Excess sugary treats not half as sweet as our free childcare

PARENTS: can’t live with ’em, can’t put ’em in a care home without losing your inheritance.

And when you become parents yourselves your relationship with your own parents becomes even more complicated.

Things which you once found intolerable must now be tolerable if you want to keep your free childcare. So if mum calls to give you the latest update on who’s dead and dying in their social circle, you’d better listen up and listen good.

You must also accept that they will do things with your children which you would never do, i.e. fill them to the brim with cooked dinner and then give them a whole tube of Smarties and then poppin’ candy before dropping them off when they’re so hyper they’re practically bouncing off the walls (the names have not been left out of this to protect the innocent, but to protect my childcare).

And yet we must grit our teeth and smile when told little Jonny “only” had 10 Fruit Shoots today, even though there is now an actual study which states that indulgent grandparents might be having a negative impact on their grandchildren’s health. It’s not that they don’t care – it’s that they love too much, according to researchers.

The University of Glasgow study suggests grandparents are often inclined to treat and overfeed their grandchildren, plying them with high-sugar and highfat foods.

Actress Maureen Lipman, a grandmother of two, even confessed: “The grandparents’ job is kind of to be in cahoots with the grandchildren against the parents.”

She said being a mother could be “quite challenging” but being a grandmother was “just pure pleasure”.

It makes a lot of sense. They have the pleasure of spending time with these delightful little people without the consequences. After years of angst raising us it must be so refreshing and life affirming to just enjoy the children without wondering about their salt intake or speech development. There is a serious side, however, as the study found that some grandparents even smoke around their grandchildren and that both that and regular over-treating can increase the cancer risk. But researchers found that concerned parents will keep schtum even when faced with really serious issues and contradictory health messages being given to their kids because they can’t afford to risk losing their childcare. It just goes to show how much this current generation of parents relies on their own, should they be lucky enough to still have them, to look after the children and carry out the pickups and drop-offs while we work.

I know parents who would just not be able to manage if they didn’t have both sets of grandparents to rely on. With childcare being so expensive, it would make work uneconomical if they had to pay for all of their children’s care.

And as our parents’ generation have generally benefited from more generous pensions and a lower state retirement age, they are young enough and in good enough health to help out.

I know I make fun of our over-indulgent relatives, but they are truly indispensable.

And, while we don’t want their love to lead to a generation of obese kids, there’s an even more serious issue which I think has been overlooked. What happens when our children have children?

Companies now offer far less generous pensions than they did and, coupled with a rise in the state pension age, it’s unlikely there will be this safety net of sets of healthy and time-rich grandparents in their 50s and 60s who will be able to hold the childcare fort.

This current generation of parents are likely to still be working when their own grandchildren come along, so who will their children turn to?

Political parties keep offering free childcare but, if you’re working fulltime, 30 hours a week won’t touch the sides. Paying for nurseries is like having another mortgage and after-school clubs, babysitters and nannies are hardly cheap either.

I believe it’s highly likely that our children will look back at us with jealousy and disbelief that a few extra bars of Freddo frogs were the worst thing we had to worry about when it came to grandparents providing childcare.

Yes they can be annoying and yes we don’t want to hear about Aunt Mable’s varicose veins yet again but we’re lucky in so many ways.