With strings attached: Grandparent-provided child care and female labor market outcomes

Abstract

Grandparents are regular providers of free child care. Similar to other forms of child care, availability of grandparent-provided child care affects fertility and labor force participation of women positively. However, grandparent-provided child care requires residing close to parents or in-laws. While living close can provide access to free child care, it may also imply costly spatial restrictions. We find that mothers residing close to parents or in-laws have lower wages and that the probability of having to commute increases if relatives provide child care. We build a model of residence choice, fertility, and female labor force participation that can account for the relationships between grandparent-provided child care, fertility, and female labor market outcomes. We simulate our model to analyze how women's decisions on residence, fertility, and labor force participation would change if the availability of grandparent-provided child care or family policies were altered. We find that if child care subsidies were raised to the Swedish level, fertility and mothers' labor force participation would increase, while mobility would remain unchanged. The absence of grandparents, on the other hand, would increase mobility, while it would have only limited negative effects on aggregate fertility and labor force participation.JEL classification: J13, J61, H42, R23

Gendered Occupational Shifts in the Transition to Parenthood: The Influence of Personal Networks

“…Informal childcare is sometimes preferred to formal childcare because it is more flexible and is included in a larger set of exchanges in kinship and family networks (Finch and Mason, 1993; Widmer, 2010). It has been shown that childcare provided by grandparents has a positive impact on the presence of mothers in the labour market (Garcia-Morán and Kuehn, 2012; Giudici, 2015; Gray, 2005).…”

Grandparental childcare in Australia: gender differences in the correlates of providing regular grandparental care while parents work

“…Grandparental care rates vary across OECD countries. A recent study utilising data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) found that between 23% (Denmark) and 70% (Italy) of grandparents take care of their grandchildren age ten or below on a daily or weekly basis (García-Morán & Kuehn, 2012). The number and proportion of Australian grandparents who provide childcare to grandchildren is not known, but both are likely to be large, given that grandparents account for around half of all childcare arrangements (ABS, 2012).…”

Fertility Cost, Intergenerational Labor Division, and Female Employment

“…It has been documented (e.g. García-Morán and Kuehn, 2017;Compton and Pollak, 2014) that the labor-force participation rate is higher for young women who live close to their parents, thereby making grandparental childcare less of an effort.…”