A new niche? The theory of grandfather involvement
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Title
Grandfathers: Global Perspectives
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
Place of Publication
London, UK
Editor(s)
Buchanan A., & Rotkirch, A.
School
School of Medical and Health Sciences
RAS ID
22564
Abstract
Grandparents in contemporary industrialized societies invest substantial amounts of time, money and care in the grandchildren. For example, in the USA in 2007, 2.5 million grandparents were responsible for meeting most of the basic needs of one or more of the grandchildren who lived in their household (US Census Bureau 2009). Across eleven European countries, 44% of grandparents reported to have provided childcare for their grandchildren in the last 12 months without the parents present (Glaser et al. 2013). This involvement is considerable. With rapidly changing family structures and a concomitant change in the potential role of both grandmothers, and grandfathers, research is now slowly moving from a strong focus on grandmothers to understanding also the specific roles grandfathers play. It is naive to lump grandparents together in investigations, as is often done, or to focus only on maternal grandmothers or select the 'favourite' or most involved grandparent. This 'favoritism' in past research resulted in marginalization of the role of grandfathers (Mann 2007), even to the exclusion of grandfathers from research (Reitzes and Mutran 2004), and to 'grandparent' becoming synonymous with 'grandmother' (Harper 2005). We aim to make the first steps towards addressing this blind spot in theory and research. We do so by bringing together research from evolutionary biology, sociology, economics and psychology to suggest an interdisciplinary perspective on grandfathering.
DOI
10.1057/978-1-137-56338-5
Access Rights
subscription content
Comments
Coall, D., Hilbrand, S., Sear, R., & Hertwig, R. (2016). A new niche? In A. Buchanan & A. Rotkirch (Eds.), In Grandfathers: Global perspectives. (pp. 21-44). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Available here.