Whatever Happened To Grandma and Grandpa?

Recently, I was at the playground with my daughter and it was time to reapply her sunscreen, so I called her using her nickname, the first two letters of her name repeated. “Gigi! Come here sweetie!” As she dutifully trotted over, a pretty woman in her late-50s or early-60s perked up brightly. “Gigi? That’s what my grandkids call me!” On cue, another woman around the same age and description joined us. “Is her name Gigi? That’s so cute: that’s my grandma name!”

The interaction was sweet, but it did get me thinking: Where were all the “grandmas”, lately? My own kids have a “Nonnie” and a “Mimi” — their one “Grandma” is my own grandmother. My friends’ kids also seem to prefer neologisms like “Lolly and Pop” or “Nini” and “Bumpy” or “Perepere” and “Taters.” Hand-to-God, these are things my friends’ kids call their Boomer grandparents. Whatever happened to “Grandma” and “Grandpa”?

But maybe I was imagining it. Perhaps I was just focusing on the handful of weird nicknames and forgetting that, no, most people go with “Grandma”, “Grandpa”, “Nana”, and “Poppy.” So I did what any Millennial non-scientist would do to figure it out: I put up two informal public polls on Facebook, asking what respondents called their grandparents and what their children called their grandparents.

The questions yielded more than 300 responses and reflected what I had, in fact, been seeing in the real world. Overwhelmingly, people older than Gen-Z/Gen Alpha called their grandparents “Grandma and Grandpa” or to a lesser extent something like “Nana and PopPop” or “Meemaw and PawPaw.”

That’s not to say there was no variation in earlier generations. In fact, I uncovered some true gems — “Grumpy,” “Graham Cracker,” “Papi sans moustache” and “Papi avec moutsache,” and (my personal favorite) “Granny Goose.” But all told, only about a dozen people said they called their grandparents anything other than some variation of grandma/grandpa or nana/poppy, and many of those were tied to their ethnicity (Bubbe and Zayde, Nonna and Nonno, Babushka and Dedushka). Among younger generations, however, I was bombarded with nearly 70 different grandparent names – and only 15 were Grandma and Grandpa respectively.

I wasn’t imagining things. The grandmas haven’t gone, but they’re losing ground to “Mimi”, “Gigi”, and “Nannies”.

TikTok has noticed this, too. There are dozens upon dozens of videos for grandparents and new parents looking for a good grandparent nickname. (Especially, it seems, for grandmothers-to-be.)

And even a few about the politics of choosing a grandparent nickname…

There’s also plenty of content for their Millennial and Gen-Z kids to poke fun at the proliferation of “new” grandparent names.

And, apparently, this is not a phenomenon limited to America, as this British comedian demonstrates.

But what happened to prompt this? How did we go from just assuming someone was going to be one of a handful of grandparent names to making the choosing of a milestone? I have some theories. For one, names in general are more diverse than they’ve ever been. I bet you had a couple of elementary school classes with a Jennifer, a Jen P., and a Jen F. That’s because between the late-70s and mid-80s, according to the Social Security Administration website, the name “Jennifer” accounted for 3% of all baby girls born in a particular year. As of last year, however, the current most popular girl’s name, Olivia, accounts for less than .9% of girls’ names in a given year. In short, people are much better at thinking outside of the box these days, and we have a better variety of names being handed out. And it seems that might just extend to new grandparents, too.

Another theory? And I say this with tremendous love and affection and respect: our parents, as a group, don’t want to admit they’re getting older. A whole bunch of people in my poll told me, unprompted, that their parents specifically eschewed more traditional grandparent names because it made them feel elderly. Sure, this new crop of Gigis and Grumpies seems livelier, more active, and, indeed, younger than the Nanas and Poppies of yore. (If you’ll recall, Dorothy, Blanche, and Rose on The Golden Girls are about the same age as Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte on And Just Like That.) As a society we’re aging better these days, and it seems that the idea that they might be Grandma and Grandpa age weighs heavily upon the Boomers and Elder Gen-Xers currently entering their second act.

Ultimately, of course, the name isn’t what’s important. “Grandma”, “Nana”, “Glamma”, or “GooGoo”: it’s the relationship our kids have with their grandparents that matters. Still, the grandparent vibe shift is pretty funny, and it makes me wonder what Millennial and Gen-Z grandparents are going to call themselves in decades to come.