Grandmothers' Involvement in Grandchildren's Care: Attitudes, Feelings, and Emotions

Abstract

Grandmothers' Involvement in Grandchildren's Care: Attitudes, Feelings, and Emotions* Grandmother's involvement in child care involves a variety of psychological and relational aspects for mothers, grandmothers, and children. This study was aimed at exploring these aspects from the point of view of the grandmother Thirty grandmothers of young children were interviewed in order to analyze the meaning they assigned to grandmothering and identify their individual definitions of the grandmother's role. The analysis of the interviews showed that grandmother's involvement in young grandchildren's care represents a powerful psychological experience and affects the relations between the grandmother and the other members of the family. Implications for child care policies are discussed. Key Words: child care, intergenerational aid, intergenerational relations, grandmothers, grandparenthood. Even in the industrialized countries of today many grandparents still care for their grandchildren when their parents are at work (Attias-Donfut, 1996; ISTAT, 1985). Even though family ties have become looser, child care by grandparents is still an occasion for material help, interpersonal relations, and the comparison of experiences between generations (Norris & Tindale, 1994). However, precisely because of the present fluid state of family relations, grandparenthood no longer has a socially codified status and has become a matter of personal choice (Kornhaber, 1996; Rosow, 1985). As Rosow (1985) pointed out, relative to active parenting, grandparenting is typically a more narrow, less active, tenuous role. All authors agree that, although the relations with the grandchildren are always characterized by a strong emotional involvement, grandparenthood can have many meanings according to a number of individual, environmental and socioeconomic factors, and the social contract between generations (Bengtson & Roberts, 1991; Kivett, 1993; Kornhaber, 1996; Mietkiewicz & Schneider, 1996; Shore & Hayslip, 1994; SmithBattle, 1996). Grandmothers' child care in the first years of the grandchildren's life provides a particularly interesting opportunity to explore the meaning assigned to the act of grandparenting today. Grandmothers' child care has an extremely important social function. Investigations carried out in a number of industrialized countries with different family cultures indicate that many working mothers with children under the age of three make use of grandmothers either as their principal caregivers or to supplement other forms of extra-family care, such as a day care center, family day care, or babysitters (Musatti, 1992; Phillips, 1991; SchneiderMietkiewicz, 1997). There are various reasons for this variability. We have shown (Musatti, 1992) that the mother's decision to entrust the care of her child exclusively to the grandmother for the entire working day is based, above all, on social and economic considerations. When a day care center is not available or is considered unsuitable, low SES working mothers prefer the grandmother to a paid babysitter. However, in another study (Musatti & D'Amico, 1996), we found that the grandmother's availability and the extent of her involvement is determined not only by the mother's material needs but mainly by the grandmother's sociocultural background and its effect on her normative expectations concerning intergenerational aid. These findings suggest that, although grandmother's child care is an ancient social phenomenon, changes in family patterns and women's attitudes towards care within the family might have affected the meaning assigned to grandchild care by modern grandmothers like other aspects of grandparenting (Robertson, 1995). Grandmother's involvement in child care is also likely to involve a variety of psychological and relational aspects. In this study we attempt to analyze how these different aspects interact in the individual definition of the grandmother's role and, particularly, in the meaning assigned to the caring for grandchildren by grandmothers with different socioeconomic backgrounds, life experience, and extent of involvement in the grandchild's care. …