The Role of Fertility in the Demography of Grandparenthood: Evidence from Italy
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The Role of Fertility in the Demography of Grandparenthood: Evidence from Italy Giorgio Di Gessa 1
& Valeria
Bordone 2
& Bruno
Arpino 3
Received: 19 February 2020 / Accepted: 28 September 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Grandparents play an important role in their family’s lives. However, little is known about the demography of grandparenthood. Given dramatic recent changes in fertility, we explore the role of number of children and age at first birth in the timing of the transition into grandparenthood focusing on Italy, a country with well-known North-South fertility differentials. We used data from the 2009 Italian Survey ‘Family and Social Relations’ (N = 10,186) to estimate median ages of grandparenthood across three birth cohorts of parents (1920–29; 1930–39; 1940–49). Findings show an overall postponement of age of grandparenthood of 5 years, shifting for women from early to mid- or late-50s (in the South and North, respectively). Such postponement is largely driven by family compositional changes: although the age of grandparenthood among mothers of three or more children has not changed much over cohorts, the percentage of mothers with such characteristic decreased significantly. The heterogeneity in experiencing the transition to grandparenthood has implications for intergenerational transfers and other roles in later life. Keywords Transition to grandparenthood . Fertility profile . Median age at
grandparenthood . Number of children . Age at first birth . Becoming a grandparent
Introduction Researchers have become increasingly interested in grandparents as populations age and the economic and social roles of grandparents in society and family life have Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12062-02009310-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Giorgio Di Gessa g.di–[email protected]
1
Research Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London, 1-19 Torrington Place, London WC1E 7HB, UK
2
Department of Sociology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
3
Department of Statistics, Computer Science, Applications, University of Florence, Florence, Italy
G. D. Gessa et al.
become more visible (Bengtson 2001). In particular, grandparents play an important role in providing informal childcare to families. In Europe, 58% of grandmothers and 49% of grandfathers look after at least one of their grandchildren under the age of 16 (Hank and Buber 2009). Therefore, numerous studies have investigated the impact of grandchild care provision on younger generations’ fertility (Aassve et al. 2012; Pink 2018), on mothers’ (Arpino et al. 2014) and grandmothers’ labour force participation (Di Gessa et al. 2016; Lumsdaine and Vermeer 2015; Zanasi et al. 2019) as well as on grandparents’ health and well-being (Arpino and Bordone 2014; Chen and Liu 2012; Di Gessa et al. 2016a, 2016b; Hank et al. 2018; Tsai et al. 2013). Yet, we still know little about the timing of the transition to grandparentho
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