The grandparents' second shift

On any weekday morning in a new apartment block on the edge of Hanoi or in the industrial towns of Bình Dương, you will find them: women and men in their sixties pushing prams around the car park, spooning rice porridge into reluctant mouths, waiting at school gates long before the bell. Many have come from villages hundreds of kilometres away, leaving behind their own homes, friends and fields to look after grandchildren while the parents work. In a country that is ageing faster than most, they form an invisible workforce on which the urban economy quietly depends.

On one level, this is simply family life as it has long been lived in Vietnam. Grandparents have always played a central role in raising children, and many would be offended by the suggestion that caring for a grandchild is a burden rather than a privilege. In many households the arrangement is never discussed at all; it is simply assumed. For young couples, the arrangement also makes obvious economic sense. Private nurseries in the big cities can swallow a large share of a factory or office salary, and few workplaces offer the flexibility that would allow a parent to leave at four o'clock. A grandmother, by comparison, works for nothing and never calls in sick.

Yet the cost of this arrangement is real, even if it rarely appears in any statistics. Grandparents who move to the city often find themselves cut off from the networks that sustained them at home: the neighbours, the pagoda, the afternoon tea under the banyan tree. Those who stay in the village bear the brunt of a different kind of migration, bringing up a second family on a small pension while the parents work in distant factories. Researchers who have interviewed such grandparents describe a striking mixture of pride and exhaustion, with the latter seldom spoken aloud.

There is also a subtler tension between generations. Grandparents bring decades of experience, but their methods do not always match those of parents who have read about child development online. Disagreements over food, discipline and screen time are common, and they are complicated by the fact that the grandparent is, in effect, an unpaid employee whom nobody can afford to upset. Many young mothers admit to biting their tongue rather than risk an argument that could leave them without childcare the following week; some describe years of walking on eggshells in their own homes.

Policymakers have been slow to recognise any of this, partly because the work takes place inside the family and is therefore assumed to cost nothing. But free is not the same as costless. Every hour a grandmother spends at the school gate is an hour she is not resting, earning or seeing her own friends. If Vietnam wants its young people to keep working and its birth rate, which has already fallen below replacement level, to stop sliding, it will need affordable public childcare on a far larger scale. Paradoxically, such services might do more for grandparents than for anyone else, allowing them to choose how much care to give instead of having the choice made for them.

None of this is an argument against grandparents helping out. The bond between a child and the person who fed, carried and sang to them every day is one of the quieter treasures of Vietnamese family life, and it would be a real loss if it were to disappear. The point is that a gift remains a gift only when it is freely given. At the moment, for many of the grandparents in those car parks, it is closer to a second working life, one that began just as the first was supposed to end.