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Grandparenting
The third act?
In the theatre, the third act is the time for plot resolution, for pulling the âthreadsâ or sub-plots together. The âthird actâ is now a commonly used metaphor for life, in particular the stage beyond partnering, childrearing and career building. This last third of life is conceived of as a period that provides time and space for consolidating psychological growth and development, reviewing our past and learning from it and, in some cases, using the opportunity for a âsecond chanceâ â at friendships, family relationships and fulfilling life goals. It is also, not coincidentally, the time when most of us become grandparents and when our families extend from two to three generations. How we respond to the challenges and possibilities of grandparenting, and how these responses influence both intergenerational relationships and our own adaptation to ageing, form the subject of this book.
Grandparenthood is for millions of people worldwide one of the most positive consequences of later life development, yet research on this topic is only just beginning to accumulate. As the Western worldâs population ages, there has been greater interest in gerontology, but much of the ageing research has focused on health- and disease-related aspects of getting older. Now the emphasis is moving toward positive ageing â how to make the best of our longer, healthier lifespans and make the most of the third act. Being a grandparent is part of that positive emphasis. Indeed, one of the goals of this book is to highlight and document the very positive contributions that middle-aged and older people can and do make in their role as grandparents, and to suggest ways in which these contributions can be facilitated, extended and acknowledged.
To date, research on grandparenting as a developmental transition, a life stage and an aspect of family functioning has been sparse and most focuses on grandmothers only; issues relating to grandfathers are explored infrequently. This lack of research is surprising, given the huge interest in these topics demonstrated by an avalanche of print and online material (usually anecdotal and unsupported by evidence) dedicated to self-help advice to grandparents and their families. As we know, the context of grandparenting has undergone considerable change in line with social and economic forces. This changed context and its implications is one reason that we need an updated analysis of this important life stage.
Facts and figures
How many grandparents are there in the world? No one knows the answer to that question, but we can make some approximations. The first important fact to take into account is that there are more than seven billion people on the planet and, with declining birth rates and longer life expectancy, weâre getting older (United Nations, 2013). The global share of people aged over 60 increased from 9.2 per cent in 1990 to 11.7 per cent in 2013, and is predicted to reach 21.7 per cent by 2050, more than 2 billion people. We also know that the average age for becoming a grandparent is quite a bit younger than age 60; even in developed countries such as Britain and the USA, it is more likely to be early 50s, and in developing countries, younger again (Statistic Brain Research Institute, 2014; Womack, 2005). Finally, while not everyone has children and not every parent becomes a grandparent, and there is considerable variation across nations and cultures, estimates suggest that most â perhaps around 70 to 80 per cent â of older adults do become grandparents. So we are talking about a cohort of almost one billion people on earth who are grandparents right now â a formidable force.
Itâs a formidable force doing a formidable job. Most grandparents have contact with their grandchildren and many have important roles in their lives, ranging from substitute parent to occasional childcare, from companion and confidante to distant but respected elder, from guide and mentor to playful protector. Some take a major role in their grandchildrenâs upbringing; for example, in the USA about one million children are being raised by grandparents in skipped-generation households, that is, with no parent living in the home (Bahrampour, 2013; Scommegna, 2012). In addition, nearly five million children live in grandparent-headed households and in half of these multi-generational homes, grandparents nominate themselves as the childrenâs primary carer (Bahrampour, 2013). Estimates suggest these grandparents are saving US taxpayers more than 6.5 billion dollars per year by raising these children and keeping them out of foster care.
In developed countries, the number of grandparents who are raising their grandchildren seems to average about 0.5 to 2.0 per cent of households (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2009â10; Baker, Silverstein and Putney, 2008; Grandparents Plus, undated), although it is difficult to identify numbers accurately and to compare data across different countries and different ways of collecting and reporting. In developing countries and among poorer and more disadvantaged subgroups, the percentage is far higher, with the United Nations (2011) reporting that in 2000 nearly 30 per cent of older adults in some countries were living in skipped-generation households. Reasons are attributed to societal trends such as teenage pregnancy, poverty, drug abuse, divorce and mental and physical illnesses (including HIV/AIDS) of the parent generation (Komjakraphan and Chansawang, 2015). In most of these households, grandparents, predominately grandmothers, have the major responsibility for supporting and nurturing their grandchildren.
We discuss in detail the great contribution of custodial and primary carer grandparents, financially, socially and emotionally, in Chapter 5 and other sections of the book. But the focus of most of this book is on the vast majority of grandparents who are not primary carers for their grandchildren. This group, too, makes significant contributions to family life, social harmony and national productivity. A report on grandparenting in Europe (Glaser, di Gessa and Tinker, 2014a) presents data indicating that, averaging across European countries, 58 per cent of grandmothers and 49 per cent of grandfathers provided regular or occasional child care for their grandchildren in the year prior to the survey. There were large between-country differences, with grandmothers in Italy, Spain and Greece providing about twice as much regular care as grandmothers in Sweden, France and Denmark. Rates in the UK fall somewhere in the middle. A UK briefing paper from the Childhood Wellness Research Centre (Statham, 2011) found that grandparents were the main childcare arrangement for 35 per cent of families of working mothers, especially when the grandchildren were very young. They continued to have a significant role in care when the grandchildren started school, both after school and during holiday periods.
Data from the USA reinforce the finding that grandparents provide substantial amounts of childcare. A report from the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies (2008) showed that about 60 per cent of US grandparents who had a grandchild under the age of 13, and lived within an hourâs travel from them, were looking after their grandchildren (or had in the past) while parents worked or studied. A small majority of these grandparents provided care for less than 12 hours per week, but many were caring for their grandchildren for much longer time periods â 12 to 25 hours per week for 24 per cent and 25 or more hours per week for 22 per cent â making significant contributions. Along with regular weekly childcare, many grandparents also gave assistance when other arrangements fell through, when the child or parent was sick, during school holidays or before and after school.
Australian data on grandparenting care show very similar trends; in Condon, Corkindale, Luszcz and Gambleâs study (2013), about 55 per cent of new grandparents provided at least some childcare for the first 36 months of their grandchildâs life. Grandmothers averaged about 7.5 hours of care per week and grandfathers about 5 hours (often contiguously with the grandmothers). Indeed, grandparents form the largest group of providers of non-parental unpaid childcare in Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2012). This unpaid babysitting saves parents millions of dollars in childcare costs in one state of Australia alone (Bourke, 2012), as well as enabling parents of young children to return to their jobs and careers.
Worldwide, the financial contribution afforded by the voluntary work of grandparents amounts to billions of dollars. This does not include the cash contributions made by many grandparents to help with their grandchildrenâs school fees, clothing and other items, also estimated to be in the billions in the USA alone (Statistic Brain Research Institute, 2014). A UK analysis indicated that on average, British grandparents were gifting about ÂŁ5,000 per year to their children and grandchildren, some indicating that they were cutting back on their lifestyle or retirement savings in order to make these contributions (moneyfacts.co.uk, 2015). This hardly fits with a common stereotype of seniors as a financial burden on the state.
Types and stereotypes
So who are these grandparents? Hereâs what one child had to say:
A grandmother is a lady with no children of her own. She likes other peopleâs girls and boys. A grandfather is a man grandmother. He goes for walks with the boys and they talk about fishing and tractors and like that. Grandmothers donât have to do anything except be there. Theyâre old so they shouldnât play too hard or run. Usually, grandmothers are fat, but not too fat to tie your shoes. They wear glasses and funny underwear. They can take their teeth and gums off.
Adapted from Lederer, 2011, p. 71
Crawford and Bhattacharya (2014) talk about the stereotypical presentation of grandparents in literature as wise sage, old hag or kindly but doddering. They note that in childrenâs picture books of past eras, grandparents were often portrayed as grey-haired, old-fashioned and aged in their 70s or 80s â the great-grandparent age range â rather than the mid-50s, the age range more characteristic of grandparents of a typical Western 5-year-old. Of course grandparents can be as young as 30, and many are in their early to mid-40s.
Are these stereotypes still prevalent today? Crawford and Bhattacharya (2014) examined a sample of 220 childrenâs picture books published over a 20-year span. They found a greater range of presentations of grandparenting in modern books, with more cultural groups represented, but noted that portrayals of grandparents still depicted them as elderly seniors and showed little variety. For example, few were presented as employed (other than as farmers or homemakers), or with hobbies outside the home, or from non-traditional family structures.
These stereotypes of ageing do not fit the reality of todayâs grandparentsâ lives, nor do they reflect how grandchildren interact with their grandparents. As Binet and Carter (2013) point out, âFar from sitting around knitting or doing crosswords, 23 per cent of UK grandparents are now currently in full-time employmentâ. They note that all over the developed world the story is the same, with a ânew breedâ of healthy and active grandparents who âfit their jobs and lives round serious amounts of childcare to help their sons and daughters to be able to workâ (no page number).
The World Health Organization (2012) is concerned that stereotypic ageist attitudes lead to older people being seen as âpast their sell-by dateâ, frail, mentally slow, unable to work or helpless when in fact older people are fitter and healthier than they have ever been; they are living longer and making paid work-related and voluntary contributions to society to an unprecedented extent. In addition, whether they are grandparents or not, seniors can provide positive models of ageing to young people, demonstrating many different ways of living enriched and fulfilling lives that do not depend on the skills and abilities of youth. Unfortunately, the prevalence of ageist stereotypes can prevent older men and women from fully participating in social, political, economic, cultural, spiritual and civic activities. This is because these attitudes influence the reactions of younger people who may be potential employers, colleagues and friends, and because of the way they can influence the self-confidence of seniors themselves.
Stereotypes are a form of labelling that delimits potential. They tend to be one-dimensional and presuppose everyone in a particular group is the same. More helpful and perhaps more realistic in understanding the variety that exists in any group are âtypologiesâ. The typology approach classifies individuals into a number of categories that can then be more richly described and compared. One of the first serious studies of grandparents by pioneer researcher on ageing, Bernice Neugarten, did just that (Neugarten and Weinstein, 1964). These researchers interviewed both grandfather and grandmother in 70 middle-class US families in which all the grandparents lived in separate households from their children. They explored grandparentsâ comfort in the role and its significance and meaning to them, as well as collecting data on how often and on what occasions they saw their grandchildren.
Five major styles or types were noted among Neugarten and Weinsteinâs sample of grandparents aged in their 50s and 60s. Formal grandparents were those who maintained clearly demarcated lines between parenting and grandparenting, showed interest in the grandchildren but did not offer advice on childrearing, and tended to help out with babysitting or provide treats for the grandchildren only on special occasions. Fun seekers emphasised leisure opportunities and mutual pleasure in their interactions with their grandchildren. Their relationships were playful and informal. The surrogate parent was a third grandparent type, applying only to grandmothers, and this occurred among families where the mother worked and grandmother took on a major responsibility for childcare. It is interesting to consider that in 1964, when this article was written, only about 50 per cent of mothers with dependent children worked even part-time, whereas today the rate in the USA is more than 70 per cent (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015; The Economist, 2014).
Reservoir of family wisdom was the description given to the fourth type of grandparent â a rare category that only comprised grandfathers, who had âdistinctly authoritarian patri-centered relationship(s)â with their children and grandchildren, according to the authors (p. 202). In this type of family, grandfather was âheadâ. He dispensed advice and resources, with parents of grandchildren acknowledging their subordinate positions, sometimes with resentment. Finally, the distant figure was the type of grandparent who had little contact with grandchildren, usually emerging only for holidays and special occasions like birthdays. They were essentially benevolent but remote from their grandchildrenâs lives.
Since Neugarten and Weinstein conducted their ground-breaking study, the idea of grandparenting types and styles has had many airings, by researchers, journalists and, in todayâs age of social media, bloggers. Some categorisations are based purely on the observerâs experience; others (for example, Cherlin and Furstenberg, 1985) arise from statistical analysis of empirical data. Interestingly, some are presented from the point of view of parents rather than grandparents, with the implication that certain types of grandparents are less helpful than others. For example, the blogger âincredibleinfant.comâ (undated) writes about spoilers (grandparents who help out a great deal, but parents sometimes have to work hard to assert their rights), gotcha grandparents (who talk as if their grandchildren are the most important thing in the world but are usually too busy to help out) and stranger grandparents, who are basically disconnected and make little effort to spend time with their grandchildren. Rossi (undated) presents a humorous take on the idea, classifying grandparents as âwarm and fuzzy, strict and stern, super spoiler, hovering helicopter, or reluctantâ, while Mills (2007) lists four types of âchallengingâ grandparents, by which she means challenging to parents. They include those who spoil the grandchildren too much, those who think they know better than the parent, those who love the grandchildren so long as they donât make too much noise/get too dirty/misbehave and those who âdonât like babiesâ.
While these creative classifications and serious studies put across the message that there is more than one way to grandparent successfully (or unsuccessfully), the small number of types generated, and the confines of the samples or observations from which they are drawn, mean that this form of analysis has serious limitations. Typologies are unlikely to illustrate the full range of ways of being a grandparent, the complexities that occur when grandparentsâ personalities and life stages interact with social forces and family situations, and the changes in grandparents as they and their grandchildren age. These are topics we take up in the later chapters of this book.
Grandparenting in changing times
Over the past fifty or so years, several social trends have impacted on the way grandparents see themselves and carry out their roles. These trends are more pronounced in developed nations but some, such as increased lifespan, are worldwide phenomena. In 1910, the life expectancy of a Chilean female was 33 years; one hundred years later it is 82 years, representing a gain of almost 50 years of life in one century (World Health Organization (WHO), 2012). According to WHO, the number of people aged 80 years or older will quadruple to nearly 400 million by 2050, resulting in the majority of middle-aged and older adults having living parents. One implication of this is that grandparents in their 50s, 60s and even 70s may find themselves juggling responsibilities for the care of aged parents with participation in the lives of their grandchildren, support for the grandchildrenâs parents, and greater financial and social expectations to continue in paid work.
Another implication is that, in comparison with children growing up in the twentieth century, many more children now and in the future will grow to adulthood while their grandparents are still alive, and many of these children will have living great grandparents as well. This is particularly the case for grandmothers and great-grandmothers, given that womenâs lifespans are on average six to eight years longer than menâs. The opportunities for children today to have loving and supportive relationships with their grandparents, with all the mutual benefits this entails, have never been greater. In temporary or long-term family crises, todayâs healthier and fitter grandparents are often available to provide a back-up when parents canât cope.
There is another trend that may counter the effects of our longer and healthier lifespans on grandparenting. In developed nations, young people are partnering later and having their first child at an older age. For example, in Britain the average age of first-time mothers in 2013 increased to 30 years from 27 years in the 1970s (Briggs, 2014). US figures show the same pattern, although first-time mothers are significantly younger than in the UK. The average age for women to give birth for the first time in the US was 26 years in 2013, up from 21 years in 1970 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2015a). Reasons for delaying maternity include greater access to contraception and abortion, as well as young women wishing to complete their education and establish themselves in the job market before they embark on motherhood. Of course, as first-time mothers get older, so must first-time grandparents and this will have implications on the nature of the grandparentâgrandchild relationship. The effects will be most marked if the children of todayâs older parents also delay childbearing, but we do not have a crystal ball to discover if this will be the case. We may be living at a particular time in history when new grandparents â mostly middle-aged and healthy â have more energy resources than ever before. Whether this will change, or how it will play out, needs to be the subject of continuing research.
Another consequence of women having their first child later in life is that, because fertility is finite (so far!), birth rates have fallen and families are smaller (e.g. Parry and Davies, 2015). While smaller families are likely to be better off financially, their emotional and social resources can be stretched. For example, with parents both working and no older siblings...
