The maternal grandparent edge
When I arrive at my daughter and son-in-law’s Brooklyn apartment in New York on Thursdays, my 18-month-old granddaughter hurtles toward me, happy for our weekly date.
While her parents work, we spend the day doing toddler stuff — reading favorite books six times in a row, singing about spiders and stars, placing objects into containers and dumping them out again, going to the park, napping (baby, not Bubbe, alas). If we’re lucky, I spend half an hour with the whole family, once my daughter gets home, then head back to my place in New Jersey.
The routine I call Bubbe Day (for the Yiddish word for grandmother) has come to feel so natural that I never considered whether it would have unfolded differently if my granddaughter had been a son’s child, not a daughter’s. But it might well have.
You hear this often: Paternal grandparents tread very carefully, mindful that a daughter-in-law might not appreciate their overtures or their frequent presence, anxious that she could limit access to their grandkids. I thought it an old stereotype, possibly never accurate and certainly now outmoded.
But researchers exploring family affiliations point out that a so-called “matrilineal advantage” does exist. That is, daughters generally have closer ties to their own parents than to their in-laws, which leads to warmer relationships between their children and the maternal grandparents.
“The mother-daughter dyads engage in more frequent phone contact, more emotional support and advice — more than mothers do with sons or fathers with daughters,” said Karen Fingerman, who teaches human development and family sciences at the University of Texas, Austin, and has published studies on this topic.
One possible explanation is that women still shoulder more of what researchers call “kinkeeping” — arranging for calls and visits, planning holiday gatherings.
“Women are more active in maintaining those relationships,” said Jan Mutchler, a sociologist and gerontologist at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. “When you have mothers and daughters, then you have two women working on it.”
What happens with sons and their children? “It’s about your relationship to the person they married,” Fingerman said. She has found that parents’ rapport with a daughterin-law — “a key figure” — significantly influences their bond with her children. The connection with this gatekeeper (more than with a son-in-law, for unexplained reasons) can cement or thwart grandparental closeness.
Thus, you hear sorrowful tales like this one of a grandmother whose name I am not using to prevent further discord. She moved to California in 2017 to help her son and his wife with their baby, her first grandchild. “I expected I’d be hands-on, baby-sitting in the evenings,” she told me.
It hasn’t worked out that way. Her daughter-in-law, whom she didn’t know well before her pregnancy, “did not want me to be close,” she said, and didn’t accept gifts and offers of help.