Abstract
Across human cultures, grandparents make a valued contribution to the health of their families and communities. Moreover, evidence is gathering that grandparents have a positive impact on the development of grandchildren in contemporary industrialized societies. A broad range of factors that influence the likelihood grandparents will invest in their grandchildren has been explored by disciplines as diverse as sociology, economics, psychology and evolutionary biology. To progress toward an encompassing framework, this study will include biological relatedness between grandparents and grandchildren, a factor central to some discipline's theoretical frameworks (e.g., evolutionary biology), next to a wide range of other factors in an analysis of grandparental investment in contemporary Europe. This study draws on data collected in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe from 11 European countries that included 22,967 grandparent–child dyads. Grandparents reported biological relatedness, and grandparental investment was measured as the frequency of informal childcare. Biological and non-biological grandparents differed significantly in a variety of individual, familial and area-level characteristics. Furthermore, many other economic, sociological, and psychological factors also influenced grandparental investment. When they were controlled, biological grandparents, relative to non-biological grandparents, were more likely to invest heavily, looking after their grandchildren almost daily or weekly. Paradoxically, however, they were also more likely to invest nothing at all. We discuss the methodological and theoretical implications of these findings across disciplines.
Highlights
Across human cultures, grandparents and elders more generally are respected and valued contributors to the health of their families and communities
Disciplines as diverse as sociology, economics, psychology, and evolutionary biology and psychology have documented the impact grandparents have within families
We investigate three issues: (1) Does biological relatedness influence grandparental investment patterns in contemporary Europe? (2) Do various non-biological factors—that is, age, health, sex, lineage, distance, family size, employment, marital status, family obligations and conflict, geographic regions, and fertility rates—vary between biological and non-biological grandparents and influence their investment decisions? (3) Assuming that non-biological and biological grandparents differ systematically on non-biological factors, do these differences fully account for differential investment patterns of non-biological and biological grandparents—or is biological relatedness an indispensable explanatory factor in contemporary Europe? In order to study these questions, we drew on data from the large-scale international dataset collected in the context of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE)
Summary
Grandparents and elders more generally are respected and valued contributors to the health of their families and communities. Disciplines as diverse as sociology, economics, psychology, and evolutionary biology and psychology have documented the impact grandparents have within families. Evidence from traditional societies shows that the presence of a grandparent can be as beneficial to child survival as, for instance, the introduction of a new water supply [1,2]. The evidence is mounting that—especially in family environments with low resource availability—grandparents can buffer child development against difficult early environments [3,4]. Millions of grandparents invest nothing—possibly because they are physically or emotionally remote or because they lack the necessary resources or inclination. All of the disciplines mentioned above seek to understand this variability, asking the questions: Why do (or do not) grandparents invest in their grandchildren? All of the disciplines mentioned above seek to understand this variability, asking the questions: Why do (or do not) grandparents invest in their grandchildren? And what factors impact the levels of investment they provide?
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