Does providing care for a grandchild impact volunteerism?

Grandparents provide a significant amount of care for grandchildren in the United States. Some grandparents provide occasional care, others provide daycare while the grandchild’s parents are at work, and others are fully raising their grandchildren. Providing regular care for grandchildren is usually not considered to be “formal volunteering” (generally defined as unpaid work for an organization outside of one’s family, such as an educational or charitable organization), but it certainly represents a significant time investment on the part of grandparents. We were intrigued by the lack of research investigating how grandparenting—a type of informal volunteer work—might affect one’s ability to do formal volunteering. Specifically, how might different types of care for grandchildren affect grandparents’ volunteerism?

We thought that providing care to a grandchild might mean exposure to more volunteer opportunities through a grandchild’s school, religious organization, or extracurricular activities. However, we also wondered whether the health and economic resources of grandparents doing the most intensive caregiving might be taxed to the point where they were less able to volunteer.

To study this relationship, we used data from the University of Michigan’s Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The HRS is a nationally-representative survey of US adults over the age of 50, and is conducted every two years. Because the HRS includes a large sample size (we are able to analyze over 13,000 people in our sample), it allowed us the ability to examine grandparents engaged in different types of grandchild care. We used data from the 2004 HRS survey to compare four different grandparent groups: those who did not provide regular grandchild care, those who had provided limited care for a grandchild (defined as approximately one to ten hours of care per week over the previous two years), those who provided substantial care for a grandchild (averaging more than 10 hours per week over the previous two years), and those who were raising a grandchild in their household.

Our results showed clear differences between the grandparent groups. As shown in the bar chart below, grandparents who provided substantial care for a grandchild (but whose grandchild did not live with them) were most likely to be engaged in volunteer activity. On the other hand, grandparents who were raising their grandchildren were least likely to do any volunteering. About 23% of grandparents raising grandchildren were engaged in volunteering, versus 32% of grandparents not providing regular grandchild care, 37% of grandparents providing limited care, and 47% of grandparents providing substantial (but non-residential) care.

Because there are known differences between these groups, we used statistical modeling techniques that accounted for differences in factors such as demographics, economic status, health, religious involvement, and household characteristics. We found that grandparents raising grandchildren had lower economic well-being and poorer health, and that these factors explained some—but not all—of their lower likelihood of volunteering. Even after accounting the potential differences between groups, grandparents raising grandchildren had the lowest likelihood of volunteering, and grandparents providing substantial care for a non-residential grandchild had the highest likelihood of volunteering. In fact, the difference between these two groups was quite large: grandparents providing substantial care for a non-resident grandchild had almost two times higher odds of volunteering than those raising a grandchild.

We were concerned that perhaps it was not grandchild care itself that was leading grandparents to do more volunteer work. Instead, perhaps these individuals are “super helpers,” especially likely to take on both informal family work as well as formal volunteer work. In order to better understand whether taking on a caregiving role for grandchildren is what was responsible for differences in volunteering, we needed to follow individuals over time, observing their volunteerism both before and after assuming grandchild care. Fortunately, the fact that the HRS re-interviews respondents every two years allowed us to examine changes in volunteer behavior between 2004 and 2008 for those who did not begin caring for a grandchild and those who did. Results show that those who started providing limited or substantial care for a non-resident grandchild also increased their formal volunteer work, whereas volunteering declined over time for those who did not begin providing care for a grandchild.

We found that there is a complex relationship between providing care to a grandchild and volunteering. Providing care for a non-residential grandchild may expand grandparents’ social networks and volunteer opportunities through involvement with their grandchildren’s activities. Grandparents raising their grandchildren, on the other hand, are engaged in a more time-demanding and intensive form of care. Although this care may expose them to more volunteer opportunities, it may also limit their ability to take on formal volunteer work. Research suggests that formal volunteering is associated with a variety of beneficial outcomes, including greater health, life satisfaction, and self-esteem, in addition to lower depressive symptoms and mortality risk; consequently, several recent initiatives have sought to increase the number of older adults who are volunteering. Grandparents raising grandchildren, a group already at risk of poorer health and economic outcomes, may be a group less able to engage in volunteer opportunities. Thus, the next question is—how can we help these grandparents reap the benefits of volunteerism?

Image Credit: “Walk” by Matlachu. Public Domain via Pixabay.