How Grandparents as Childcare Providers Impacts Kids

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Grandparent Month!

This month, we're heading on vacation to reconnect with family and visit grandparents. In honor of this, I'm dedicating this month's posts to grandparents.

In my "free time" I've been working on a book about childcare. One of the topics I've been reading about is the role that grandparents play in caring for children. As one researcher put it, "As aging Baby Boomers evolve into today's grandparents, the time is ripe to better understand the relationships grandparents have with their grandchildren." (Dunifon R, 2012) According to Dunifon's review, grandparents can positively impact a child, improving academic achievement, social behavior, maturity, and mental health; they can act as a buffer if a mother is depressed or uses harsh discipline (Dunifon R, 2012). The closer the grandparents are, geographically speaking, the larger these effects seem to be.

Photo by William Krause on Unsplash

Academics and Behavior

A 2019 paper looked at the role that care provided by grandparents played on cognitive development in children and found, as many studies related to childcare have, relationships not only between the type of care provided (here, grandparental) and socioeconomic status. Overall, children cared for by their grandparents had better ability to name objects but worse ability to perform non-verbal reasoning and concept development. (Del Boca D, 2018)

Outcomes for children being raised by grandparents were less favorable, though there were multiple confounding factors, such as the fact that children being raised by their grandparents were often doing so in informal arrangements, outside the scope of social services and formal assistance programs, and these families were more likely to experience poverty. Wisdom and spiritual guidance were strengths of grandparent caregivers, but they struggled with the energy, discipline and generational gap faced when raising young children. Children in these types of situations tended to have more behavioral and discipline issues at school. (Dunifon, 2012)

Health and Physical Activity

A 2014 study looking at feeding practices among in grandparents versus parents found that grandparents were more likely to use food to manage children's emotion and restricted foods (considered maladaptive feeding practices), but also engaged in more positive practices such as providing a healthy food environment. The more time grandparents spent with their grandchildren, the more their feeding practices resembled those of the children's parents.(Farrow C, 2011)

Probably one of the most interesting studies I read found that children's physical activity behaviors tended to reflect their caregiver's (a common theme in physical activity literature), irrespective of whether their caregiver was a parent or a grandparent. (Other literature has shown that less formal childcare situations--grandparental care compared to center-based care, for example--tend to increase rates of childhood obesity) In situations where the physical activity of a caregiver was limited--say, by arthritis--access to play areas, such as parks and playgrounds, was crucial to ensuring kids got regular physical activity. (Eli K, 2016)

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

Hank

When I was in preschool, my maternal grandmother died and my grandfather ("Hank") moved to live near us in Florida. By then my grandfather's health was already quite poor, and he had little interest in playing with a small child, so most of my memories at my grandfather's house--where I went after school--either involve playing with my brother or playing alone. I also remember being hungry a lot, because all he ever seemed to have in his house was orange marmalade, bread, and gin. One of my strongest memories of him is looking from the living room of his house out onto the screened porch where he sat, watching the sunset and drinking his evening cocktail--a man at dusk.

When grandparents care for children, things aren't always perfect, but I think that one thing that is gained is that the kids take care of the grandparents a little bit too. Any human with a heart, no matter how little they are, can sense when something is weak and vulnerable. Being cared for by grandparents enables a relationship to be built and (in good situations) gives stressed parents a break. But I think it also gives children a chance to be the protector, the helper, the translator, and the leader, and those are good lessons, albeit ones that are difficult to capture in a research study.

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