Grandparent relationships get treated, almost by default, as the warm and uncomplicated bond in a family tree, the one relative who spoils you unconditionally and asks for little in return. New survey data suggests that assumption doesn’t hold for a meaningful share of American families. According to YouGov, 23% of Americans, roughly one in four, have experienced estrangement from a grandparent at some point in their lives, even as the same survey finds most people describe grandparent bonds as some of the most formative relationships they’ve had.
The bond is real, but it isn’t universal
YouGov’s survey of 1,000 U.S. adults, conducted May 2-6, 2023, found that 69% of Americans believe close grandparent-grandchild relationships are very important, a share that climbs to 75% among women, 78% among Black Americans, 83% among people who describe themselves as religious, and 84% among adults 65 and older, according to the poll. Thirty-nine percent of respondents said their grandparents were “very influential” in their lives and another 33% said “somewhat influential,” while on the other side of the relationship, 43% of grandparents surveyed said their own grandchildren were very influential to them, evidence that where closeness exists, it tends to run in both directions rather than one.
The matrilineal advantage
One of the survey’s more specific findings involves what researchers describe as a matrilineal pattern in how close those bonds actually get. Americans are most likely to say they were very close with their mother’s mother, and least likely to say the same about their father’s father, a gap that holds up even a generation further back, with great-grandparents following the identical pattern, according to YouGov’s data. Only 48% of respondents said they had even met all four of their grandparents, which on its own limits how many people ever had the chance to form a bond with every branch of the family in the first place.
That matrilineal pattern matters beyond trivia, too. Because so much of grandparent contact runs through the maternal line, family dynamics on the mother’s side, geography, custody arrangements, how involved a daughter-in-law versus a son-in-law feels welcome to be, end up shaping which grandchildren grow up with four active grandparent relationships and which grow up closer to two. It’s a structural explanation sitting quietly underneath a statistic that otherwise looks like simple personal preference.
What grandparents actually pass down
Where the relationship does take hold, it tends to do real work. Seventy-seven percent of respondents celebrated holidays with grandparents, 74% said grandparents entertained them growing up, and 61% learned about family history directly from one. Just over half, 51%, picked up cultural traditions that way, and 50% learned a specific skill or hobby from a grandparent. The role goes beyond storytelling and holidays, too: 54% of respondents said a grandparent disciplined them at some point, 44% received regular childcare from a grandparent, 40% lived in the same household as a grandparent at some point, and 18% had a grandparent serve as their primary legal guardian.
Estrangement isn’t rare, either
Set against all of that closeness, the 23% estrangement figure lands differently. It isn’t a fringe outcome; it’s a substantial minority of American families where the supposedly automatic grandparent bond simply never held, or eventually broke. That tracks with YouGov’s broader look at family estrangement: in a separate survey of more than 11,000 U.S. adults, the pollster found 29% of Americans report being estranged from some immediate family member, a category that includes grandparents alongside parents, children and siblings, according to that survey. Two different data sets point at the same underlying reality: family estrangement, grandparent relationships included, is common enough that it can’t be treated as an outlier story.
Two truths, not a contradiction
The real finding here isn’t that grandparent bonds are overstated or that estrangement is secretly the norm. It’s that both things are true in the same population at once: deep, formative closeness for a clear majority of Americans, and a real, sizable minority for whom that same relationship went in a completely different direction, often shaped by which side of the family it ran through, how far apart everyone lived, and whether anyone in the middle worked to keep the connection alive in the first place.
