grandparents as educators and carers in China

Abstract

Many grandparents play a significant role as educators and carers of children in the preschool years. Recently, this role has become the focus of much early childhood research as challenges facing grandparent carers and grandparent-headed households increasingly become an economic and social issue. Using survey data from China we explore the role of grandparents who have a primary care responsibility for a young child and discuss this contribution to the family in relation to quality of care and education. We argue that grandparents play a significant role in terms of home education of the young, workforce support for young parents, cultural identity within families and community capacity building. Grandparents are therefore deserving of more sustained attention from policy makers and educators when considering the young child's developmental environment.

Physical activity in young children and their parents–An Early STOPP Sweden–China comparison study

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‘Doing Gendered Age’: older mothers and migrant daughters negotiating care work in rural Lao PDR and Thailand

“…18 Nyland et al's work add to the above the importance of factoring in cultural change and teasing out how this reconfigures age as a relation of power. 19 In their research in the Chinese context they found that grandparents not only care for grandchildren out of plain necessity, but also 'because care of young children has traditionally been a right and expectation of grandparents'. 20 However, these rights and expectations have become contested and subject to change under the pressure of wider social transformations.…”

Benefits of Grandparental Caregiving in Chinese Older Adults: Reduced Lonely Dissatisfaction as a Mediator

“…In the case of migrant grandparents, it has been argued that grandparental caregiving could be regarded as a means of social engagement and social activity (Waldrop and Weber, 2001;Nyland et al, 2009;Arpino and Bordone, 2014;Burn and Szoeke, 2015;Bulanda and Jendrek, 2016), which could fulfill the need for social connectedness. As argued by disengagement theory, people gradually disengage from social life as they grow older (Cumming et al, 1960), making them more likely to lose social ties that were previously available to them.…”