Before she died, I was always closer to my mom’s mom. She was everything to me. She looked like me, talked like me, or really, I looked and talked like her. I had her hands. I had her laugh. People told me that my whole life, and I never got tired of hearing it.
And I loved my dad’s mom too. It was never a competition or a question of who loved me more. Both of them loved me completely.
The relationship was just different. One felt like home base. The other felt like visiting.
Apparently, that little family imbalance is common enough that researchers have spent decades trying to figure out why it happens. And the answer has almost nothing to do with which grandmother loves harder.
The research keeps finding the same lopsided result
Thomas Pollet, a psychologist at Northumbria University, studied more than 7,000 British families with Daniel Nettle at Newcastle University and Mark Nelissen at the University of Antwerp. They found that maternal grandparents had more contact with newborn grandchildren and provided more support.
That wasn’t a one-off finding. Other studies looking at who grandchildren feel closest to have put the maternal grandmother at the top of the ranking so consistently that researchers stopped asking whether it was true and started asking why.
In one study of British teenagers, the maternal grandmother was the most important family member outside of parents and siblings. The maternal grandfather came next. The paternal grandparents came after that.
The maternal grandmother who ends up closest to the grandchild is usually there because the structure of families gave her a head start. The research has gotten increasingly specific about how.
And the pattern holds even when paternal grandparents live closer. Pollet and his colleagues found that maternal grandmothers maintained more contact across distance than paternal grandmothers did, which suggests the gap isn’t just about geography.
The grandmother who’s closest to the mother gets a head start with the child
Most of it comes down to one relationship.
Richard Michalski, a psychologist at Hollins University, and Todd Shackelford at Oakland University found that grandparents who were emotionally closer to their adult children were also closer to their grandchildren.
The middle generation is the bridge. If the bridge is strong, the grandparent gets through. If it’s weaker, less gets across. And in most families, the strongest bridge runs between a mother and her own mother.
Fathers love their parents too, but mothers tend to be the ones organizing the family’s social life, and they start with the people they’re closest to.
Think about what that looks like in practice. Mom calls her mother when she’s pregnant. Her mother is there for the birth, or close to it.
She comes over in those first impossible weeks, holds the baby so Mom can take a nap, learns the feeding schedule, figures out which cry means hunger and which one means overstimulation.
A year later, she knows the pediatrician’s name. She knows which foods the toddler won’t touch. She knows the bedtime routine well enough to run it herself.
Five years later, she’s the person the child has seen most often outside of their own house.
She’s the one who knows about the friend drama at school, the favorite cereal, the thing the child is afraid of that they haven’t told their parents yet.
It wasn’t planned. The relationship between the two women just kept creating opportunities for the grandmother to show up, and she kept walking through them.
The grandchild bond wasn’t assigned. It was accumulated, one visit, one phone call, one sick day at a time.
And the accumulation happened so gradually that by the time the child was old enough to feel it, the closeness already felt like it had always been there.
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There’s an evolutionary theory too, but it’s smaller than it sounds
Some researchers have tried to explain the pattern through biology.
A mother always knows the child she gave birth to is hers. Her mother, therefore, knows her daughter’s child is her descendant.
On the father’s side, that biological connection between grandparent and grandchild was historically harder to verify.
That’s led some researchers to predict an investment ranking, with the maternal grandmother first and the paternal grandfather last, and a number of studies have found something that looks roughly like that order.
But the evolutionary explanation is one layer of a bigger picture, not the whole thing. And leaning too hard on it misses the more human version of the same story.
More recent thinking, including work by the anthropologist Kristen Hawkes at the University of Utah, points to what researchers call the grandmother hypothesis: by helping her daughter, the maternal grandmother was helping the grandchildren at the same time.
She wasn’t only investing downward into the child. She was lightening her daughter’s load, which freed the mother up to be a better parent, which benefited the child too.
In other words, the grandmother who cooked dinner so her daughter could rest wasn’t just being kind. She was doing something that rippled outward into the next generation, because a mother who isn’t running on empty parents differently than one who is.
So even the evolutionary angle points back to the same place: the mother-grandmother relationship is the engine. Everything else follows from it.
The paternal grandmother is working with a narrower path
If the maternal grandmother’s closeness comes from structural access, then the paternal grandmother’s relative distance usually comes from the same dynamic running in reverse.
She may live farther away. Her son may not call her as often as his wife calls her own mother, because he communicates differently.
The family may default to spending holidays with the mother’s side first. She may still be working full-time while the other grandmother retired years ago and has afternoons free.
After a divorce, the gap can widen further. Children typically live with their mothers, which means maternal grandparents often keep or increase their access while paternal grandparents can lose it almost overnight, through no choice of their own.
None of that is about love. It’s about logistics, communication habits, and the way families organize themselves around the mother, often without anyone consciously deciding to.
The paternal grandmother who sends birthday cards, calls when she can, and shows up every chance she gets is doing everything right.
She’s just working with a narrower path to the child, and that narrower path can make the relationship feel different from the inside, even when the love behind it is exactly the same.
Still, the pattern is just a pattern. Plenty of people are closest to their dad’s mom, or a grandfather, or a step-grandparent, or someone who isn’t biologically related at all. Geography, personality, divorce, remarriage, and who simply shows up can rearrange the average completely.
Maybe I wasn’t closer to my mom’s mom because she loved me more than my other grandmother did. Maybe she entered my life through a door that was already open between her and my mother, and then she spent years walking through it.
By the time I was old enough to notice how close we were, the relationship had already been building for most of my life. She’d been in the room since before I could remember.
And that kind of presence, the kind that starts before you’re even aware of it, is hard to compete with, no matter how much love is on the other side.
