This can be seen by looking at the average number of children ever born to three different age cohorts of women, all of whom had completed their fertility by 1991 when the data were collected. The first trend is a decline in the percentage of women having no children, only one child, and five or more children. Second, there was an increase in the percentage of women having two or three children. Connidis concluded that most ever-married people would have at least two or more children for some time to come. Most young children have grandparents.
Children are more likely to have grandparents alive today than in the past.
Recent trends in fertility among today's young adults may result in slightly lower percentages of people experiencing grandparenthood in the future, but it seems apparent that most people will still have grandchildren. They may, however, have somewhat fewer, on average, than today's older adults, as a result of the changing fertility patterns discussed earlier. Stepgrandparenthood is an experience about which there has been little research but which is a fairly common experience. People become stepgrandparents through divorce or death and subsequent remarriage in either the grandparent or parent generation. Comparable Canadian information is not available.