“We want grandparents who want to have pizza nights with us, attend baseball and basketball games, have ice cream dates, take bike rides, just genuinely have fun with us and our boys,” reads one post on the Facebook group Surrogate Grandparents USA, a place where grandparent-seeking families can connect with surrogate grandparents. “One lonely grandma here. I would love to share affection and attention with a nearby family,” posted another.
Created in 2015 by 68-year-old retired paralegal Donna Skora, Surrogate Grandparents USA now has more than 11,800 members. The page is described as “a place where grandparents who are missing having grandchildren in their lives & families whose children are missing having grandparents in their lives, can find and connect with each other for a possible lifetime of love.”
Here, prospective grandparents across the country offer their services for baking cookies and reading books, while parents can seek out the kind of support and comfort only grandparents can provide. In 2024, 21% of adults in the U.S. reported feeling lonely, with many respondents feeling disconnected from friends, family. While a surrogate family might not be the most conventional set up, at the end of the day, doesn’t every family have their unconventionalities?
Access to the group is granted by invitation only. Skora reviews each membership request and the group’s moderators encourage people to properly vet prospective surrogates before connecting in real life. Short personal ads are then shared on the page, along with locations. If both the surrogate grandparent and the grandparent-seeking party hit it off, messages are exchanged before eventually progressing to meeting up IRL.
The reasons people post on the group are as wide-ranging and complex as biological families. Some members of the group have lost loved ones, others have never had families of their own. The site has also expanded to serve foster children who have aged out of the system and are looking for chosen family, as well as helping grandparents who are raising grandchildren full time find respite care.
It is also a safe haven for the estranged. Today, around 27% of American adults have cut off contact with a family member, which translates to 68 million people, one of the highest estrangement rates in the world. Skora’s experienced this first-hand, becoming estranged from her son and daughter-in-law when her grandson was born. “We were totally blacked out of their lives completely,” she told reporter Lexi Pandell in a recent interview with Wired.
Deciding to launch Surrogate Grandparents USA the same year, Skora connected with a family nearby. As is the case with flesh-and-blood, it is not always happy families. In the end, Skora cut contact when the parents began requesting gifts and trips from her. This is now expressly forbidden in the group’s rules.
For others, however, the arrangement works well and fills a family-shaped hole. “I’m not going to live my life being sad,” one surrogate grandmother told Wired. “There are people out there who want relationships with people like me.”
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