9 Things Grandparents in North Carolina Do Differently Than Their Parents Did
“We never did that when you were little” can start quite a conversation in a North Carolina family.
Now that you’re a grandparent, you might understand both sides. You remember how your parents did things, but you’re also learning why their approach doesn’t always fit your grandchildren’s lives.
These are the things grandparents in North Carolina do differently than their parents did.
Note: This is general information, not legal or financial advice. Laws, program rules, and dollar amounts are subject to change.
1. Buckling Kids Into Car Seats
A car seat wasn’t automatic for parents raising kids a generation ago.
Today’s grandparents never skip buckling a kid into a car seat before the driveway even clears.
Not back then.
North Carolina’s first child passenger safety law didn’t exist until 1982, and it only covered children under 2 riding with a parent.
The rule kept growing from there.
Today’s rule covers every child under 16.
A child stays in a car seat or booster until they turn 8 or reach 80 pounds, whichever comes first, under North Carolina’s current law.
State lawmakers are even weighing a bill that would swap the weight cutoff for a height cutoff.
It would judge a child’s readiness by whether they stand about 4 feet 9 inches tall instead.
The Two-Part Car Seat Cutoff
North Carolina’s rule leans on two numbers, age and weight, and either one alone can end it.
A big 7-year-old weighing 85 pounds can move to a seat belt once the weight half stops applying.
A small 8-year-old under 80 pounds skips the seat too once turning 8 ends the other half.
2. Requiring Bike Helmets
A helmet goes on before a kid’s bike even rolls, and grandparents insist on it every time.
No helmet, no ride.
North Carolina had no state helmet law of any kind until the Child Bicycle Safety Act took effect on December 1, 1997.
It applies to anyone under 16, on any public road, path, or right-of-way.
Before that date, a kid could pedal to school bare-headed and break no law at all.
3. Buckling up Every Time
North Carolina grandparents won’t pull out of the driveway with anyone unbuckled today, a rule that simply didn’t exist when their parents were behind the wheel.
It wasn’t the law yet.
North Carolina’s mandatory seat belt law didn’t take effect until October 1, 1985.
Even then, police spent more than a year issuing warnings instead of tickets while drivers adjusted.
A driver could legally cruise the interstate unbuckled before that date.
No ticket, no fine, nothing.
4. Putting Babies on Their Backs
Grandparents lay a grandbaby down for every nap on their back today, a position the generation before them was taught to avoid.
That’s a recent switch.
The national Back to Sleep campaign only began urging that change in 1994.
That’s well after many of today’s grandparents had already raised their kids face-down, following the medical advice of the time.
It’s not just old history. Unsafe sleep positions and shared beds contributed to more than 1,100 North Carolina infant deaths between 2015 and 2023, according to the state’s Child Fatality Task Force.
The research on safe sleep reversed course decades ago, and the state is still working to make the new advice stick with every generation of caregivers.
5. Much Longer Shot List
North Carolina now requires two doses of the chickenpox vaccine before a grandchild starts kindergarten, plus a meningococcal shot before 7th grade and a booster dose before 12th.
Those school rules didn’t exist when many of today’s grandparents were raising their kids.
The list kept growing.
In the mid-1990s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended just six vaccines nationwide: Hepatitis B, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP), Hib, polio, measles-mumps-rubella (MMR), and a tetanus-diphtheria booster.
The chickenpox vaccine itself didn’t even reach the market until 1995.
Today’s recommended childhood schedule folds in shots against hepatitis A, rotavirus, meningitis, and human papillomavirus (HPV), among others, protecting kids against diseases that weren’t even preventable by shot back then.
A kid heading into a North Carolina kindergarten now carries protection against far more diseases than a kid heading into kindergarten in 1995 ever did.
6. Saving Through a 529
North Carolina grandparents can drop money straight into a kid’s 529 account as a birthday gift, an option their parents never had while raising them.
There was no such account.
North Carolina’s 529 plan crossed the $2 billion mark in total savings back in 2017, according to the plan’s announcement.
Account balances have kept rising in the years since.
The plan’s materials list grandparents by name as welcome contributors, right alongside parents, aunts, and uncles.
A grandparent can put in as much as $19,000 a year without triggering a federal gift tax, the 2026 annual exclusion set by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
7. North Carolina Now Pays Grandparents to Step In
The state now pays a grandparent who takes in a kid full-time, support that didn’t exist when grandparents’ parents sometimes did the same thing decades earlier.
No check existed.
The state’s Kinship Care payment program only began in November 2023.
It offers up to $405 a month for each child a relative takes in, with no foster care license required.
Before that, many county social services offices had no budget to pay a relative caregiver anything at all.
Grandparents who stepped in decades ago covered every diaper and school shoe out of pocket, with no help from the state.
8. School Without the Paddle
Grandparents don’t worry about a paddle waiting in a classroom anymore, not the way their parents once did.
That changed fast.
North Carolina schools recorded nearly 900 corporal punishment incidents across 17 districts in the 2010-11 school year alone.
That number fell to about 60 incidents by the 2017-18 school year.
By 2019, all 115 of the state’s school districts had voluntarily ended the practice on their own.
Lawmakers are still working on a bill that would make that ban permanent under state law, since nothing currently stops a district from bringing it back.
Psst! How much do you know about American family history? Take our quiz and see how many you can get right.
Quiz
American Family Trivia
Answer these questions on family life across the decades. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
A P&G researcher invented Pampers in 1961 after growing frustrated with washing cloth diapers for a family member. Which family member was it?
9. Clocking in Past Retirement Age
Grandparents today are far more likely to still clock in at a job than their parents were at the same stage of life.
Retirement kept moving later.
The share of North Carolinians age 65 and older still in the labor force rose from about 15% in 2010 to 17.4% in 2022, according to the state's Department of Health and Human Services.
The national rate for that age group has followed the same upward trend.
That's a shift of more than two percentage points among North Carolina's older adults in just over a decade.
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