Kaiser Health News (May 26) ‘We Miss Them All So Much’: Grandparents Ache as the COVID Exile Grinds On Across America, where more than 70 million people are grandparents, efforts to prevent infection in older people, who are most at risk of serious COVID-19 illness, have meant self-imposed exile for many.
At the opposite extreme, some grandparents have taken over daily child care duties to help adult children with no choice but to work. “All the grandparents in the country are aching,” said Madonna Harrington Meyer, a sociology professor at Syracuse University in New York. “Some are aching because they can’t see their grandchildren — and some are aching because they can’t get away from them.”