Twenty-first century grandparents: global perspectives on changing roles and consequences

ABSTRACT

This special issue on Grandparents highlights the increasing role that they are taking in raising the next generation, not only in the United Kingdom, but across the world. Why are grandparents playing a major role in rearing the next generation? Firstly, older people are living longer and are healthier so they are more available. Also rising divorce rates, increases in single parenthood, more working mothers and the globalisation of work has fuelled family change. The expanding body of interdisciplinary research in cross-generational relations has raised key questions such as: how has human evolution shaped grandparental behaviour? How is grandparenting different from parenting? How do lineage, gender or marital status influence grandparenting? How does grandparental involvement affect the well-being of children and is this different when they are caring for them full-time? How is contemporary grandparenthood shaped by cultural patterns and what are the social policy implications? This introduction outlines some key topics which are further developed by the 11 papers in this special issue. Contributors come from many disciplines and countries and employ a vast range of research methods. The overall conclusion is that societies need to re-evaluate the role of grandparents, pay attention to the support they need, and systematically integrate kin and grandparental care into family policies. As caretakers of many of their grandchildren, who will be our future citizens, grandparents are guardians of all our tomorrows.

KEYWORDS:

• Grandparenting
• grandchildren
• grandparental investment
• well-being
• gender
• intergenerational relations

Introduction

In 2014, British Prime Minister Cameron highlighted the nearly six million ‘unsung heroes’ who spend their days looking after their grandchildren saving Britain more than £7 billion in child care costs (Daily Telegraph, 2015). Two years later, in 2017, research revealed that the number of grandparents who provide childcare for their grandchildren had risen dramatically (International Longevity Centre, 2017). The report found that over nine million grandparents make up the UK’s ‘Grandparent Army’ with nearly three million offering very regular care. Grandparents spend an average of over 8 hours a week looking after their grandchildren. This time commitment rises to over 11 hours weekly for those core grandparents who are most heavily relied upon. Two-thirds of grandparents offer financial contributions to their grandchildren’s upbringing, across payments towards clothes, toys and hobbies, leisure activities and pocket money. Some also pay for others to babysit so they and the parents can take a well-earned rest. According to the most recent report, the major reason for grandparents’ increased involvement is their children’s workloads and pressure to keep their job or get a pay rise. The vast majority (96%) of grandparent childminders receive no payment from their children to cover the cost of looking after their little ones. The report adds that grandparents are also shelling out over £400 each year for little ones’ activities whilst they are in their care, a colossal combined £3.8bn (International Longevity Centre, 2017).

The increasing involvement of grandparents in child care is not restricted to the UK. Across Europe, Glaser, Price, Ribe, di Gess, and Tinker (2013) using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) found that 44% of grandmothers gave regular or occasional help looking after grandchildren, and 42% of grandfathers played a similar role. This study also found that in Northern Europe, where municipally provided child care is more available and cheaper, grandparents were less often responsible for day care, but nevertheless very involved in other ways. In Southern Europe, where state subsidised child care is more limited, grandparents are often playing the major role caring from grandchildren while their parents worked.

Across the world, also other factors come into play. In China, urbanisation has created up to 60 million ‘left behind’ Chinese children, or about one fifth of all Chinese children, who are growing up in the Chinese countryside while their parents live and work away, manning the factories and shops which are bringing about China’s economic miracle (BBC, 2016a; see e.g. Ban et al., 2017). In Romania (BBC, 2016b) it is estimated that 350,000 children are ‘left behind’ while their parents are working abroad. Similarly, in the Philippines, large numbers of children are living with grandparents or relatives while their parents work abroad (Asis, 2000).

Increases and shifts in grandparenting have fuelled increasing interest in this familial relation. The last decades have witnessed a growing number of studies on intergenerational relations in the fields of family sociology, demography and psychology, as well as in economics and anthropology. In this issue, we include original research findings from these disciplines and from a wide range of countries and cultures: England (Leeson, 2018), Scotland (Jamieson, Ribe, & Warner, 2018), Wales (Hunt, 2018), United States (Bates, Taylor, & Stanfield, 2018; Capaldi, Tiberio, & Kerr, 2018; Hossain, Eisberg, & Shwalb, 2018), Finland (Tanskanen & Danielsbacka, 2018), Australia (Coall, Hillebrand, Sear, & Hertwig, 2018), South Africa (Wild, 2018) Israel (Attar-Schwartz & Buchanan, 2018) and Malaysia (Tan, 2018). Grandparenting is approached from the perspectives of population change, grandparental investment, social and cultural change, and effects of grandparenting on various family members, and we discuss them in detail below.

Population change enhances grandparenting

At the heart of increasing grandparental involvement is demographic change. Countries in the developed world have experienced an unprecedented growth in the number of their elderly and this trend is expected to continue for the next decades. The demographic ‘Gray Dawn:’ is often a cause for concern and framed as an ‘ageing crisis’ (Peterson, 1999). Ageing populations do indeed pose huge challenges to social and health care services and the economic foundation of social welfare provision. However, the Gray Dawn also means that there are more elderly who live longer and who are healthier and are available to help. For instance, Finnish children born in 1860 shared on average four years of life with at least one grandmother and one year with at least one grandfather. For a child born in 1950, the corresponding amount of shared years had grown up to 24 years with a grandmother and 13 years with a grandfather (Chapman, Lahdenperä, Pettay, & Lummaa, 2017). In the United Kingdom, it is projected that, by 2044, those aged 65 and over will represent 25% of the total population (Office for National Statistics, 2014). As Leeson (2018) notes in the first paper in this special issue, never before have so many elderly people survived to old age. While life expectancy at birth has increased steadily for centuries, life expectancy at age 65 started to increase only in the twentieth century.

In parallel with increases in life expectancy, fertility rates are falling so that fewer children are being born into each family (Buchanan & Rotkirch, 2013).

Total fertility rates, that is, the total number of children born to a woman in her lifetime, have fallen dramatically, particularly in the developed world (Buchanan & Rotkirch, 2013). In Taiwan, the rate is 1.1, which means that two people will produce only one child over their reproductive life. The population replacement rate is estimated at just over 2. Over the last 50 years, the global fertility rate has halved and is around 2.5 children per woman today (Roser, 2017). As the world ages and moves to a low fertility phase, the young become more valuable. They are the future workers and creators of future economic wealth. Hence the recent spread of pronatalist policies in many European countries, which are trying to increase the birth rate but also improve the well-being of the young. Developed family policies in many wealthy countries hint at this realisation: provision of parental leaves with monetary compensation and of subsidised and high-quality day care (Esping-Andersen, 2013; Gauthier, 2013).

Evolutionary roots of grandparenthood

In the recent decade, a new interdisciplinary perspective on grandparenting and intergenerational relations has emerged which combines social sciences with evolutionary theory. Comparing humans to other species, Darwinian theory highlights how unusual the human family system is in the animal kingdom. Mammalian grandparents rarely contribute to raising children to the same extent as in our own species. A central question in evolutionary studies is why grandparents typically are so involved in the lives of their adult children and grandchildren. Could they not go off and enjoy their well-earned retirement? In the second article in this issue Coall et al. (2018) with his multi-disciplinary, multi-national team, explores the theory behind the involvement of grandparents in the lives of grandchildren. Evolutionary theory is interested in the ultimate explanations for this involvement, asking why our species has so many potentially involved grandparents. One impetus for this research was the Grandmother hypothesis (e.g. Hawkes, O’Connell, Jones, Alvarez, & Charnov, 1998), which sparked an ongoing discussion about the evolutionary roots of grandparenthood and the female menopause, and about the relative importance of the nuclear family versus the extended family for children’s wellbeing in different societies (see e.g. Kramer & Russell, 2015). Anthropological studies show that where grandmothers are present, there is often a better survival rate in grandchildren. This led to the hypothesis that female menopause may originally have evolved in order for females to be able to assist with rearing their grandchildren. Although the grandmother hypothesis is debated, it appears to be clear that once menopause had, for whatever reason, evolved, grandparenthood emerged as a defining characteristic of our families (e.g. Lahdenperä, Gillespie, Lummaa, & Russell, 2012). As Coall and colleagues show in their contribution, such ultimate and evolutionary explanations do not exclude complementary sociological and economical explanations (Rotkirch, 2018). For instance, self-interest theory may play some role: by helping younger generations, grandparents may hope that they in turn will look after them when the time comes. As Finch has shown (1989) there is some truth in this: ‘the proper things to do’ is to support those relatives who have supported you. But as Coall, Hilbrand, Sear, and Hertwig (2016) explain, the evidence for reciprocity is not convincing. It may rather be that healthy, longer living grandparents feel better in themselves, when they take part in their grandchildren’s’ lives, without ever receiving as much ‘in return’.

Social and cultural changes in family composition and grandparental roles

Another major issue relating to the increased involvement of grandparents, is that a growing number of women are working, for example in Finland (Leeson 2018). The dual-earner family has rooted itself socially and culturally in most developed countries. With advances in gender equality and in order to maintain the resources to give the child the education and quality of life parents feel important, two salaries have become the norm. Labour force participation rates of women in the prime ages of 25–54 years continued to rise in the 1990s to between 60% and 85% (Limm, 2002). Across the world, some 50% of all women are working (United Nations, 2010). This raises the question of who will care for the children, especially those in the critical pre-school age and older children after school and in the holidays?

In addition, family break-up and divorce impacts on the need for extra help. In the UK one in four families are headed by a single parent, typically a single mother (separated/divorced or single and unmarried). The increase in the number of lone mothers, whether as a result of never having married or following divorce, places further demands on grandparent care (Buchanan, 2017a). Earlier research shows that many of these grandparents are filling the parenting gap: attending school meetings, helping with homework, advising young people about careers (Tan, Buchanan, Flouri, Attar-Schwartz, & Griggs, 2010).

Changing gender roles is also shaping grandparenting itself. When we talk about ‘grandparents’, the underlying assumption has for long been that we are talking about grandmothers (Buchanan & Rotkirch, 2016). The specific role of grandfathers as men, fathers and grandparents has until recently been absent in the family literature. In 2016 Rotkirch and Buchanan brought together scholars to explore global perspectives on grandfathering and found, contrary to assumptions, that many grandfathers were very connected with their grandchildren. Some of them represent the new ‘niche’ of Western grandfathers, who aim to be more caring and involved grandfathers than what was the norm in previous societies (Coall et al., 2016; Leeson, 2016). In this issue, a paper from the from the United States by Bates et al. (2018) demonstrates how grandfathers can be analysed on a spectrum from involved, passive, to disengaged. Measuring contact frequency, intergenerational commitment, and participation in activities, their contribution explores how grandfathers seek to keep in touch with their grandchildren, using a sample of 351 grandfathers from the Grandfather Involvement and Health Survey from the United States. Their results show that the well-known difference between maternal and paternal grandfathers, the former of which tend to be more involved grandfathers (Danielsbacka & Tanskanen, 2016) remains, but also which other factors are at work. Alongside individual characteristics of the grandfather, such as health and place of residence, both characteristics of the child’s family and characteristics of the grandfather–grandchild relationship itself – especially the emotional closeness of the grandfather–grandchild dyad – influence grandfathering (Bates et al., 2018).

Not discussed in this special issue, but important in understanding the changing roles of grandparents, are the strong if little-articulated norms about how grandparents should involve themselves with their grandchildren. One key norm of contemporary grandparenting in many European societies including the UK is the concept of ‘being there’ (e.g. Clarke & Roberts, 2004). This means being available if asked for support in caring or in financial need. Another key rule in many other contemporary Western societies appears to be ‘non-interference’ (Harper & Ruicheva, 2010). Grandparents should not undermine the parents’ relationships with their children and they are afraid of intruding too much or becoming a burden. However, the norm of low interference is less true for grandparents of lone parent families where grandparents can become ‘replacement partners’ and ‘replacement parents’. It is noteworthy that both normative concepts are passive, that is, at heart, the parents of the grandchildren are expected to be self-determining and independent. Grandparents also have few legal rights or obligations in developed societies. But as we see things may be changing, and for instance, an increase in the rights of grandparents are now being debated in many countries.

The relatively passive cultural norms of grandparenting in UK and Western societies contrast sharply with the authoritative role of grandparents and especially grandfathers in more traditional cultures. A number of factors influence the roles grandparents play: cultural traditions toward care of the elderly may be imported from the homeland – for example, with the Chinese population there is the strong Confucian tradition of filial piety and obligation to care for the elderly (Buchanan, 2017a). Another key factor is whether elderly people live in multi-generational households or live alone (Buchanan, in press). In this issue, Hossain et al. (2018) explores the influence of culture in examining the social identities of grandparents. They note that grandparents assume many roles and are valued differently across cultural communities. In the Western world, the processes of individuation and economic practices tend to segregate grandparents from the social mainstream. ‘Ageism’ may work insidiously to undercut the importance and status of grandparents. By contrast, in the non-Western world, traditions of gender hierarchy, kinship and property ownership have promoted the higher social status of grandparents within the family and society. As family patriarchs, grandparents still maintain a respected authority role, especially in many Asian, African and Latin American societies. In this issue, Hossain et al., 2018 argue that despite all the advantages of greater equality between generations, such a respect-based social identity may also vitalise intergenerational interactions because it is based on a sense of inclusion.

The main challenge to the more active grandparent role is that parents are the gatekeepers of contact with grandchildren, as noted in a number of studies (e.g. Buchanan & Flouri, 2008; Buchanan & Rotkirch, 2016; Clarke & Roberts, 2004). This poses a particular dilemma following parents’ divorce. Under the UK law grandparents have no legal rights for contact with their grandchildren if parents do not wish this. A UK-based qualitative study by Ferguson (2004) exploring the role of grandparents in divorced families, concluded that there was not sufficient evidence that grandparents should have their special role recognised by the law. However, Dunn and Deater-Deckard (2001) using data from the Avon longitudinal study showed that many grandparents, although they may not be recognised by UK law, are already heavily involved following family separation and divorce and are often key confidants for children. In addition, many young people want ongoing contact with their grandparent, even when their parents do not support this (Buchanan & Flouri, 2008).

Conditions for and consequences of grandparent involvement

Demographic, evolutionary, sociological and cultural perspectives on grandparenting are all united by an interest in grandparental involvement and all the varied forms of investment that different grandparents provide to their grandchildren. The main forms of investment – child care, other forms of practical support, financial support and economical support have been documented in several large and ongoing survey collections and analysed (see e.g. Arber & Attias-Donfut, 2002; Coall & Hertwig, 2010; Szydlik, 2016). More recently, research has further explored the effects of grandparental involvement on various behaviours and on wellbeings, such as parental fertility, grandparental wellbeing and child wellbeing (Rotkirch, 2018). Among these, one critical factor in grandparent involvement, as noted above, is the impact of parental divorce. It appears that divorce and remarriage in either generation influences relationships. On the one hand, it expands the extended family network of children, but on the other hand, it can reduce or totally severe contacts to some branches of the kin network – typically that on the paternal side.

In this issue, Tanskanen and Danielsbacka (2018) explore the effects of family recomposition in the grandparental generation. Were Finnish grandparents affected by the change in their marital status? The investigation was based on one sweep of the Generational Transmissions in Finland 2012 survey, which includes 1441 grandparents aged between 62 and 67 years and was reported by the grandparents. They found that both their divorce and remarriage were associated with reduced child care help and reduced contacts between grandparents and their grandchildren. In addition, remarried and widowed grandfathers provided significantly less practical and financial help to their offspring compared to their never-divorced counterparts. Among grandmothers, remarriage was associated with reduced child care help and contact, and divorce with reduced financial help when compared to never-divorced grandmothers.

Although divorce may interrupt the grandparent relationship, step-grandparents can also play a role. In this issue, Jamieson et al. (2018) using data from Growing Up in Scotland survey (GUS) and qualitative in-depth interviews with different types of grandparents of children involved in GUS, critically examined the established finding that maternal grandmothers tend to be the most involved grandparent. They found that with changing families and increasing gender equality, children may have a number of older relatives who were involved. Their results indicated, however, that despite these cultural changes, maternal grandmothers continued to be most heavily involved, although this did not mean that the contributions of other grandparents, including step-grandparents, were not also important.

There is now a growing body of research that illustrates that grandparent involvement is associated with improved mental health, improved resilience and pro-social behaviour in grandchildren. For instance, an earlier study by Buchanan & Flouri (2008) found that adolescents whose closest grandparent was involved in their lives following their parents’ separation or divorce, reported fewer emotional symptoms and more pro-social behaviours than those with less grandparent involvement. Three papers in this special issue (Attar-Schwartz & Buchanan, 2018; Wild, 2018; and Tan, 2018) provide a synthesis of the effects of grandparenting through a series of studies conducted over the last decade in the UK, Israel (both Arab and Israeli young people), South Africa and Malaysia. These studies all consider situations in which the grandparent is not the primary caregiver, but instead an important part of the extended family of the grandchild. It is interesting that across these studies there are some commonalities. For example, amongst the studies on grandchild well-being (Attar-Schwartz & Buchanan, 2018; Tan, 2018; Wild, 2018), grandparent involvement is associated with positive outcomes.

Broadly, these studies used the same methodology: self-report surveys of teenagers age 11–16 collected in school. It is remarkable that across these very different settings, results show that grandparent involvement was associated with positive outcomes for children. Frequent or emotionally close contacts between a grandchild and a grandparent may protect against developmental problems and boost a child’s cognitive and social abilities. However, the impacts vary with the study population and are sometimes found only for specific types of grandparent–grandchild dyads. For instance, in the South Africa study by Wild (2018) she found that in a large South African sample of adolescents, grandparental involvement was linked to increased pro-social behaviour. However, the even stronger effect of reducing internalising or emotional problems was found only for some types of grandparents.

As also stressed in the overview by Coall et al. (2018) in this issue, we need to remember, that although these studies carefully control for a variety of factors, such as socioeconomic status, or the level of parental involvement with the child, the associations are not necessarily strictly causal, A recent study comparing effects of variations in grandparental involvement in the same child but over time did not find associations between child development and grandparents’ involvements (Tanskanen & Danielsbacka, 2017). This may mean that the results are based on reversed causality: grandparents invest more time and resources to those grandchildren who do better at the first place. Alternatively, real causal effects are too small for the ‘within-child’ methodology to pick up. The search for even more stringent causal pathways continues as data and research methods improve.

Kinship care

The grandparent involvement in the above studies did not include those who were in full-time care of their grandparents. When children are unable to live with their birth parents, it is typically their extended family, rather than the state, which steps in to take care of them. Thus, the emotional costs of migrant working parents can be high, and several studies show that the children’s physical and cognitive development may suffer in grandparental care compared to children raised by their parents. In the case of the ‘left behind’ children of China, such worse outcomes have been explained by lower emotional involvement in parenting among grandparents, and that grandparents also are less able to provide physical care and less receptive to new parenting information (Chang et al., 2017).

In the United States grandparental primary care of a child is known as ‘custodial care’ while in the United Kingdom it is more commonly referred to as ‘kinship care’. In this issue, Hunt (2018), who has undertaken many of the key studies in the United Kingdom, brings together findings on kinship/custodial care from both the UK and the US.

Currently, somewhat more than 1% of children in the United Kingdom live with relatives, usually with their grandmothers, without the parents present. Such families are often socially and economically deprived, and improved appropriate support is sorely needed. Overall, however, the outcomes are generally better than children living in stranger placements such as state-provided foster care.

Taking on full-time responsibility for a grandchild can be challenging. A related question that is not touched upon in this issue, is to what extent does this full-time parenting impact on their grandparents’ health? This is important, not only from their perspective, but also because of the long-known relationship between poor parental mental health and the child development (Quinton & Rutter, 1985). The findings are ambiguous. Coall, Hilbrand, Meyer, Gerstorf, and Hertwig (2017) in a prospective study of associations between helping, health and longevity found that helping others and grandparenting increased longevity. Hicks Patrick, Nadorff, and Blake (2016), drawing data from national surveys and other empirical studies in the United States and Canada, however, found that when it came to custodial grandfathers, they were more likely to report depressive symptoms and to receive less social support as well as greater levels of life disruption than non-custodial men. In the United States, custodial grandparenting is more common among minority families who may be more likely to live in poverty (Hicks Patrick et al., 2016). Yet, in another study, Bates and Taylor (2012) in the United States, found that involved grandfathers had significantly fewer depressive symptoms and significantly higher scores on positive effect than disengaged grandfathers, and there was a positive health benefit for these involved older men.

The different outcomes in these studies may be explained by the amount of time grandparents spend in caring. When it comes to both grandparents, Glaser et al. (2013), in her study across Europe, found that intensive care of grandchildren (more than thirty hours a week) was associated with less good outcomes for both grandchildren and grandparents, while less intensive care was associated with generally positive outcomes. Intensive grandparent care was also associated with isolation and hardship among grandparents.

There is thus a limit to the possible beneficial aspects of grandparental involvement. Custodial grandparenting may nevertheless often be the best choice for a family in crisis, compared to other options.

When exploring all the positives on intergenerational relations, it is easy to forget that there are negatives. In an earlier research, Buchanan and O’Leary (2016), used a UK internet site Net Mums, to explore parents’ views on grandfather involvement with their children. Although mothers spoke about how much they appreciated the child care and other support their parents provided, they also spoke of some really fraught intergenerational relationships; there was sometimes concern about their parents’ abilities to care for their children, and also occasional cases of possible abuse. Parents were the gatekeepers and grandchildren did not visit their grandparents unless they, as parents, gave permission. In some cases, it was important grandparents stayed away.

Importance of longitudinal data sets

As we see through this special issue, research has been greatly enhanced by the emergence of large surveys on generations, grandparenting and ageing, such as the US the Longitudinal Study of Generations (LSOG), and the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement (SHARE) in Europe. In this issue, national longitudinal studies of grandparenting utilised include the Three Generational Study from Oregon, the Growing up in Scotland study and one generation from the Generational Transmissions in Finland survey. Studies presented in this issue include both quantitative and qualitative methodologies as well as analysis of cross-sectional and specially collected surveys and interviews.

Such data helps us grasp the social and economic impact of grandparenting and what factors promote family solidarity and support. Nevertheless, detailed information about grandparenting and its effects on families is still often missing since its collection ideally requires information from at least three family generations and two kin lineages.

Large data studies and longitudinal cohort studies are being developed across the world and we look forward to future findings on grandparents, for example, from The China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) (2018), a longitudinal survey being conducted by the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University with the University of Southern California. When these data sets become available, they will offer exciting opportunities to explore issues of intergenerational relations across nations.

The final paper in this special issue also tempers the positive picture of grandparent involvement given. Capaldi et al. (2018) from the Oregon Social Learning Centre reminds us in the last article that also maladaptive behaviour, in this case substance abuse, can be transmitted across generations. This final contribution underlines the importance and continuing scarcity of longitudinal data with information about, for instance, the crucial period of adolescence, in several family generations. It also raises interesting questions about the contribution of genetics and the environment to risk behaviour. Nature or nurture? These longitudinal studies do help us refine our understanding of how changes in the environment interact with transmissions between family generations. There is much still to know.

Making grandparenting visible: social policy issues

In most parts of the developing world, it is assumed, that if parents cannot provide care for their children, because they are working or for other reasons, grandparents are the best caretakers. It is only in the developed world that legal hurdles separate grandchildren from grandparents. However, some of these hurdles are being rescinded (Rotkirch & Buchanan, 2016).

Under public law in England and Wales, when parents are unable to care for their children, there is a greater recognition by the courts that ‘the best interests of the child’ are often better met by family and friends’ care. Grandparent Plus in the UK (Grandparents Plus, 2018) demonstrates the valiant work many grandparents are doing as full-time kinship carers. These grandparents are of course providing a considerable resource and they are cheaper than state care. Many of the grandparents are very poor or have had to give up work to care for their grandchildren. Some of these children have had difficult backgrounds and can be very challenging. A major concern in UK, as Hunt and Waterhouse (2013) point out is that because carers are ‘family’, they may not receive the help needed to manage some very damaged young people.

A second issue is that parents can block contact with grandchildren and this is true in many jurisdictions of the developed world (Rotkirch & Buchanan, 2016). In a recent letter to the Times Buchanan (2017b), noted that if parents in the UK no longer want grandparents involved in their children’s lives grandparents must apply for ‘leave’ of the court to make an application – a cumbersome and expensive business. According to Grandparent Plus, it is estimated that one million grandparents in Britain are being denied contact with their grandchildren because of family breakdown, death or divorce (Grandparent Plus, 2018). Quite apart from the issue of Grandparental rights, it could be argued that children have right to contact with grandparents because of the support they offer, resources and future inheritance available, and indeed because this is what young people want (Buchanan, Hunt, Bretherton, & Bream, 2010). Kaganas (2007) and the Scottish organisation Grandparents Apart Self Help (GASH) suggest that there should be a change in the law to give a ‘presumption of contact’ with the grandparents as there currently is with Fathers under English and Welsh, Northern Ireland, and/Scottish law. The organisation suggests that this will encourage those involved to attend conciliation/crisis counselling to assist in finding a compromise. This presumption can of course easily be overruled where a grandparent may pose a risk for a child. In her letter to the Times Buchanan (2017b) made this suggestion which has received some support from the higher judiciary.

Conclusion

Contributions in this issue come from a range of disciplines: demography, sociology, gerontology, psychology, social work, human biology, family studies, anthropology and Health Studies. It is certainly no coincidence that most contributing scholars have been involved in multi-disciplinary research and in multi-cultural research at some stage in their careers. Grandparenting has become a ‘melting pot’ for the behavioural sciences at large, attracting explanations from sociology to evolutionary biology and economics (e.g. Arber & Attias-Donfut, 2002; Coall & Hertwig, 2010; Lee, 2013). Since most scholars agree on the major empirical findings regarding grandparenting relations, the field serves as a useful playing ground to compare and integrate disciplinary hypotheses and theoretical explanations (Rotkirch, 2018).

Grandparenting is characterised by both universal traits and cultural variation. The mere fact that children can form meaningful social relations to the parents of both their mother and their father is biologically quite unique. Some other species such as elephants and dolphins have involved grandmothers, but these are usually maternal grandmothers (Euler, 2011). To have paternal grandmothers and males involved in the lives of grandchildren is exceedingly rare in nature. Demographic, social and cultural factors shape how extended families interact in different populations, and what grandparenting means in society at large. We are proud that the contributors to this issue are currently based in leading Universities from around globe. Thus, the experiences of grandparenting discussed here represent a wide geographical spread. There is still much we do not know, but across the world, many of these grandparents are filling the gap for time-poor mothers and fathers (and in some cases failing parents). Indeed, they are the new army of proxy parents. As societies, we need to support them for they are playing an increasing role in raising the next generation. These children will be all our futures.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ann Buchanan is emeritus professor and senior research associate at the Department of Social Policy and Interventions, University of Oxford. For twenty years, she directed the Centre for Research into Parenting and Children at Oxford. She was awarded an MBE in 2012 for her services to social science. She is a Fellow of the National Academy for Social Sciences.

Anna Rotkirch is research professor and director of the Population Research Institute, Väestöliitto. As a sociologist, she has specialized in comparative research on families in Europe. Current research interests include fertility, grandparenting, and friendship. In 2013, she co-edited with Ann Buchanan Fertility Rates and Population Decline. No time for Children, and in 2016, Grandfathers: global perspectives both published by Palgrave Macmillan.