National Grandparents Day

What the day is

National Grandparents Day falls on the first Sunday after Labor Day, which this record stores as September 13. It became a national observance in the United States in 1978.

Origin and background

It exists because of a sustained campaign by a West Virginia woman who had raised a large family and spent years visiting nursing homes. What she noticed there was not neglect by staff but isolation: residents who had families and did not see them, and who talked about grandchildren they no longer knew. She wanted a day aimed less at celebrating grandparents in the abstract than at getting people to actually turn up, and she lobbied for it locally, then at state level, then nationally for most of a decade.

The biology behind grandparenthood is more interesting than it first appears. Humans are unusual in that women commonly live for decades after they stop being able to have children, which is rare among mammals and demands an explanation, since evolution does not usually maintain a long post-reproductive life for nothing. The leading account, known as the grandmother hypothesis, holds that older women improved the survival of their grandchildren enough to select for longer life, by provisioning food and by allowing daughters to have children closer together. Studies of historical population records have found that having a living maternal grandmother nearby was associated with measurably better child survival.

The modern version is less dramatic but recognizable. Grandparents supply an enormous amount of unpaid childcare, and in many families that provision is what makes a parent's employment possible at all.

The practical point remains the founder's. A visit is worth more than a card, and the constituency she had in mind were the people who did not receive either.

How to take part

• Visit rather than send something, if visiting is at all possible.
• Record an older relative talking. That is the part that cannot be replaced.
• Ask specific questions about their twenties. General ones get general answers.
• Visit someone in a care home who has nobody, which is what began this.