Grandparental partnership status and its effects on caring for grandchildren in Europe

Type of content
Journal Article
Thesis discipline
Degree name
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Language
en
Date
2021
Authors
Daly, M.
Perry, Gretchen
Abstract

Grandparents are important childcare providers, but grandparental relationship status matters. According to several studies, caregiving is reduced after grandparental divorce, but differential responses by grandmothers versus grandfathers have often been glossed over. To explore the effects of relationship status on grandparental care, we analysed data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) comparing four grandparental relationship statuses (original couple, widowed, divorced, and repartnered) with respect to grandmothers’ and grandfathers’ provision of care to their birth children’s children. When proximity, kinship laterality, and grandparents’ age, health, employment, and financial status were controlled, divorced grandmothers without current partners provided significantly more childcare than grandmothers who were still residing with the grandfather, those who had new partners unrelated to the grandchildren, and widows without current partners. Grandfathers exhibited a very different pattern, providing substantially less grandchild care after divorce. Grandfathers in their original partnerships provided the most grandchild care, followed by widowers, those with new partners and finally those who were divorced. Seemingly contradictory findings in prior research, including studies using SHARE data, can be explained partly by failures to distinguish divorce’s effects on grandmothers grandfathers, and partly by insufficient controls for the grandmother’s financial and employment statuses.

Description
Citation
Perry G, Daly M (2021) Grandparental partnership status and its effects on caring for grandchildren in Europe. PLoS ONE 16(3): e0248915.
Keywords
Ngā upoko tukutuku/Māori subject headings
ANZSRC fields of research
Field of Research::16 - Studies in Human Society::1699 - Other Studies in Human Society::169901 - Gender Specific Studies
Field of Research::17 - Psychology and Cognitive Sciences::1701 - Psychology::170113 - Social and Community Psychology
Rights
Copyright: © 2021 Perry, Daly. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.