Coming Home: Deeper Bonds with Family

Introduction

Ask people what they would do with more time and, sooner or later, most of them mention someone they love. They would walk the children to school rather than waving them off from a car. They would be the grandparent who does the Tuesday pick-up. They would finally have the long, unhurried conversations with a partner that a working week keeps postponing. They would drive across the country when an elderly parent needs them, without first asking a manager for permission.

For many early retirees, this is not a side benefit. It is the point. Work, even work we enjoy, is a powerful competitor for the hours and the attention that family life needs. It takes the best of the morning and leaves the tired end of the evening. It sets the calendar around which birthdays, school plays, illnesses and farewells must be squeezed. When it recedes, something else can come forward, and what comes forward most often is home.

This chapter explores that homecoming. It looks at what research says about time with children, grandparenting, marriage after retirement and caring for relatives, and it listens to people who stepped away from paid work years or even decades early and describe, in their own words, what changed in their families. The picture is warm, but it is not simplistic. More time is an opportunity, not a guarantee. Marriages can wobble during the transition before they settle. Care for others can enrich a life or exhaust it, depending on how it is chosen and supported. The evidence suggests that the families who flourish are those who use their new freedom deliberately, and that is precisely what early retirement makes possible.

There is a particular poignancy to early retirement in this respect. Leaving work at 60 or 67 often means gaining time just as children have grown up and moved away. Leaving at 35, 45 or 55 can mean gaining time while children are still small enough to want you on the school run, while teenagers still need a steady adult nearby, while parents are still well enough to enjoy a day out, and while grandchildren are young enough to be carried. Timing, in family life, is almost everything.

What the research tells us

Presence, not just hours: time with children

It is tempting to assume that the more hours a parent spends with a child, the better that child will do. The research is more nuanced, and in some ways more encouraging. In a much-cited American study using time diaries from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, Milkie, Nomaguchi and Denny (2015) examined how the amount of time mothers spent with children aged 3–11 (1,605 children) and adolescents aged 12–18 (778 young people) related to behavioural, emotional and academic outcomes. For younger children, the sheer quantity of maternal time was not linked to these outcomes, while social and economic factors were. In adolescence, however, more engaged time with mothers was associated with fewer delinquent behaviours, and engaged time with both parents together was related to better outcomes (Milkie et al., 2015).

Two lessons follow for anyone imagining an early exit from work to be with their children. First, no parent needs to feel that a working career has irreparably harmed their children; the study offers no support for that kind of guilt. Second, what seems to matter is engaged time, and particularly time in the teenage years and time when both parents are present together. These are exactly the kinds of time that full-time work for two adults tends to squeeze out, and exactly what early retirement can restore. The early retirees in this chapter rarely talk about “quantity time” in the abstract. They talk about walking to school, surfing lessons, dinner cooked slowly, and being available when a teenager finally wants to talk.

Grandparenting: generally good for grandparents, with important exceptions

Grandparents are an enormous source of childcare across Europe and beyond, and a growing body of research asks whether this care is good for the grandparents themselves. The broad answer is “often yes, but it depends on the kind of care”.

Using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), Di Gessa, Glaser and Tinker (2016) found a positive longitudinal association between looking after grandchildren and grandparents’ physical health, even after taking account of health and socio-economic circumstances earlier in life. Interestingly, this association appeared only for grandmothers and not for grandfathers, and the authors call for more research into the mechanisms and gender differences (Di Gessa et al., 2016).

Arpino and Bordone (2014), also using SHARE data on around 10,000 people aged 50–80, asked whether providing childcare helps grandparents stay mentally sharp. Descriptively, grandparents who were intensively involved had lower cognitive scores, but the authors showed this was explained by their background characteristics rather than by the childcare itself. Using a statistical approach designed to get closer to cause and effect, they found that providing childcare had a positive effect on one of four cognitive tests, verbal fluency, with no significant effect on the others. Results were very similar for grandmothers and grandfathers. It is a modest finding, but a hopeful one: time with grandchildren appears to belong among the socially and cognitively stimulating activities that help older minds stay active.

One of the most striking studies comes from the Berlin Aging Study, which followed older Berliners over many years. Hilbrand et al. (2017) reported that grandparents who provided non-custodial childcare had mortality hazards 37% lower than grandparents who did not provide childcare. Tellingly, the benefit was not confined to grandparents: older adults without grandchildren, or without children at all, who cared for others beyond their family also appeared to live longer. The authors interpret this through an evolutionary lens, suggesting that the neural and hormonal systems involved in caring for others may promote health in the carer (Hilbrand et al., 2017). As with all observational research, healthier people may simply be more able to help, and the study cannot fully rule that out.

The best overall guide is a systematic review by Danielsbacka, Křenková and Tanskanen (2022), which pulled together 117 studies published between 1978 and 2019. Its conclusions are carefully balanced. Where grandparents lived separately and were involved in their grandchildren’s lives, 69% of findings pointed to better outcomes for the grandparents. Where grandparents were raising grandchildren without the parents present (custodial grandparenting, often arising from family crisis), 68% of findings pointed to worse health or wellbeing. Findings for three-generation households were evenly mixed. The reviewers also note that there is only limited evidence that grandparenting itself causes better health (Danielsbacka et al., 2022).

For anyone considering retiring early partly to be a more present grandparent, this is useful guidance. Chosen, regular, non-custodial involvement is the kind most consistently linked with wellbeing. Being pressed into full-time substitute parenting, especially in difficult circumstances, is a different and often harder experience that deserves support rather than romanticising.

Partners and marriage: a wobble, then often a settling

Popular culture is full of jokes about retired husbands under their wives’ feet, and there is a grain of truth in the research, though the full story is more hopeful. In a study of American couples in late midlife, Moen, Kim and Hofmeister (2001) found that the actual transition into retirement was associated with declines in marital quality for both husbands and wives. Couples in which one partner retired while the other remained employed reported the greatest marital conflict, regardless of which partner had retired. Yet the same study found that actually being retired, for more than two years, promoted marital quality, which the authors interpret as a reduction in role strain once couples had settled into their new life (Moen et al., 2001).

Szinovacz and Davey (2004), using the American Health and Retirement Study with 2,695 married people, found a similarly textured picture for depressive symptoms. Recently retired men seemed to be negatively affected when their wives carried on working, while joint retirement had a beneficial influence on both recently retired and longer-retired men. For recently retired men, however, the benefit of their wives’ retirement depended on whether the couple enjoyed doing things together. Among women, effects appeared only in the first six months after retirement, when wives reported more depressive symptoms if their husbands were already at home. The authors conclude that marital context plays an important role in retirement wellbeing (Szinovacz and Davey, 2004).

A broad review of psychological research on retirement by Wang and Shi (2014) likewise emphasises that family factors, including a spouse’s situation, shape how people adjust. None of this suggests that retirement is bad for marriages. It suggests that the transition is a genuine renegotiation of roles, routines and space, and that couples who plan it together, and who find shared pleasures, tend to do best.

Why does this matter so much? The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has followed its participants since 1938, found that people who had happy marriages in their eighties reported that their moods did not suffer even on days when they had more physical pain, whereas those in unhappy marriages felt both more emotional and more physical pain (Mineo, 2017). Waldinger and Schulz (2023) draw on this and many other findings to argue that the quality of our closest relationships is among the strongest predictors of a long and happy life. A marriage given more time and attention in one’s forties or fifties is, in a real sense, an investment in one’s eighties.

Caregiving by choice

Many people in midlife find themselves in the “sandwich” between children who still need them and parents who increasingly do. For some, early retirement is prompted by a parent’s illness; for others, financial independence simply means that when a crisis comes, they can respond without jeopardising a job.

Research on caregiving has long highlighted its costs. In a landmark study of older spousal carers in four US communities, Schulz and Beach (1999) found that carers who were experiencing mental or emotional strain had mortality risks 63% higher than non-carers. Crucially, carers who were helping but not experiencing strain did not have elevated risk.

Later studies have complicated the idea that caring is inherently harmful. Brown et al. (2009), using a national longitudinal survey of 3,376 older married Americans, found that spending at least 14 hours a week caring for a spouse predicted lower mortality for the carer, independent of the spouse’s limitations and other factors. Roth et al. (2013) matched 3,503 family carers in the US REGARDS study with 3,503 similar non-carers and found that, over about six years, carers had an 18% lower rate of death. They concluded that caring for a family member with a chronic illness or disability is not associated with increased risk of death in most cases and may bring modest survival benefits (Roth et al., 2013).

The pattern across these studies is important for early retirees. Caring appears to be most harmful when it is strained, and strain is often the product of competing demands, financial pressure and lack of choice. Financial independence cannot remove the grief of watching a parent decline, but it can remove some of the strain: the fear of losing a job, the rushed visits squeezed around meetings, the guilt of being elsewhere. Carl Jensen, who left work at 43, describes being able to “jump in the car” and drive 800 miles at a moment’s notice when his father was dying (Jensen, 2025). That freedom to respond fully is one of the quietest and most profound gifts of an early exit from work.

Lives enriched: real stories

Pete Adeney — planning a career around the family to come

Pete Adeney, the former software engineer who writes as Mr. Money Mustache, left full-time work at 30 (Adeney, 2011). In one of his earliest public interviews, he explained that as he and his wife approached financial independence they were thinking about starting a family, and did not want the busy, shuttling lifestyle they saw in other households with children. “We wanted to be just home with the kid,” he said, describing the freedom to spend whole days at home or to go on trips together without mandatory office shifts mixed in with the already difficult job of caring for a baby (Mad Fientist, 2017).

Asked about what that meant for his son, Adeney said that it “really changes the parenting experience” and argued that people who are lucky enough to start early might get their “money earning and your career kickassing done in advance” so that, when the children arrive, they have time to focus on them (Mad Fientist, 2017). His blog’s very first post lists “spending time raising your young children” among the freedoms that financial independence can bring (Adeney, 2011). Whatever one thinks of his forthright style, the underlying idea has inspired many readers: sequence your life so that the most time-hungry season of parenthood meets the most time-rich season of your finances.

Justin McCurry — the dad who is always around to fix things

Justin McCurry, who writes the Root of Good blog from Raleigh, North Carolina, retired in 2013 at 33 with three young children. His wife tried to retire in 2015, worked part-time for six more months, and joined him in early retirement in 2016. “When I retired in 2013 I expected to have fun, but not this much fun!” he writes (McCurry, n.d.).

A year into retirement, with a one-year-old, a seven-year-old and an eight-year-old, McCurry addressed a common worry: would children raised by early-retired parents grow up lazy or unclear about the value of work? His experience was the opposite. His children watched him repair appliances and electronics, manage the family finances, practise languages online and take an online course on financial markets simply out of curiosity; they joined in, and began their own learning. He observed that children never really see their parents’ office jobs, which are abstract to a child, whereas seeing a parent “creating, fixing, and learning at home is very concrete”, and concluded that his children now saw him working more than they had when he was employed full time (McCurry, 2014). His story reframes the question. The value early retirement offers children may lie not only in more hours together, but in a visible, everyday model of what an engaged adult life looks like.

Doug Nordman — surfing lessons on day one

Doug Nordman served 20 years in the US Navy’s submarine force before retiring in 2002 at 41, when his daughter was nearly ten. On his first official day of retirement the family gave themselves the gift they had been joking about for months: surfing lessons. “Much to my surprise, we were hooked,” he writes. “It’s a great way to spend time with your kids” (Nordman, 2018). Sixteen years later he was still surfing at least twice a week, and his daughter had been riding waves for more than half her life.

The bond outlasted childhood. By 2018 his daughter had begun her own Navy career, and Nordman wrote from Spain, where she was stationed, describing how he and his spouse had visited twice that year and travelled around the country with her when her duties allowed (Nordman, 2018). Father and daughter later wrote a book together, Raising Your Money-Savvy Family For Next Generation Financial Independence, prompted by parents at financial-independence meetups asking how they had taught their daughter to manage money (Nordman, n.d.). His story is a reminder that time invested in children when they are young can become a lifelong companionship when they are grown.

Ken and Mary Okoroafor — a London family choosing time together

Ken and Mary Okoroafor, the British couple behind The Humble Penny, paid off a 25-year mortgage in seven years and reached financial independence by the time Ken was 34. Ken arrived in the UK as a first-generation immigrant with nothing at 14; Mary grew up in Hackney. With two young sons, they left their corporate jobs, in their own words, “to focus more on fun and family life”, pursue their passions and “truly live our best lives” (Okoroafor and Okoroafor, n.d.).

Their story is a useful counterweight to the idea that early retirement means doing nothing. The couple went on to build a business, write and coach, but on their own terms and around their children. “Family means the world to us,” they write (Okoroafor and Okoroafor, n.d.). For many readers, particularly in the UK, their experience shows that financial independence need not mean leaving the world of work entirely. It can mean reclaiming enough control to put family at the centre and arrange everything else around it.

Jeremy Jacobson — freedom to start a family

Jeremy Jacobson and his wife Winnie, the couple behind Go Curry Cracker, left work while in their thirties, after around a decade of saving 70% or more of their income. In a 2015 account of their journey, Jacobson explained that when they were ready to have a baby, they used their location independence to arrange IVF treatment abroad at a fraction of US prices, and planned to take to the road again with their son once he was about six months old. “I have no idea how we ever had time for jobs!” he wrote (Jacobson, 2015). For the Jacobsons, early retirement did not come after family life; it made room for family life to begin.

A balanced view

It would be easy to read the stories above and conclude that early retirement guarantees closer families. It does not, and honesty about the limits is part of what makes the opportunity real.

First, the research linking family involvement to wellbeing is mostly observational. Healthier, wealthier and more sociable people are more able to care for grandchildren, to be present for children and to enjoy their marriages, so some of the apparent benefits may reflect who takes on these roles rather than the roles themselves (Arpino and Bordone, 2014; Danielsbacka et al., 2022). The careful studies still find benefits, but typically modest ones.

Second, the retirement transition can strain a marriage before it strengthens it. Moen et al. (2001) found declines in marital quality around the transition itself, and the most conflict when one partner retired while the other kept working. For early retirees, this mismatch is common: one partner may reach financial independence, or feel ready to stop, well before the other. The McCurry household, in which one spouse retired three years before the other, is a real-life example of a staggered exit that worked, but it needs conversation and care (McCurry, n.d.).

Third, caring can be a burden as well as a gift. Schulz and Beach (1999) showed that strained spousal carers face markedly higher mortality, and the grandparenting review found that custodial grandparents usually fare worse (Danielsbacka et al., 2022). Early retirees may be seen by siblings or adult children as the obvious person to take on unlimited care because they are “not working”. Boundaries matter.

Fourth, more time does not automatically mean better time. The study of mothers’ time found that sheer quantity did not predict younger children’s outcomes (Milkie et al., 2015). Presence that is distracted, resentful or anxious offers less than presence that is engaged. Carl Jensen, reflecting on eight years of early retirement, notes that because his children kept the family rooted in one town, their life looked “more conventional” than the travel-filled images associated with the movement, and that the real value lay elsewhere, in being able to attend all of his children’s events and volunteer at school (Jensen, 2025).

Finally, the stories in this chapter mostly come from people with professional incomes, stable partnerships and good health. Many parents and carers cannot retire early, and many who stop work early do so because of illness or redundancy rather than choice. The benefits described here are real, but they are not equally available, and nothing in this chapter should be read as a judgement on families who make different choices or face different constraints.

Putting it into practice

• Name the people. Write down the specific family members you hope to spend more time with, and what that time might look like on an ordinary Tuesday, not just on holidays.
• Mind the timing. If children are young or teenagers, or parents are ageing, consider how your timeline aligns with the years when your presence matters most. Engaged time with adolescents appears especially valuable (Milkie et al., 2015).
• Plan the transition as a couple. Discuss who stops when, how household roles will change, and what each of you needs in terms of space and shared activity. The first year or two may be bumpy; that is normal (Moen et al., 2001).
• Build shared pleasures. Joint activities you both enjoy seem to be part of what makes retirement good for marriages (Szinovacz and Davey, 2004). Surfing lessons are optional.
• Offer grandparenting on your terms. Regular, chosen involvement is the pattern most linked with wellbeing. Agree hours and expectations with adult children at the outset.
• Care without being consumed. If you take on care for a parent or partner, protect your own rest and seek support early; strain, not caring itself, is the main risk (Schulz and Beach, 1999; Roth et al., 2013).
• Keep a family “freedom fund” of time. Leave slack in your calendar so that you can respond when someone you love needs you urgently.

Questions for reflection

1. When you imagine your freed-up time, whose face appears first, and what are you doing together?
2. Which family relationships are in a season now that will not come again, and how might your plans honour that?
3. If you and your partner stopped work at different times, what would each of you need from the other during the transition?
4. What kind of grandparent, aunt, uncle or family elder would you like to be, and what boundaries would help you enjoy that role?
5. If a parent or relative needed care, how would you balance their needs with your own health and your other relationships?
6. What would you want your children to learn from watching how you spend your days once paid work is optional?
7. What is one thing you could start doing now, before retirement, to deepen a family bond you care about?

References