Do Grandchildren make us stay?

My daughter lived with me when she gave birth to my GS (I was already divorced) then the 3 of us emigrated to Spain. DD and GS came back to Britain after 18 months but I stayed as I had met my OH. He and I came back 7 years later but settled 300 mile from DD in an area he came from as he had contacts for employment. Now I visit her as much as I can but fell guilty that I cant support her more. My GS is ASD and she is still a lone parent. My OH has work here and his elderly Mum but who knows what the future will bring.

When my daughters were both engaged to be married I thought about my future, widowed years before, I thought I would like to go back home to Aberfan, only 24 miles away. Younger daughter married , I could go home, but ten minutes away was my 2 year old grandson, then came my two granddaughters , I am still in the same town and they have or are moving away.

Yes, we did exactly that last year having always lived within 10 minutes of our 4 grandchildren.

I did worry that everything would change and it has but not for the worse.

We do less childcare but we do more being grandparents.

We do less pop in for an hour and more stay for a long weekend.

We have to make more effort because we're the ones not working but we came to the conclusion that once the youngest started school visits would be less ad hoc during the week even if we had stayed and more around weekends. So the distance ( we moved 100 miles away) actually didn't really disrupt anything more than pop ins.

The children love visiting because now we live in the country as opposed to in a town as they do. Their parents love it because now we have them for large parts of the holidays . We love it because we now live where we want to , are able to do the things we want yet still find time to be grandparents .

For us- it worked.

We moved 500 miles away when DDs were living independently. Now there are 2 DGC and the marriage fell apart I moved half way back which makes it easier to visit. My visits to help with childcare are very special but I couldn't live in London again. We FaceTime and that keeps me going between visits

In our case absolutely. Our eldest daughter lives in Australia. She and husband have no children.
Our youngest has one son, she lives 2 miles away and we are quite involved with his care. He’ll be here in half an hour.
I’m not sure how much we save them financially but I am certain their life would be much harder without us.
Of course we just love DGS to bits and I feel his life is better with us here. His other GandG are older than us and are not in such good health so he only visits them with his parents for short times.
Maybe we’ll be off to Australia in 10years time when the last people he will want to spend time with will be us?

I never lived more than 2 miles from my parents and saw them most days ,my children are the same its a 10 minute walk from one and the other has just moved 25 minutes away by car...into the country .She comes here to do shopping so pops in on her way past.Still see them all the time.Its just being close to family thats important .Nothing is more important than that in my life .I would never consider moving away from them

Yes, we moved to France, my grandchildren were into their teens but my husband's grandchildren were much younger. I keep in touch daily with Whatsapp etc and they all come to visit.
I am not overly maternal and am quite happy for my family to get on with their lives independently of me. Of course I will be there to help if needed.

I live 200 miles from my DGC, so have never been on hand to help with DGC, but to turn the question round, I have never considered relocating to be nearer. We have lived in the same broad locality (within a 40 mile radius) for the last 50 years and have a network of friends and activities that I would be sorry to move from. Such a move would also take us much further from our DD.

Actually, we briefly considered it once, when the DGC were babies and for a few weeks it looked as if DDiL might have a crippling and progressive disease. Thankfully that wasn't the case, and we were able to relax.

I could have written your post word for word, day6.

gmelon it was my dream to live by the sea at some time in my life - once work was over, but the pull of our AC and the GC made it impossible for us to move far away. We'd miss them too much and we are quite involved with our GC. We delight in watching them grow and change and they are so loving and close.

We stayed put. No regrets as we found a lovely house, perfect for us, about eight miles from them, but I want a lottery win now so we can have a holiday home by the sea.