Thanks for keeping us afloat professional#

The charities Grandparents Plus, Save the Children and the Family and Childcare Trust describes these willing volunteers as a “hidden army”, allowing the nation’s parents to stay in work.

Thanks for keeping us afloat professional#

For while there will be some who are sitting back and enjoying the proverbial crossword and slippers, others (if not most) are knee deep in the kind of unpaid labour that the economists cited by Lady Altman and her colleagues rarely bother to consider when calculating the strength, or otherwise, of our economy.Īlmost 2 million grandparents have either given up work or reduced their hours to take on childcare for their children’s children – no surprise given that the cost of professional childcare has risen 27 per cent in five years too. And, more’s the point, these early retirees aren’t stripping the economy, they’re helping the rest of us to prop the damn thing up. “It would add 1 per cent to the economy if people worked a year longer.”īut “writing themselves off”? I rather think not. “People in their 50s and even their 60s are not old, so why should we write them off and why should they write themselves off?” she said. Lady Altman, the pensions minister, says too many boomers are opting out of the workplace too soon, while still young and healthy and with lots to give.

They are retiring early and enjoying their spoils – and, according to Baroness Altman, it’s bad for all of us. They have at their disposal a freedom never afforded to their parents and which their children (hey, that includes me) will not have the chance to share either. It’s hard to feel sorry for the generation that had it so good, the baby boomers who got rich quietly by the sheer luck of finding somewhere to live and holding on to it, and who now close the doors on their careers with life expectancy rising almost daily and a fully funded pension on which to sit out the decades that remain.