Is There a Rejuvenating Effect of (Grand)Childcare? A Longitudinal Study on German Data

Does grandchild care influence grandparents’ self-rated health? Evidence from a fixed effects approach

Valeria Bordone and Bruno Arpino

The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 2022, vol. 77, issue 2, 446-455

Abstract: ObjectivesProvision of grandchild care has been found to be associated with a youthful subjective age. Yet, previous studies on this topic were cross-sectional and ignored the increasing proportions of older people growing old without the opportunity to become a grandparent. This study investigates the effects of childcare to grandchildren and to other children on subjective age using panel data.MethodsWe exploit the longitudinal nature of data from the German Ageing Survey (DEAS) to examine the association between grandparental childcare and care to other children with subjective age, using fixed-effects regression analyses on a sample of 50–85 years old individuals (men: N = 11,151; n = 3,984; women: N = 10,687; n = 3,746, where N is the number of observations and n is the number of individuals).ResultsThe results from cross-sectional analyses show a “rejuvenating effect” of provision of both types of childcare in later life, especially for women. However, longitudinal analyses find very small and statistically insignificant effects.DiscussionWe show for the first time that both grandchild care and childcare outside the grandparent–grandchild relationship are associated with a youthful subjective age for older people. However, these associations are likely due to selection effects, that is, unobserved characteristics of people that make them more likely to engage in childcare and are also associated with subjective age. Our results warn against causal interpretation of associations found in previous studies, but also open up new research questions on the role played by childcare other than to grandchildren.

Keywords: German Ageing Survey (DEAS); Grandparenting; Intergenerational relations; Longitudinal methods; Subjective age (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/geronb/gbab021 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:geronb:v:77:y:2022:i:2:p:446-455.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Journals of Gerontology: Series B is currently edited by Psychological Sciences - S. Duke Han, PhD and Social Sciences - Jessica A Kelley, PhD, FGSA

More articles in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B from The Gerontological Society of America Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().