Your Parents May Have A Case Of 'Gramnesia.' Here's What The Viral Term Means.

Folks on the internet are constantly making up new terms — some pointless, others more useful. But this one is ringing true for many parents of young children.

“Gramnesia” is a portmanteau combining the words “grandparent” and “amnesia.” It’s unclear who first coined the term, but it has been appearing on online forums for years.

Maryland therapist and mom Allie McQuaid, who goes by @millennialmomtherapist on Instagram, posted a video in June on this topic with overlaid text that reads: “I just heard this term called ‘gramnesia’ when grandparents forget what it’s really like having young kids and I can’t stop thinking about how accurate it is.”

It has since racked up more than 4.4 million views, 20,000+ likes and hundreds of comments.

In the caption, McQuaid says that she’s heard a ton of stories from her clients— many of whom are millennials — about the “ridiculous” and unhelpful comments they’ve gotten from their own parents after they’ve spent time with the grandkids.

Common examples of gramnesia might include:

• “Oh, you slept through the night as soon as we brought you home from the hospital!”
• “You were potty trained at 1 — and it only took a weekend!”
• “You never had tantrums like this!”
• “We gave you rice cereal and you slept like a champ. Have you tried that?”
• “You were never this picky. You always ate whatever we put on your plate.”

McQuaid has several theories about what might be causing this wave of gramnesia. For one, it’s natural to have a “foggier memory of how things truly were” as we get older, “especially if the experience we had was particularly difficult or even traumatic,” she said. There’s even a psychological phenomenon known as “euphoric recall,” which says we have a tendency to remember past