Detrimental Effects of Living with a Grandparent: Cross-National Evidence

Abstract

Co-residing grandparents would generally be regarded as beneficial to modern families. Grandparents can help with the general running of the household - cooking, cleaning and child-minding - allowing younger adult members of the household to spend more time in the paid labor force. Grandparents almost invariably have close emotional ties with their grandchildren and are most often very supportive (Silverstein & Marenco, 2001 ). Grandparents are one of the most highly regarded sources of social support to families (Findler, 2000). The grandparent-grandchild relationship is generally based on love, mutual support, respect and obligation (Kemp, 2005). The presence of grandparents in a household has been found to be associated with less deviant behavior and fewer depressive symptoms (Hamilton, 2005). Although grandparents are usually quite distant from contemporary school curriculums, they often support their grandchildren's educational careers by being interested and supportive of the children's school work (Silverstein & Marenco, 2001). Educated grandparents tend to facilitate their grandchildren's education (Crosnoe & Elder, 2002). Social capital theory implies that another related adult living in the household would strengthen supportive social networks which would benefit the grandchildren's educational careers.However, the association between co-residing grandparents and the educational performance is unexpectedly negative according to data from the OECD's 2000 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) Study. This international study investigated student performance in reading, mathematics and science among some 172 000 fifteen-year-old students in over 6000 schools across 32 countries (OECD, 2001,2002). The list of countries in the accompanying tables includes all but two of the PISA participating countries: Japan, because there was too much missing data on parental occupation, and liechtenstein where the sample was too small. Item Response Theory (IRT) modelling was used to create students' scores which were standardised for each subject area at an international mean of 500 and standard deviation of 100. The general and technical reports (OECD, 2001, 2002) detail the data, tests and sampling procedures.In the student questionnaire, the question 'Who lives at home with you' was followed by a response set that included 'Grandparent(s)'. Table 1 presents the frequency distributions for this item. The percentage of 15-year-olds living in the same household as one or both grandparents range from less than 3 per cent in Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden to over 20 per cent in Austria, Brazil, Italy, Latvia, Mexico, Russia and Spain. Apart from Austria and Germany, the percentage of students with co-residing grandparents tends to be lower in the more industrialized countries. In Southern and Eastern European countries sizable proportions of 15-year-old students have grandparents living in the same household. These figures correspond well with the distributions for co-residing grandparents among eighth graders according to the 1995 Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), for most (but not all) countries where a comparison can be made (see Table 1 ).In many countries the mean scores for students with co-residing grandparents are considerably lower than that for other students. Table 2 presents the mean scores by country for all students, students with co-residing grandparents and students in households without grandparents. (For this and subsequent analyses the estimates are weighted). In New Zealand, the 6 per cent of students co-residing with grandparents had mean reading scores a remarkable 85 score points below that for other students. For mathematics the difference was 70 score points. Other countries in which students living in the same household as grandparents showed much lower scores were Belgium (81 score points for reading and 75 for mathematics), Denmark (63 and 58), France (59 and 58), Luxembourg (53 and 44), Mexico (45 and 42), the Netherlands (73 and 72), New Zealand (85 and 69), Sweden (67 and 60), Switzerland (63 and 49), the United Kingdom (52 and 45) and the United States (69 and 60). …