‘Proxy Parenting’ and Creating a ‘Golden Touch’: Practices and Discourses of Intensive Grandparenting

Grandparents’ involvement in their adult children’s families has increased in recent decades, especially in relation to care arrangements around grandchildren. This ‘new army of proxy parents’ calls for the need to critically analyse grandparental care. Drawing on a study on intergenerational care in Sweden, involving grandparents, adult children and grandchildren (63 interviewees including 28 grandparents), we suggest the concept of intensive grandparenting as an analytical lens for understanding contemporary grandparental involvement in care for grandchildren. Intensive grandparenting is done in a complex and ambivalent relation to parenting, making grandparents ‘proxy parents’ that help realise intensive parenting ideals, while also realising ‘good grandparenting’ ideals through adding a ‘golden touch’ to grandparent–grandchild relations. This growing involvement of grandparents, while highly appreciated, risks reproducing gendered and classed inequalities within and between families.