https://memoirsandrambles.substack.com/p/the-window-for-great-grandmothers
But even more interesting is that this “age of great-grandmothers” as I like to call it not only is ending, but it hasn’t been here for long either.
Now, I won’t dig too deep into the numbers but this source for example claims global life expectancy jumped from around 47 to 72 from 1950 to 2022. One can extrapolate it was even lower in the 1900s, and before then too.
What that means is that there probably weren’t too many great-grandmothers before the 1900s either. Indeed, people had children even earlier, but it was hard to get old enough to have grandkids even in that case.
So all in all, it seems that the window in history during which there were probably the most great-grandparents is kind of around now, and it’s seemingly about to end.