Abstract
How has the demography of grandparenthood changed over the last century? How have racial inequalities in grandparenthood changed, and how are they expected to change in the future? Massive improvements in mortality, increasing childlessness, and fertility postponement have profoundly altered the likelihood that people become grandparents as well as the timing and length of grandparenthood for those that do. The demography of grandparenthood is important to understand for those taking a multigenerational perspective of stratification and racial inequality because these processes define the onset and duration of intergenerational relationships in ways that constrain the forms and levels of intergenerational transfers that can occur within them. In this article, we discuss four measures of the demography of grandparenthood and use simulated data to estimate the broad contours of historical changes in the demography of grandparenthood in the United States for the 1880–1960 birth cohorts. Then we examine race and sex differences in grandparenthood in the past and present, which reveal declining inequality in the demography of grandparenthood and a projection of increasing group convergence in the coming decades.
Highlights
We introduce the proximate determinants of grandparenthood and four measures of grandparenthood—the proportion becoming grandparents, age at transition to grandparenthood, length of grandparenthood, and number of grandchildren—that allow researchers from different fields to appreciate how demographic changes affect the demography of grandparenthood in ways most interesting to that field
Our findings demonstrate the factors behind later and longer grandparenthood and highlight a potential racial convergence in most features of its demography
The proximate determinants of grandparenthood are a way to examine the pathways through which people do not become grandparents and the proportion of individuals in a cohort who do become grandparents
Summary
The demography of grandparenthood refers to the prevalence, age patterns, and duration of grandparental roles as well as numbers of grandchildren among population members. One key limitation is that these measures provide the average expected duration of grandparenthood for the whole population, including those who never become grandparents These period estimates reveal nothing about the length of grandparenthood among those who become grandparents, which is needed for understanding the period of overlap for family relationships, intergenerational transfers, and multigenerational effects. Parity structure can be incorporated into life tables or multistate cohort component demographic models (Keyfitz and Caswell 2005:573), but such models are inadequate for understanding kinship because they are not analytically tractable tools for modeling what happens to both members of a kin pair For questions such as the changing demography of grandparenthood in the United States, mathematical approaches are much more limited than microsimulation. Recognizing these issues, we restrict our interpretations to general statements presented graphically and note that the results presented are simulation estimates, not based on empirical data
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