Grandmothers

Factors Influencing Grandmother-Grandchild Involvement

Transcript

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Grandmothers’ involvement with their grandchildren depends on a number of factors. One of these is geographical distance. Increased geographic mobility often means that grandparents live some distance from their grandchildren, making visits less frequent and relationships less intimate. Moreover, today's grandparents are more likely to live independent lives apart from their children and to be involved in several other roles. Many middle-age grandmothers are in the labor force and may also have responsibilities for caring for their elderly parents.

Thus, they may have less time to devote to grandparenting activities than did grandmothers a generation ago. In addition, the rising divorce rate may limit the access of grandparents to grandchildren who are living with a former son-in-law or daughter-in-law. An estranged parent may deny children access to their grandparents as a means of punishing the spouse. All 50 states once had laws allowing grandparents to petition courts to continue seeing their grandchildren if their child's marriage ended through divorce or death. Now, many states have made grandparent visitation [Page 641]laws invalid, deciding that they go against the rights of the parent.

The Grandmother-Grandchild Relationship

The ties between family generations are maintained largely by women. One example is that grandmothers tend to have warmer relationships with their grandchildren than do grandfathers. The maternal grandmother usually has the most contact and the closest relationship with the grandchildren, and the grandmother's relationship with her daughter's daughter often is especially close.

Grandchildren often become closer to their grandmothers, particularly their maternal grandmother, following divorce, a trend that may be related to the fact that custody often is awarded to the mother. Grandchildren from divorced families often benefit from this increased involvement with their grandmother, who provides additional emotional and even financial support as the family adjusts to new configurations and economic hardships. Close, supportive relationships with grandparents, especially the maternal grandmother, are linked with better mental health in adolescents and young adults raised in single-parent families.

In some parts of the world, the presence of a grandmother may spell the difference between life and death for her grandchildren. According to anthropologist Kristen Hawkes and her colleagues, post-menopausal women have helped ensure the survival and fitness of their grandchildren since prehistoric times. These women, no longer reproductively active themselves, are able to invest their energies in providing for the physical and psychological health of grandchildren and other young relatives. Hawkes and her colleagues studied the present-day Hadza hunter-gatherers of northern Tanzania and found that older women gather more edible plant foods than any other members of the group.

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