Effects of Grandchild Caregiving on Social Participation: Spillover or Competition?

Jianji Chen , Centre d'Estudis Demogràfics (CED-CERCA), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Sergi Vidal, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Jeroen Spijker, Centre d'Estudis Demogràfics (CED)

Individual social participation tends to diminish and concentrate on the family setting in later life. While the “active aging” paradigm aims to activate older population’ social participation and contributions, very few research has studied how older adults’ family- and non-family-based social participations interact to each other especially in a context of the Global South. This study investigates the role of grandchild caregiving for non-family-based social participation among Chinese older adults. A sample of 12,007 grandparents aged 50-80 was drawn from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (2011-2018). We conducted individual fixed-effects regression models to examine the frequency of social participation among six social activities across major forms of grandchild care provision. Given the gender inequalities of grandchild care and the stratification of social participation by urbanicity in China, we also assess potential heterogeneous associations by gender and rural/ urban residence. The results show that providing grandchild care generally increases the frequency of social participation to a modest level, particularly when grandparents are the main care providers. This lends support to the spillover hypothesis, which proposes that caring responsibilities enhances opportunities for social interactions in school and other settings. Such association intersects with urbanicity and gender, with spillover effects being most pronounced among urban women. Overall, the findings suggest that grandchild caregiving might not undermine social life among Chinese grandparents, and that gender and rural/ urban inequalities need to be considered for “active ageing” policies.

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 Presented in Session 32. Grandparents and Grandparenting