Title PART 54.pdf ✅

The Economist January 14th 2023 International 53 found that the presence of a maternal grandmother significantly increased a child’s chance of living to the age of two. In sub­Saharan Africa the odds of being in school are about 15% higher for children living with a grandfather and 38% higher for children who live with a grandmother. As for Mrs Diallo, she has never worked outside the home. But she has helped some of her offspring to do so. Ndeye, one of her daughters, got a job in an office despite having eight kids herself, because Mrs Diallo helped out with the children. Yet for all her sense of love and duty, Mrs Diallo cannot babysit all 30 grandkids. The state offers little help. Unlike Ndeye, many of Mrs Diallo’s daughters and grand- daughters have never worked outside the home. This is common: barely a third of working­age women in Senegal are either in work or seeking it. Grandparents in the poorest countries do their best, but there are not enough of them. She’s there in times of need In richer places, fertility has fallen much further than in Africa. A typical Mexican woman, for example, can expect to have only two children, down from nearly seven in 1960. Mexico’s ratio of living grandpar- ents to children is three times higher than Senegal’s. Mexican abuelas thus have more time to lavish on each grandchild. Irma Aguilar Verduzco lives with her daughter, also called Irma, and two grand- children, Rodrigo and Fernanda. She cooks, does school runs and reads with her grandchildren. Ever since he was three, Ro- drigo, now 16, has liked to take a cup of cof- fee and sit down for a chat with his grand- mother. Fernanda, now 12, still likes to get into bed with her. Irma junior, meanwhile, has long worked 12­hour days, currently as a manager at the Maya Train, a big rail pro- ject. She is divorced, and says her ex­hus- band “does not help”. She “could not have done anything” without Irma senior’s help. Grandmothers are the main source of non­parental child care for young children in Mexico, especially since covid­19 forced many nurseries to close. They watch over nearly 40% of sprogs under six. Before grandma moved in, Irma was struggling. “There is no understanding or flexibility for working mothers in Mexico,” she com- plains. Her kids were often home alone. “Sometimes I paid people to look after them but it was hard to afford and hard to trust people.” One day, years ago, Rodrigo came home from nursery with a broken bone; Irma suspects mistreatment. With her mother around, she feels relaxed. Miguel Talamas of the Inter­American Development Bank and his colleagues have tried to estimate how much Mexican grandmothers help their daughters get paid work. They looked at what happened to families after grandmothers die. An abuela’s death reduced by 27%, or 12 per- centage points, the chance that her daugh- ter was in the labour force, and reduced her earnings by 53%. (The same study found no effect on the employment rate of fathers.) Living with grandparents is not always easy. They may have outdated ideas or de- mand too much deference. In India, where couples traditionally live with the hus- band’s parents, a genre of television drama turns on the fraught relations between wives and mothers­in­law. A study of rural Indian women in 2018 found that those who lived with their mummyji (mother­in- law) had little freedom. Only 12% were al- lowed to visit friends or relatives alone. A grandma who enforces old­fashioned norms of wifely subjugation can make it harder for her daughter­in­law to work outside the home. But an intriguing study finds that on average, this effect is out- weighed by the help the mother­in­law gives with domestic chores. Such help has become more concentrated as India’s fer- tility rate has fallen, from six in 1960 to just over two today. Madhulika Khanna of Am- azon and Divya Pandey of 3ie, a think­tank, looked at what happened to Indian women if mummyji died. They found the daugh- ters­in­law were 10% less likely to do or seek paid work, probably because they had to spend more time collecting firewood and minding their children. Even over- bearing grandmothers can inadvertently do their bit for female emancipation. Rich countries generally provide servic- es that help women juggle child­care and work. But many parents seek extra help from grandparents nonetheless. Old­age pensions help, by allowing grandparents to give up work. According to one survey, 50% of very young children, 35% of prim- ary­school­aged children and 20% of teens in America spend time with their grand- parent in a typical week. This can make a big difference. Janice Compton of the University of Manitoba and Robert Pollak of Washington Universi- ty crunched American census data and found that living within 25 miles of a grandmother raised the labour­force par- ticipation rate for married women with small children by 4­10 percentage points. “Granny nannying”, as some call it, can have downsides, too. A British study found grandparents are more likely to leave their wards near fire hazards than nurseries or nannies. Studies from America, Britain, China and Japan suggest that a child around grandparents is more likely to be obese, though whether this is due to spoil- ing or other factors is unclear. To us a book she’ll read And although grandmas help daughters re- turn to the workforce, that often means withdrawing from it themselves. “There is a clear trade­off,” says Mr Talamas. Back in Mexico, Hermelinda Coapango Vázquez works as a manicurist but takes appoint- ments only at times that fit around caring for her grandson. “My grandson is my life,” she says. “I don’t have a partner and I am not one for having lots of friends.” A study from Brazil found that when children aged 0­3 were randomly assigned formal child- care, the family collectively earned more, mainly because grandparents and older siblings were freed up to work. Another pitfall is that families that rely heavily on grandma for child­care are less likely to move and find a better job. A study by Eva Garcia­Moran of the University of Wurzburg and Zoe Kuehn of the Autono- mous University of Madrid found that west German women who lived near their par- ents in­laws earn about 5% less and com- mute for longer than their peers. Children parented solely or mostly by grandparents tend to be worse off than their peers. In America, where roughly 2% of children are raised primarily by a grand- parent, Laura Pittman of Northern Illinois University found more emotional and be- havioural problems among such adoles- cents than their peers. That is perhaps not surprising. If children are not living with their parents, it is often because some- Senior moments 1 Population who are grandparents, % Sources: “How many grandparents are there in the world?”, D. Alburez-Gutierrez, 2023; The Economist 30 20 10 0 502000 4020801960 United States Sweden Senegal Mexico India China Burundi Bulgaria Retirement? What’s that? Grandmothers saying they regularly look after their grandchildren*, % Selected countries, October 2019-March 2020 Source: Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) Wave 8 *During the past 12 months 2 Bulgaria Romania Italy Hungary Germany Finland Israel France Belgium 6050403020100 012
54 International The Economist January 14th 2023 thing has gone badly wrong: a father in jail; a mother dead or incapable. In these cir- cumstances, living with a grandparent is usually far better than the alternatives. Katie Clark, a 68­year­old from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has had sole custody of one grandchild and has temporarily cared for five others because of her daughter’s addiction to opiates. She took charge of her daughter’s first baby soon after she was born. About 12 years later, the daughter ar- rived, homeless, with five more. She aban- doned her children in Katie’s home, before returning with police to demand them back. The daughter currently has custody of the five children, and Katie fears she is neglecting them again. The child raised en- tirely by Katie is now at university. In rural China, grandparents help re- duce the harm caused by the government. Under the apartheid­like hukou (house- hold registration) system, rural Chinese who move to cities are treated as second- class citizens. Their children are barred from local public schools, so they are often left behind with their grandparents in their parents’ home village. But rural schools are often dire. Grandparents, though well- meaning, are often barely literate. Scott Rozelle of Stanford University finds that more than half of toddlers in rural China are cognitively delayed, partly because their grandparents do not realise that it is important to talk to them. In Chinese cities the story is different. The one­child policy (which became a three­child policy in 2021) was always en- forced more strictly in cities than the countryside. So many urban families con- sist of four grandparents, two parents and just one child. Thus, there is no shortage of caring hands. Urban children often live with grandparents during the week and see their hard­working parents on weekends. Nurseries are pricey and distrusted in China. Grandmothers often retire in their 50s to watch over the precious only grand- child. This works well enough. The labour- force participation rate for Chinese women is, at 62%, slightly higher than America’s. “If you want to give your child a good edu- cation, you have to work hard to earn a lot of money,” says Zhou Bao, an architect and mother in a “4­2­1” family who has used both sets of grandparents for child­care. But “in the process of making money, you can lose the time spent with your child.” And she expresses a common fear that grandparents tend to spoil their only grandchildren. “They can be too attentive,” she says, “making them less independent.” The Communist Party promotes tradi- tional values, such as family members car- ing for each other so the state does not have to. In Beijing the government even set up a school in 2005 to teach grandparents how to look after children better. But the next generation may not wish to shoulder the same responsibilities. Few middle­class parents today expect to be bringing up their children’s children in a few decades, reckons Dan Wang of Hang Seng Bank. If they opt out of grandparenting, that could make it harder for their daughters to com- bine motherhood and work, fears Ms Dan. Just stays a little while Overall, looking after kids appears to be good for grandparents. Those who spend time with their grandchildren report lower levels of depression and loneliness. But one can have too much of a good thing. Youngsters can be exhausting, frustrating and objectionable. A study in Singapore, with mainly ethnically Chinese families, found that many looked after their grand- children more out of duty than because they relished it. Many find it harder as they age. Some are squeezed in the “grandsand- wich generation”—relied upon to help both their grandchildren and their own ail- ing parents. Some hanker for a more relax- ing retirement. Grandma Irma in Mexico admits she would like to travel more as her grandchildren grow more independent. One place where grandparents have plenty of time to relax is Sweden, where a strong welfare state means parents seldom rely on them. For each child, a Swedish couple can take 16 months of parental leave, for most of which the state pays them most of their previous wages. (The man must take three months, or they are lost; many split the time off equally.) After- wards, there are subsidised nurseries, and the norm is for both parents to go back to work. Since child­care is everywhere, Swedes find it relatively easy to move cities to find a better job. “Once in a while a grandparent might pick up a kid from pre­school or babysit, but not always,” says Andreas Bergh of Lund university. Rather than allow a daughter to go back to work, grandparents might enable her to go out to dinner with her husband. Grandparental help is “a bo- nus”, says Andreas Heino of Timbro, a think­tank in Stockholm. Subsidies for parental leave are so gen- erous that even entrepreneurs take a fair chunk of it. Sandra Kastås runs two compa- nies in Stockholm. When her son was born in 2021 she took two months off, then spent a year working half­time, as did her hus- band, an IT specialist. Despite her hectic schedule, Mrs Kastås expects no regular help from her parents. They live on Got- land, a remote island, and do not visit of- ten. Her mother “shows her love by send- ing gifts”, such as books and jumpers she has knitted. She talks to her grandson, on FaceTime. “He hugs the phone when she calls. It’s cute,” says Mrs Kastås. Most Swedes are happy with their sys- tem. But some of the elderly complain of loneliness. Nearly half of Swedish house- holds consist of one person, the highest level in Europe after Finland. In a popula- tion of 10.4m, some 900,000 people are ov- er 60 and living alone. Of these, a fifth are considered socially isolated, meaning they do not meet friends or family more than twice a month. During the pandemic, Swedes joked darkly that it would be easy to isolate the elderly because “We don’t vis- it our grandparents much anyway.” Immi- grants from places such as Africa or the Middle East are often shocked at how atomised Swedish families are. Lars Tragardh, a historian, praises Swe- den’s “statist individualism”. The state looks after people as individuals, so they can make their own choices and not have to rely on others, he says. Parents else- where envy the help that their Nordic peers receive, despite the higher taxes needed to pay for it. Still, even the most generous welfare state cannot offer love. Helena Paues, who works for an associ- ation of local authorities in Sweden, de- scribes how her father enjoys taking her dyslexic son, Wille, to museums. “He loves facts and science. I think his grandfather has taken him to all the museums in Stock- holm: the science museum, the Viking museum, and so on. They have a very close bond. My father also struggled with learn- ing to read and write when he was young.” In the summer, the grandkids stay at their grandparents’ summer house, swim in the lake, and drink lemonade in a tree house. They clamour to do the same thing every year. Ms Paues says her father instils values such as respect for others. “He doesn’t need to talk about it, he does it by being himself. He teaches them that their opinions matter, because he listens to them.” She concludes: “As a child, you need A lot on her plate more grown­ups than just your parents.” n 012