Abstract
This article considers the potential relationship between providing care for grandchildren and retirement, among women nearing retirement age. Using 47,444 person-wave observations from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we find that the arrival of a new grandchild is associated with more than an 8 % increase in the retirement hazard despite little overall evidence of a care/retirement interaction. We document that although family characteristics seem to be the most important factors driving the care decision, they are also important determinants of retirement. In contrast, although financial incentives such as pensions and retiree health insurance have the largest influence on retirement, the opportunity cost associated with outside income seems to have little effect on whether a grandmother provides care. There is little evidence of substitution between caring for grandchildren versus providing care for elderly parents or engaging in volunteer activities; grandchild care is instead taken on as an additional responsibility. Our findings suggest that policies aimed at prolonging work life may need to consider grandchild care responsibilities as a countervailing factor, while those policies focused on grandchild care may also affect elderly labor force participation.
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Notes
As noted by Luo et al. (2012:1144), “Grandchild care can take several forms.” Vandel et al. (2003) also documented significant variation in the types of grandparent care provided during the first three years of infancy. Throughout this article, we use the terms “care,” “caring,” “caregiving,” and “care work” interchangeably to describe the act of providing childcare assistance (including babysitting) for grandchildren, and the terms “carers,” “care workers,” and “caregivers” for those who provide such care. We recognize that the conventions regarding the description of such contributions have changed over the past decades and do not intend for our descriptors to convey any particular preference for one over the other. In this article, these terms should be interpreted as equally emphasizing the value of such contributions.
Questions on grandparent caring were first included in the long form of the decennial census in 2000 (Simmons and Dye 2003).
As a condition of use, we note that “The HRS (Health and Retirement Study) is sponsored by the National Institute on Aging (grant number NIA U01AG009740) and is conducted by the University of Michigan.” Where possible, we use the RAND HRS data files (St. Clair et al. 2010) for their ease of use and consistency of variables across waves. As of the initial writing of this article, the family section variables had not been included in the RAND HRS data files but were for the most part in the associated Enhanced Fat Files. For the few explanatory variables that were not available in the RAND data (e.g., family variables, such as children’s characteristics), we merged data across waves using the raw HRS data.
Although at first glance, the reduction due to this second criterion seems large, it is important to remember that the current version of the HRS reflects the merging of the original (1992) HRS sample with the Assets and Health Dynamics of the Oldest Old (AHEAD) survey. The latter survey consisted of individuals born prior to 1923 (and hence were aged 70 or older when first surveyed in 1993) and their spouses. This population was presumed by the survey designers to be retired and hence was not asked many of the questions used in our analysis. In addition, because the data set is longitudinal, the same individuals (those over age 70) are omitted in each wave to which they respond. Specifically, of the 17,293 unique women in the overall sample (e.g., all individuals after application of the first criterion), 4,619 correspond to the AHEAD survey, and 881 do not belong to any of the existing cohorts as a result of being too young. Of the remaining 11,793 women, 9,367 are included in our analysis sample (79.4 %). For more details on the structure and sampling design of the HRS, see the online HRS documentation (http://hrsonline.osr.umich.edu/sitedocs/surveydesign.pdf and http://hrsonline.isr.umich.edu/sitedocs/userg.HRSSAMP.pdf).
The HRS sampling design is to add cohorts as they reach age 51. Our approach therefore corresponds to how additional cohorts are added into the HRS; in particular, first spousal observations whose birth years correspond to the new cohort are taken as members, and then additional participants are recruited to round out (i.e., make representative) the new cohort.
This definition captures a variety of types of grandchild care, including babysitting and coresidence both with and without the grandchild’s parent. Luo et al. (2012) distinguished between different types using the categories “babysitting,” “multigeneration household,” and “skipped-generation household,” and they documented care transitions into and out of each type. Because our main focus is on the interaction between caring responsibilities (however such responsibilities may arise) and retirement, we employ the coarser, single definition in our analysis.
There is also not a separate variable for grandchild coresidence in all waves; therefore, we construct this variable by first considering whether children live in the home, and then considering whether those children have children.
This question is taken from the Wave 1 (1992) questionnaire; the exact wording of the question has changed slightly over the years. For example, more recent surveys reference “since the previous interview on [date]” rather than asking about time spent in the past 12 months.
See Lumsdaine and Vermeer (2014) for more details on our theoretical approach.
Descriptive statistics showing the bivariate relationships between all our covariates and the key variables of interest are contained in the working paper precursor to this article (Lumsdaine and Vermeer 2014: appendix A2).
Liquid wealth is significant at the 90 % level of confidence, however.
Our finding is also consistent with the literature that notes especially strong demand for grandparent care when the grandchild is of preschool age (e.g., Luo et al. 2012). We are grateful to our anonymous referees for suggesting this interpretation.
The p values on the caring for grandchildren and caring for parents variables are .052 and .203, respectively; although neither is statistically significant at the 95 % level of confidence, the caring for grandchildren variable is significant at the 90 % level of confidence. It is also possible that the lack of significance on the caring variable in the retirement equation reflects the censoring that occurs as a result of the new grandchild effect because when those grandmothers retire, they have reached “failure” in the Cox proportional hazard sense, meaning that their subsequent caregiving is no longer available to assist with identification of a retirement effect. To consider this possibility, we reestimate the Cox proportional hazard model omitting the “new grandchild” variable. In this case, the p value on the caring variable declines to .042; in addition, the coefficients on the other variables are qualitatively unchanged.
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Acknowledgments
Preliminary research for this article was initiated while the first author was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. The collaboration for this article is the result of a research internship at American University for the second author. We gratefully acknowledge financial support for the first author from the National Institute on Aging, Grant Nos. R03-AG14173 and R03-AG043010, and for the second author from Stichting A.A. van Beek-Fonds. We also thank Rachel Friedberg, Ed Lazear, Chris Ruhm, David Wise, and seminar participants at American University, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Erasmus University, the Hoover Institution, the NBER Summer Institute on Aging, and the NETSPAR International Pension Workshop for helpful conversations and suggestions on this topic. We are especially grateful to Kathleen McGarry for her input and expertise on the data set and to Mike Bader, Seth Gershenson, Alan Gustman, Elvira Sojli, Wing Wah Tham, three anonymous referees, and the Editor for their very helpful comments on this article.
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Lumsdaine, R.L., Vermeer, S.J.C. Retirement Timing of Women and the Role of Care Responsibilities for Grandchildren. Demography 52, 433–454 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-015-0382-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-015-0382-5