A 35-year-old Singaporean mother of five did not want to become a grandmother just yet so she kept advising her young children not to get married.

Shirli Ling, who is an online influencer with 17,000 followers on Instagram, was married at 17 and got married twice more after. She did not want her children to face the same hardships she experienced as a young mother.

“While kids are growing up, you have to keep telling them, ‘Don’t be like mummy, don’t get married so young,’” South China Morning Post (SCMP) quoted Ling as saying.

However, she also knew that “the more you tell them not to do something, the more they’re going to do it.”

Last year, Ling’s eldest son got his girlfriend pregnant and she is now a grandmother.

“What’s done is done,” Ling told SCMP, adding: “Rather than scold my son, I prefer to advise and provide more support.”

In contrast, some men can’t wait to be a grandfather, like the husband of a 53-year-old woman in Yiyang, Hunan province in central China.

The woman surnamed Guo told Henan Television that their only daughter, 29, did not want to marry and have children.

The father, who was yearning for a grandchild, was frustrated, but one day in September 2022, his wife arrived home from work to find a woman carrying an infant. The woman told her that she was hired as a maid and the baby belonged to Guo and her husband.

Guo learned that her husband had resorted to a secret surrogacy to have a baby and used her identity card to apply for the infant’s birth certificate. Henan Television reports that the baby was carried by a university student.

“I flared up into a fury; I am going to divorce him,” said Guo, according to SCMP.

Guo’s daughter is now worried that once her parents are divorced, she will be left with the legal obligation to bring up the child, knowing that her father cannot raise the infant alone, SCMP reports.