Grandparenting, education and subjective well-being of older Europeans

Abstract

We study whether grandparenthood is associated with older people's subjective well-being (SWB), considering the association with life satisfaction of having grandchildren per se, their number, and of the provision of grandchild care. Older people's education may not only be an important confounder to control for, but also a moderator in the relation between grandparenthood-related variables and SWB. We investigate these issues by adopting a cross-country comparative perspective and using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe covering 20 countries. Our results show that grandparenthood has a stronger positive association with SWB in countries where intensive grandparental childcare is not common and less socially expected. Yet, this result is driven by a negative association between grandparenthood without grandparental childcare and SWB that we only found in countries where intensive grandparental childcare is widespread. Therefore, in accordance with the structural ambivalence theory, we argue that in countries where it is socially expected for grandparents to have a role as providers of childcare, not taking on such a role may negatively influence SWB. However, our results show that grandparental childcare (either intensive or not) is generally associated with higher SWB. Overall, we do not find support for a moderating effect of education. We also do not find striking differences by gender in the association between grandparenthood and SWB. The only noteworthy discrepancy refers to grandmothers being often more satisfied when they provide grandchild care.

Keywords: Cross-country comparison; Education; Grandchild care; Grandparenthood; SHARE; Subjective well-being.

Figures

Fig. 1

Marginal effects of being grandparent on SWB by gender, country, and measured at two levels of the education rank (Q1 = first quartile, Q3 = third quartile). Note: DK Denmark, SE Sweden, NL Netherlands, CH Switzerland, FR France, DE Germany, EE Estonia, AT Austria, BE Belgium, LU Luxemburg, CZ Czech Republic, HU Hungary, GR Greece, ES Spain, IL Israel, HR Croatia, SI Slovenia, PT Portugal, IT Italy, PO Poland. All the analyses control for age, marital status, employment status, number of children, whether the respondent lives in a rural area; whether the respondent has any long-standing illnesses; GALI; survey waves. Confidence intervals are centred on the point estimates and have lengths equal to 2 × 1.39 × standard errors to have an average level of 5% for the Type I error probability in the pair-wise comparisons

Fig. 2

Marginal effects of the number of grandchildren on SWB, by gender and country. Note: DK Denmark, SE Sweden, NL Netherlands, CH Switzerland, FR France, DE Germany, EE Estonia, AT Austria, BE Belgium, LU Luxemburg, CZ Czech Republic, HU Hungary, GR Greece, ES Spain, IL Israel, HR Croatia, SI Slovenia, PT Portugal, IT Italy, PO Poland. All the analyses control for age, marital status, employment status, number of children, whether the respondent lives in a rural area; whether the respondent has any long-standing illnesses; GALI; survey waves. Confidence intervals for pair-wise comparisons at 5% as in Fig. 1

Fig. 3

Marginal effects of having grandchildren and providing intensive or not intensive grandparental childcare on SWB, by gender and country. Note: DK Denmark, SE Sweden, NL Netherlands, CH Switzerland, FR France, DE Germany, EE Estonia, AT Austria, BE Belgium, LU Luxemburg, CZ Czech Republic, HU Hungary, GR Greece, ES Spain, IL Israel, HR Croatia, SI Slovenia, PT Portugal, IT Italy, PO Poland. All the analyses control for age, marital status, employment status, number of children, whether the respondent lives in a rural area; whether the respondent has any long-standing illnesses; GALI; survey waves. Confidence intervals for pair-wise comparisons at 5% as in Fig. 1