7 Things Grandparents in Indiana Do at Bedtime That Their Own Parents Never Did
A grandparent’s nightstand can look nothing like it did a generation earlier.
Many Indiana grandparents now wind down with gear their own parents never had.
Here’s what has changed after dark.
Note: This is general information, not medical advice. Sleep needs and treatments vary by person, so talk to a doctor about a diagnosed sleep condition.
1. Strapping on a CPAP Machine
A CPAP machine, the bedside device that treats sleep apnea with steady air pressure, never sat on anyone’s parents’ nightstand because the machine didn’t exist yet.
Australian physician Colin Sullivan built the first working design and published it in 1981.
By 1985, the sleep clinic Sullivan helped establish had about a hundred patients on the program.
The technology didn’t reach store shelves commercially until 1989, when Sullivan’s company began selling it.
That’s not exactly common.
About 5 million Americans with diagnosed sleep apnea now run one every night, based on estimates from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
Grandparents born in the 1940s and 1950s spent their childhoods listening to a parent snore through the night with no machine anywhere in the house to fix it.
2. Taking Melatonin Before Bed
Melatonin has become a nightly habit for a lot of grandparents, and the numbers back that up.
A 1994 federal law reclassified melatonin as a dietary supplement, opening it up to wide retail sale decades after today’s grandparents’ own parents had already raised their kids.
National survey data tracked melatonin use among U.S. adults from 0.4% in 1999 up to 2.1% two decades later.
That’s a fivefold jump.
Their parents mostly reached for warm milk or a nightcap, not a bottle from the supplement aisle.
A grandparent popping a gummy before bed is a new habit, not an old one wearing a new label.
3. Setting a Phone Alarm
A phone alarm barely existed for grandparents a decade ago.
Only 18% of adults 65 and older owned a smartphone in 2013, according to Pew Research.
The retiree advocacy group AARP’s 2024 survey puts today’s figure near universal, a jump of about 73 percentage points in just over a decade.
It’s a different world now.
Their parents wound an actual clock and never plugged anything into the wall just to wake up on time.
4. Goodnight Video Calls
Grandparents now hand off goodnight duty to a screen more often than not.
AARP found that 86% of grandparents of children age five and under video chat with them at all, and nearly 40% log on daily or a few times a week.
Seventy-one percent of that group leaned on the technology more once the COVID-19 pandemic kept families apart.
Some had never opened a video call before that.
Goodnight looks different now.
A landline handled it for their parents, and only when grandchildren lived too far away for a visit to be simple.
5. Checking the Video Doorbell
Locking up now means one last glance at the video doorbell for a lot of grandparents.
More than 6 in 10 adults 50 and older now use some kind of smart device for security, utilities, or lighting around the house.
Some set a smart thermostat to drop a few degrees overnight while they’re at it.
It’s one more lock.
Their parents made do with a deadbolt and a porch light, never a live camera feed on a phone.
6. Wearing a Sleep Tracker
A sleep tracker rides along to bed for a growing share of grandparents now.
That same AARP research found 38% of adults 50 and older own some kind of wearable device, and a lot of them wear it overnight.
A tracker never touched their parents’ wrist at night.
It never happened.
The habit is new enough that today’s grandparents mostly picked it up as adults, not as kids watching a parent do the same thing.
What Grandparents’ Sleep Trackers Measure
A grandparent’s sleep tracker estimates sleep mostly from movement and heart rate, a method researchers call actigraphy.
A 2024 study published in the journal Sensors found these trackers measure total sleep time fairly well but perform poorly at catching wake-ups or sorting out sleep stages.
That doesn’t make a sleep tracker able to diagnose sleep apnea, which still requires a clinical sleep study.
7. Asking a Smart Speaker
Grandparents now hand the last bedtime chore to a smart speaker in a lot of homes.
Pew Research found about one in five adults 50 and older had one in the home as of 2019, a category of device that only reached the market in 2014.
That’s a fast rise.
It’s a voice command now, not a walk to the switch.
Their parents’ evening ran on a lamp switch and the newspaper’s weather page, not a speaker on the dresser.
Psst! How much do you know about sleep and aging? Take our myth-or-fact quiz and see how many you get right.
The Shrinking Tech Gap
Grandparents didn’t drift into this tech shift.
They sprinted through it in a little over a decade.
The gap between adults 18 to 29 and adults 65 and older on smartphone ownership was 53 points in 2012.
By 2021, that gap had narrowed to 35 points, and it keeps shrinking every year Pew checks.
That’s 18 points closed in under a decade.
The gap keeps closing.
Many households still keep a landline mounted on the kitchen wall, gap or no gap.
A paper calendar sits next to it more often than any app does, at least in the houses where the habit never had a reason to change.
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