two person making gingerbread house and three children watching them

Pew Researchers Just Published Six New Facts About American Grandparents This Month, and One Number About How Often They Actually See Their Grandkids Might Surprise You

September 20, 20261Views

Minutes Read

Two-thirds of U.S. adults age 65 and older were grandparents as of 2024, and the odds climb fast with age, according to a Pew Research Center analysis published this month. Fewer than 1% of people in their 30s have a grandchild, compared with 27% of those in their 50s, 51% of those in their 60s, and 74% of those ages 80 to 90. The average grandparent has six grandchildren, and 14% have more than ten.

An elderly woman hugging a young child — Photo: Ekaterina Shakharova / Unsplash

How Often They’re Actually in Touch

Seven in ten grandparents 65 and older are in contact with at least one grandchild monthly or more, per the same Pew report. Broken down further, 15% are in touch daily, 27% several times a week, and 28% several times a month. Just 10% keep it to about once a month, and one in five have less contact than that.

Time spent together backs up the contact numbers. A separate June 2026 AARP survey of more than 3,300 grandparents found that 69% provide some form of hands-on care, averaging over 500 hours a year, according to AARP’s own research release. AARP put the combined value of that unpaid caregiving plus direct financial support at $900 billion annually nationwide, with the typical grandparent spending $2,654 a year on grandchildren, a figure that tops the average monthly Social Security retirement check.

Caregiving Load and Living Arrangements

Pew’s own numbers on caregiving intensity tell a slightly different story than AARP’s, which is worth noting rather than smoothing over. Pew found 21% of grandparents said they or a spouse had spent 100 hours or more over two years caring for a grandchild, working out to roughly an hour a week on average, while the other 79% spent less time than that.

Living arrangements skew more toward extended families than a lot of people assume. Eight percent of children lived in a household headed by a grandparent in 2024. Among those households, 48% had two married grandparents present, 43% had a single grandmother as head of household, and 9% had a single grandfather.

Key Points

66% of U.S. adults 65 and older are grandparents, rising to 74% among those 80 to 90
The average grandparent has six grandchildren; 43% have three to six, 14% have more than ten
70% of grandparents 65+ have monthly or more frequent contact with a grandchild
21% logged 100+ hours of grandchild care over two years, per Pew; AARP separately found 69% of grandparents provide care averaging 500+ hours a year
8% of U.S. children live in a grandparent-headed household

Closeness doesn’t always track with how often people talk. Among adults with at least one living grandparent, Pew found 36% describe the relationship as extremely or very close, 27% as somewhat close, and 38% as not very close, with Black Americans reporting notably higher closeness, at 49%, than other groups.

Homeowner Who Finally Got Sick of Stepping Over Her Own Clutter Every Day Sold or Donated Nearly Everything She Didn’t Actually Use in a Single Month

Aria Hastings

Parenting is hard. Like, really hard. And somehow the internet has found a way to make it even harder — between the expert opinions that contradict each other, the Pinterest-perfect nurseries, and the celebrity moms who look like they have it all together before the ink on the birth certificate is even dry. It's a lot. That's kind of why Aria started writing about it. Aria doesn't claim to have all the answers, and honestly, that's what makes her so easy to read. She writes the way most of us think — real, a little messy, and always honest. Her approach to parenting has never been about doing it perfectly. It's about doing it intentionally, and giving yourself enough grace to actually enjoy it somewhere in between the chaos. You'll find her covering everything from the everyday stuff — routines, sibling dynamics, screen time debates, the mental load of just keeping little humans alive and happy — to the bigger, harder conversations that don't always have a clean answer. She's not here to lecture. She's here to sit with you in it. She also keeps tabs on the celebrity mom world, and she'll be the first to admit it's partly because it's fun. But there's something genuinely refreshing about watching someone famous have a parenting moment that's just as relatable as yours. Aria finds the stories worth talking about and actually has something interesting to say about them. If you've ever closed a parenting article feeling worse about yourself than when you opened it, Aria's writing is the antidote to that. She wants you to walk away feeling like you've got this — because you do.