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Grandparents and the Care of Their Grandchildren

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Fertility, Living Arrangements, Care and Mobility

Part of the book series: Understanding Population Trends and Processes ((UPTA,volume 1))

Across Europe, certain grandparents are being relied upon to provide informal care for their grandchildren, particularly as part of a package of early-years childcare provision (Gray, 2005; Lewis et al., 2008). The increased participation of women in the labour market (Crouch, 1999), without concomitant and equivalent increased participation of men in informal care (Hook, 2006) means that the demand for informal care is likely to increase whilst supply decreases. Evidence suggests that grandparents are the informal carers of choice after the parents themselves (Wheelock and Jones, 2002). However, certain interest groups representing grandparents have raised the concern that grandparents may be making a rather larger contribution to the care and upbringing of their grandchildren than they had anticipated (e.g. Age Concern, 2006). Regular primary care of small children is a time consuming activity, which is both physically and emotionally demanding and as such, not a task that grandparents had necessarily envisaged as a core part of their grandparental role.

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  1. School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Alison Smith Koslowski

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    Koslowski, A.S. (2009). Grandparents and the Care of Their Grandchildren. In: Kneale, D., Coast, E., Stillwell, J. (eds) Fertility, Living Arrangements, Care and Mobility. Understanding Population Trends and Processes, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9682-2_9

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