Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Title

Scientific Reports

Volume

14

Issue

1

PubMed ID

38514748

Publisher

Nature

School

School of Medical and Health Sciences

RAS ID

65728

Funders

Strategic Research Council / Academy of Finland

Comments

Helle, S., Tanskanen, A. O., Coall, D. A., Perry, G., Daly, M., & Danielsbacka, M. (2024). Investment by maternal grandmother buffers children against the impacts of adverse early life experiences. Scientific Reports, 14, article 6815. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-56760-5

Abstract

Exogenous shocks during sensitive periods of development can have long-lasting effects on adult phenotypes including behavior, survival and reproduction. Cooperative breeding, such as grandparental care in humans and some other mammal species, is believed to have evolved partly in order to cope with challenging environments. Nevertheless, studies addressing whether grandparental investment can buffer the development of grandchildren from multiple adversities early in life are few and have provided mixed results, perhaps owing to difficulties drawing causal inferences from non-experimental data. Using population-based data of English and Welsh adolescents (sample size ranging from 817 to 1197), we examined whether grandparental investment reduces emotional and behavioral problems in children resulting from facing multiple adverse early life experiences (AELEs), by employing instrumental variable regression in a Bayesian structural equation modeling framework to better justify causal interpretations of the results. When children had faced multiple AELEs, the investment of maternal grandmothers reduced, but could not fully erase, their emotional and behavioral problems. No such result was observed in the case of the investment of other grandparent types. These findings indicate that in adverse environmental conditions the investment of maternal grandmothers can improve child wellbeing.

DOI

10.1038/s41598-024-56760-5

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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