sociologist Madonna Harrington Meyer interviewed 48 of them; all but four "said they were doing much more care for the grandchildren than they expected -- and much more than their own parents did for them," she told me. They were often filling real child care gaps: "taking kids to doctors' appointments, giving them dinner, tucking them in," she added. "There's a huge shift in what's expected or requested from grandparents."

At the same time, "they all talked about incredible joy," Meyer says. As a newly minted working grandma myself, I can confirm the trend. When my daughter was on maternity leave, I worked from home -- her home -- once a week to help her care for Sadie, sometimes just to give her a break to go to the gym. That kind of arrangement would never have occurred to me, or to my mother, during my own hectic maternity leaves years ago.

I was in good company. Jen Goetz, a 57-year-old talent acquisition leader for Cisco in Golden, Colo., took the company's grandparent leave when her granddaughter was born. She now sometimes works remotely from her daughter's house to help with the baby or simply to allow her daughter to get some sleep.

Her own experience as a young working mom, juggling twin girls and a son who are just two years apart, is never far from her mind. "In my former life as a mom with three young babies in diapers, I desperately wanted the support. I'm just so pleased to be able to offer it" now, Goetz says. "It makes me happier. And I think it makes me a better employee."

She is among the newest grandmas in her friend group, who share baby essentials like strollers and bassinets with each other. "There's a lot of us," she says of working grandmas, "women who are mid to later part of their career, but we have a lot of runway left in our career. We're not ready to hang it up."

Joanne Lipman is the former chief content officer of Gannett and editor in chief of USA Today. She is the author of "Next! The Power of Reinvention in Life and Work."

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 25, 2025 12:45 ET (16:45 GMT)

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