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Regular provision of grandchild care and participation in social activities

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Abstract

Against the background of rapid population ageing, studying social participation in later life is of particular relevance within the framework of active ageing. Although caring for grandchildren has taken a central role for older persons due to unprecedented overlap between grandparents’ and their grandchildren’s lives, whether the relationship between grandparental childcare and social activities is characterised by cumulation or competition remains under-explored. Grandparental childcare may increase the purpose in life for grandparents, stimulating their social participation, or it may impose time and energy constraints on it. This study aims to assess the effect of providing grandchild care on participation in social activities for people aged 50–85 in Europe. Using an instrumental variable approach on data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, we find no significant negative effects of grandchild care on engagement in at least one social activity. However, regular provision of grandchild care has a significant negative effect on the number of activities in which grandmothers participate. When considering the activities separately by type we also find, for grandmothers only, a negative effect on volunteering, engagement in educational or training courses and participation in political or community-related organisation.

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Notes

  1. More specifically, we used data from the first wave (2004) and the refresher samples from the following waves for those countries that took part in the data collection in 2004 (i.e., Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland). We used the second wave (2006) and the refresher sample from the fourth wave (2010) for the countries that joined SHARE in 2006 (i.e., Czech Republic, Ireland, and Poland). We used the fourth wave for countries that joined SHARE in 2010 (i.e., Estonia, Hungary, Portugal, and Slovenia).

  2. In SHARE, some questionnaire modules were not presented to all respondents of the same household. For example, the questions on children and on the provision of childcare to grandchildren were answered by one randomly selected individual in each household, the so-called “family respondent”.

  3. In the fourth wave the time reference was the 12 months before the interview instead of the previous month.

  4. SHARE additionally includes two other activities (care for a sick or disabled adult; and help to family, friends, or neighbours) that we did not consider for three reasons: (1) the focus of the paper is on the impact of grandchild care on extra-family social activities; (2) the “help to family” activity did not explicitly exclude grandchild care; (3) in the fourth wave these two activities were not included in the option list.

  5. In wave 1 and 2, respondents were additionally asked about the number of childcare hours on a typical day/week/month/in the last 12 months, depending on the answer to the previous question. However, this information was not asked in wave 4 and is also not available for Israel.

  6. We used the question on the type of area where the building is located and we coded as “rural” respondents in the category “rural area or village”, while all other categories (“big city”, “suburbs or outskirts of a big city”, “large town”, and “small town”) were included in the reference group.

  7. In SHARE the few questions on preferences and values (for example about parents’ and grandparents’ duties as well as about who should bear the responsibility for older persons in need) are included in the so-called drop-off questionnaire, to which only a sub-sample answers. Moreover, these questions were not repeated in the fourth wave. Using this information would have implied an overall reduction in our sample size of 65 %.

  8. For binary outcomes we also estimated bivariate probit models that take into account that both the endogenous variable and the outcome are binary variables. Results are similar to those obtained using 2SLS: the coefficients of grandchild care have the same sign as those reported in the text when significant. Also marginal effects are similar to estimates obtained with linear models (results available upon request).

  9. The SHARE questionnaire asks whether each child lives “in the same household”, “in the same building”, “<1 km away”, “1–5 km away”, “5–25 km away”, “25–100 km away”, “100–500 km away”, “more than 500 km away”, “more than 500 km away in another country”. We used this information for each child who has at least one child of its own to build the instrumental variable described in the text, namely, the smallest geographical distance to children with own children.

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Acknowledgments

Bruno Arpino acknowledges funding from the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Project: “Grandparenting and successful ageing”; Grant No. CSO2015-62707-ERC).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political and Social Sciences and Research and Expertise Centre for Survey Methodology (RECSM), Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Carrer Ramon Trias Fargas 25-27, 08005, Barcelona, Spain

    Bruno Arpino

  2. Centre for Research on Ageing, University of Southampton, Highfield Campus, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK

    Valeria Bordone

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  1. Bruno Arpino
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Correspondence to Bruno Arpino.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 7, 8, 9, 10.

Table 7 First stage estimates of two-stage least square models predicting participation in at least one activity or number of activities by gender
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Table 8 Second stage estimates of two-stage least square models predicting participation in at least one activity or number of activities by gender
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Table 9 First stage estimates of two-stage least square models predicting participation in each activity by gender
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Table 10 Second stage estimates of two-stage least square models predicting participation in each activity by gender
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Arpino, B., Bordone, V. Regular provision of grandchild care and participation in social activities. Rev Econ Household 15, 135–174 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-016-9322-4

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