Who Cares? Is Grandparental Childcare Crowded Out by the Expansion of Formal Daycare Services? Evidence for West Germany

Clara Schaeper , BSE/DIW Berlin
Ludovica Gambaro, University of London
C. Katharina Spieß , Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB) and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Grandparents are the third most important source of childcare for their grandchildren after parental care and formal daycare services in Germany, as in many Western societies. Yet their role is often overlooked in accounts of social policies supporting families with young children, which tend to focus almost exclusively on formal daycare services. This paper examines whether reforms increasing the availability of formal daycare places in Germany have crowded out childcare provided by grandparents. Drawing on representative data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, the analysis exploits the staggered implementation of the reforms with a difference-in-difference approach. The case of Germany is particularly interesting to study in this regard as it has seen one of the largest expansions of formal daycare services within Europe; it is a country where grandparental childcare is common and socially expected, with prevalence and intensity levels within the European average. By documenting how families replace or combine different forms of childcare, results have the potential to inform policies on daycare provision and to widen our knowledge of the context of grandparenthood and multigenerational relations.

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 Presented in Session 75. Child care and family