Abstract
This study examines the association between family function and self-esteem of Chinese university students with grandparenting experience, and explores the moderating effects of social support in this link. Two thousand five hundred thirty university students (1372 males and 1158 females) from a Chinese university completed the Perceived Social Support Scale, the Rosenberg’s Self-esteem Scale, and the Family Assessment Device (FAD). Six hundred and forty-five (25.69%) students reported grandparenting experience and they reported lower scores on self-esteem and social support than the students raised only by their parents. The grandparenting group scored higher on such dimensions of family functioning as Communication, Role, Affective Involvement, Affective Responsiveness, and General Family Function (GF) than their counterpart group. For both groups, self-esteem scores were positively correlated with social support scores, while negatively correlated with FAD all sub-scale scores. Hierarchical regression analysis showed that for the students with grandparenting experience the social support moderated the relationship between GF and self-esteem. When students reported a high level of social support, those with low GF score reported higher scores in self-esteem than those with low self-esteem. However, in case of low social support, there were no differences in self-esteem between groups with high and low GF scores. These findings suggest that social support plays a positive role to relieve the adverse impact of poor family function on self-esteem of the adolescents with grandparenting experience. In addition, the significance and limitations of the results will be discussed.
Highlights
Since the 1980s, due to the radical development of the society resulting from China’s “reform and opening,” there were many significant changes within the Chinese family
Among the six dimensions there are Problem Solving (PS), Communication (CM), Roles (RL), Affective Involvement (AI), Affective Responsiveness (AR), and Behavioral Control (BC) (Shek, 2001): (1) problem solving; (2) CM; (3) RL; (4) AR; (5) AI; and (6) behavior control
Six hundred and forty-five (25.69%) students reported that they left their parents and were raised by grandparents for at least 1 year during their childhood; 1764 (70.25%) students were brought up only by their parents; and 121 (4.06%) students reported that they had experience of being raised by other persons, who were not their own parents or grandparents
Summary
Since the 1980s, due to the radical development of the society resulting from China’s “reform and opening,” there were many significant changes within the Chinese family. In the European countries and United States of America, the reasons for grandparenting are mainly based on the parents’ marital status (divorce, separation, premarital pregnancy, etc.) and economic reasons, while in China there are unique reasons for this phenomenon: first of all, Chinese traditional culture has formed strong and unique family ethics, as part of this moral code of conduct, grandparents view raising grandchildren as their responsibilities, and through this it is considered to obtain happiness and satisfaction. Other research is focusing on the influence of grandparenting on the psychological and social development of the children, reporting a negative effect on their self-esteem. The children being raised by their grandparents show more psychological problems and difficulties with social adaptation in family and school life (Qi, 2011; Edwards and Daire, 2006; Li and Li, 2006; Zhang and Lu, 2017). Due to a lack of retrospective studies on the influence of grandparenting on adolescents and young adults, we raised the following question: Do children with a background of being brought up by their grandparents up to adolescence or adulthood show different levels of selfesteem compared to their peers without the experience of grandparenting?
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