Census 2016: ‘skip-generation’ families press grandparents into service
TORONTO — With their only child grown up with a family of her own, Louise Hutchison and Dave Sharp were enjoying the freedom of being empty-nesters: travelling, getting together with friends and, of course, visiting with their grandchildren.
But three years ago, the Alberta couple’s lives changed dramatically when they went from being grandparents to full-time caregivers of their three young granddaughters after their mother was charged with impaired driving and disappeared from her children’s lives.
“It wasn’t what we were planning, because we had been through it,” Hutchison conceded in an interview from her home in Airdrie, near Calgary. “We went from an empty nest to a full house again.
“It was actually fun being the grandparents because we could take them and we could have a lot of fun with them,” Hutchison, who works as a company manager, said of her granddaughters Coralynn, 9, Riley, 6, and Hayleigh, almost 4.