In The U.S., This Polarizing Issue Has Parents Divided. In Sweden, It’s Law.

Pam Barnes, a resident of Louisville, Ohio, watches her 3-year-old grandson 10 hours a day, four days a week. She loves being involved in her grandchild’s life, but being a full-time caregiver also comes with a price.

Barnes had to quit a “good-paying” job as an office manager. Her daughter and son-in-law “knew I couldn’t do it for free” and agreed to pay her $50 a day as a result, Barnes said. She said talking with her family about getting paid was “a little awkward,” but she sees this money as a sign of appreciation for the career sacrifice she has made.

“I’m not looking to replace my other salary, but I did need something, so [my husband and I] could have a little cushion,” Barnes said. “I also take [my grandson] places and out to lunch occasionally and use my pay for that.”

“I didn’t want to cheat them or take too much from them. But they needed to understand that when you have kids, there’s expenses,” Barnes added. “You can’t expect your parents, friends ― whoever might want to do it ― you can’t expect them to do things for nothing.”

And yet, many Americans do have the expectation that grandparents should take care of grandchildren at any time, under any circumstance, for free.

“One time, my daughter-in-law told [her] older friend that they paid me and [that friend] couldn’t believe that I took money,” said Janis Bowlby, a retired HR professional based in Newberg, Oregon. “It really hurt my feelings that someone would say that.”

Bowlby took care of her two grandchildren for $75 a week until the grandchildren went to school and her full-time care was no longer needed. Her family provided lunch, and Bowlby did not need gas money since she lived within a mile of her grandchildren. But as a widow, Bowlby said the money made a difference.

If you want to guarantee a hot debate, ask your friends and loved ones the following question: Should a grandparent be paid for taking care of their grandchild?

The perennially polarizing question is like kicking a hornet’s nest because it hits so many sore spots for American families around money or cultural expectations of what a grandparent should do.

When HuffPost surveyed its readers about whether grandparents should be paid for babysitting grandchildren, one grandparent said, “My payment is every hug and kiss that I can get from them.” Another reader answered that the notion of paying her parents for child care “would be offensive and even comical” because “children for them are viewed as a treasure and a joy, not a job.”

The resentment that might be simmering underneath all of this? The idea that, if a grandparent really cares about their grandchildren and their adult children, they step up and take care of their grandchildren for free.

“There are many grown children who, the minute a parent says no to anything, thinks, ‘They don’t love me,’” said Jane Isay, a grandparent and the author of “Walking on Eggshells: Navigating the Delicate Relationship Between Adult Children and Parents.”

Bowlby said she takes personal offense to people who are proud of parents who refuse to take money “because they love their grandkids.”

“If my children could not have afforded daycare, I would have still been there in a heartbeat because I love my children and grandchildren,” Bowlby said. “But they could, and at the time, the extra money helped me out.”

One big reason why many parents turn to their parents for child care duties is because day care is so unaffordable for many Americans. The market rate price for just one child per year can range from $5,357 in smaller towns to more than $17,000 in 2022 for larger cities, according to a 2023 Labor Department report across 2,360 U.S. counties in 47 states.

These prices represent up to 19.3% of a median American family’s income per child and are the reason why “childcare prices are untenable for families across all care types, age groups, and county population sizes,” the report stated.

Just this month, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance suggested that one solution for lowering the cost of day care lies with grandparents: “One of the ways you might be able to relieve a little bit of pressure on people who are paying so much for day care is … maybe Grandma and Grandpa wants to help out a little bit more.”

But what if Grandma and Grandpa can’t afford to, or simply don’t want to do this help for free?

As Audrey VanScyoc, a parent in Tucson, Arizona, put it to HuffPost: “Money is tight for everyone right now, including grandparents. They may not want to take money for babysitting their grandkids, but they should,” she said.

If these U.S. families lived in Sweden, all of these questions would not need to be so personal. The decision on whether or not to pay grandparents would not have to be a fraught discussion between families ― it would be government policy.

As of July, Swedish grandparents are eligible for up to three months of paid parental leave for a grandchild’s first year. Under the new law, parents can transfer a maximum of 45 days from the Nordic country’s generous paid leave policy to a grandparent, while a single parent can transfer 90 days, which will help a grandparent “strengthen the ties to their grandchild,” said Anna Tenje, minister for older people and social insurance in Sweden.

Tenje told HuffPost that the new law will particularly benefit single mothers and families in which several adults are involved in raising children. She said the ability to transfer paid parental leave to grandparents “increases the possibility for parents of young children to combine working life with family life in periods of life that require more flexibility.”

Could this ever happen in the U.S., which remains one of the few countries in the world without any form of national paid leave? Not anytime soon, said Richard Petts, a professor of sociology at Ball State University and an expert on parental leave.

In the U.S., “our childcare infrastructure is quite poor, and we don’t subsidize childcare nearly to the extent we should ― families are expected to manage this themselves and not be supported by public policies,” he said. Adopting Sweden’s paid caregiver model would require Americans to value care much more than they currently do, he said.

Although the Nordic country’s grandparent leave remains a far-off fantasy for Americans, it’s the kind of law that could help make paying a grandparent for child care a less judgmental conversation.

“Policies that recognize the value of carework would certainly help to de-stigmatize various forms of compensation for this labor,” Petts said.

U.S. grandparents, for one, would welcome the idea. “I think Sweden is on to something,” Bowlby said. “It would be a great way to earn a little extra and give us an opportunity to fill a need.”

Until there is nationwide change, the conversation about whether to pay a grandparent for caregiving will continue to be a sensitive topic for U.S. families. But it doesn’t have to be such a contentious debate ― if both sides are willing to table their assumptions.

“This arrangement cannot be made out of anger. ‘Well, I’ll pay you,’” Isay said. “It requires a lack of ego on both sides.”

Lose the harmful and judgmental belief that if grandparents want or need to be paid, it means they love their grandchildren ― or their adult child ― less.

“My feeling is that if you donate your time to your grandchildren or you are paid, you are doing it out of love,” Bowlby said.

Instead, grandparents should be direct about what this money could do to help them, and adult children can be proactive about offering ways to reimburse their parent for their time.

“It’s not about, ‘Oh, you can’t love me if you need the money,’” Isay said. “It’s, ‘How can we make this easy for everybody? How could we make it so that we’re sharing the children and the love and the sacrifice?’”

Families can use the cost of child care in their area as a starting measure for how much they should pay a grandparent. Bowlby said in her own talks with family, “I told them to find out how much it would cost if they had to pay a child care facility, and I would charge them one-third of that cost,” she said.

Reimbursement also does not have to be a regular check to be meaningful. Bowlby, who still drives her youngest grandchild around, said her family gave her the surprise gift of $500 spending money on a cruise as a way to thank her. “They still tell me constantly how much they appreciated what I did and how they needed me,” she said.

Adult children who want to compensate grandparents should also be sensitive about whether their offer of payment might be a blow to their parent’s ego. So if you want your parent to accept the money, be respectful.

“As grandparents age, our authority leaks out like a hole in one of the water towers. It’s like drip, drip, drip,” Isay said. “And taking money from your children to take care of the grandchildren might be an assault on that authority.“

For both parents and grandparents, it helps to tune out the noise of what other people expect you to do for caregiving. Many people also hold entrenched ideas of what a grandparent should be doing with their free time, which contributes to the ongoing stigma against paying grandparents for caregiving.

For adult children, it helps to remember that it is not realistic to keep your parent constantly on reserve for free babysitting duties ― unless this is an explicit agreement you both have accepted.

“Even when we’re old and we’re not working, we have created lives for ourselves,” Isay said. “And so the question of, ‘Can you? Will you? Would you?’ is legitimate.”

So if the talk does get tense, take a deep breath and ask yourself: “What does love require of me?” Isay said. “I think that attitude makes it easier for people to have open conversations.”

The most important piece of advice is to have the conversation. Barnes, for example, said she and her daughter talked for almost a year before Barnes quit her job about what her caregiver role could look like. Now that it’s her reality, Barnes sometimes wishes she could just be Nana instead of her grandchild’s disciplinarian, but she said the good days outweigh her bad ones.

“When he tells [me], ‘Nana, I have so much fun with you,’ that outweighs the ‘Nana, I don’t want to do what you tell me right now,’” Barnes said.

And, as Barnes’ story shows, the decision about when to accept payment can be nuanced. Barnes decided that when she watches her grandchild over the occasional weekend, she does not ask for payment, because it’s when she and her husband “can be Nana and Papa” and just have fun.

But to make her new role work, Barnes also got a backup for her days off.

“We went on vacation this year for two weeks, and they had to find somebody else during the day to watch [my grandson]. That was a little difficult for [my daughter], but you know, I have a life too,” she said.