Grandchild Care, Living Arrangements and Older Adults' Health in China: New Findings on Biomarkers

Jiawei Wu , University of Essex
Karen F. Glaser, King's College London
Mauricio Avendano, University of Lausanne

Grandparents have become important caregivers for grandchildren around the world. Empirical studies investigating the effects of grandchild care on grandparents’ health so far have focused on self-reported measures and yielded mixed results, which reflect the contradictory role enhancement and role strain theories. Although a stressor like grandchild care might trigger biological responses, its associations with biomarkers are understudied. Employing longitudinal data from 2011, 2013 and 2015 waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), we explored the effects of grandchild care provision, care hours and care-related living arrangement on grandparents’ self-reported health, an extensive set of biomarkers and allostatic load. We estimated individual fixed-effects models to address confounding from personal unobserved time-invariant characteristics, controlling for socio-demographic confounders. We also explored gender and urban-rural differences. Overall, there is little evidence that grandchild care and care-related living arrangement had substantial beneficial or harmful effects on older adults’ health, and the effects were neither universally salubrious nor detrimental. Out of all health measures tested, we found that providing grandchild care was associated with higher life satisfaction but also with a higher probability of being diagnosed with high-risk c-reactive protein. Longer care hours was associated with a lower probability of being diagnosed with high-risk c-reactive protein. Grandparents living in skipped-generation households reported a higher probability of having activities of daily living limitation, but they also had a reduced risk on cholesterol ratio. These findings suggest that elements from both role enhancement and role strain may be acting to affect caregiving grandparents’ health.

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 Presented in Session 76. Families, health, and healthcare