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We often hear about the isolation of contemporary American family life — the parents forced to go it alone, the kids stuck inside, the disappearing village. But there’s another trend pushing American childhood in a more communal direction: Grandparents are playing a larger and more enduring role in kids’ lives.

For starters, there’s a demographic shift at play. As birth rates fall, the average number of grandchildren per grandparent has fallen as well. Susan Miller, a 67-year-old grandma in the Washington, DC, area, told me that while her mom had 13 granddaughters, she has four grandchildren. Having fewer grandkids “gives you more time with them,” she said.

Longer life expectancy also means kids actually get more years with their grandparents than they used to, even though people are having kids later in life, according to Ashton Verdery, a sociologist at Penn State University. These trends are “likely leading to deeper relationships between grandchildren and grandparents,” Verdery said.

Miller and her husband spend the summers in Minnesota with their grandkids, cooking, crafting, roughhousing, and putting on plays and puppet shows. Her 11-year-old granddaughter has “my husband really wrapped around her finger,” she said.

“He’ll dress up,” Miller said. “He’ll pretend to be a ballerina.”

Beyond participating in impromptu ballet performances, grandparents provide a host of benefits for kids. Across cultures, spending more time with grandmothers and grandfathers is linked to better educational and mental health outcomes, Verdery said. They can also offer kids a fresh perspective and sometimes come at child care with a more relaxed outlook than their stressed-out adult children, said Susan Kelley, a professor emerita of nursing at Georgia State University who has studied grandparents raising grandchildren.

But grandparents are also increasingly stepping in to plug holes in America’s crumbling child care........

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