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Women's Work: The Role of Grandparents in Inter-Generational Transfers
Abstract
This article surveys the role of grandparents in providing a continuing level of material support in 61 households with dependent children in an inner city area. It concludes that assistance is structured by gender, income level, household financial organisation, residential proximity, need and ideology. In terms of the provision of continuing support to households with young children, grandparents are important but grandmothers give more assistance than grandfathers and they direct it where it is most needed. It is important for grandmothers to have access to paid work. The ideology of assistance is differentiated by class. In professional families the married couple is the unit of transfer but for working class families the solidarity of female relatives, in particular, of daughters and mothers and mothers-in-law, is more important.
Grandparenting children with disabilities can be intensive. Generally, the degree of intensity in the care work is linked to the degree of severity of disabilities. As we demonstrated in Chapter 5, for some grandchildren, care work is moderately intensive; challenges may indeed be challenging but can often be taken in stride. The work includes mainly routine grandparenting such as helping with transportation, school work, meals, dressing, medications, and outings to the zoo. Grandparents who perform moderately intensive care work tend to do it in intermittent bursts, according to arranged schedules, or around-the-clock. In Chapter 6 we focus on extremely intensive care work. For these grandparents, care work is extremely intensive, requiring nearly all competing activities to be put on hold. Some grandparents provide intensive supervision, some provide intensive medical care, and some provide both. Grandparents must continue to provide routine care for themselves, including preparing meals, cleaning, paying bills, working out, and visiting doctors. In addition, they must provide assistance with routine tasks for their grandchildren, such as feeding, bathing, dressing, toileting, and medicating. And in addition to all of that, these grandparents provide constant supervision or handle specialized medical equipment and treatments such as feeding tubes and oxygen tanks. The days and nights may prove to be long, and the stresses on aging bodies too much.
Historically, parental and grandparental roles were quite different. Parents were responsible for daily care, schoolwork, doctor visits, and discipline while grandparents were responsible for trips to the park, ice cream counter, or matinee. Over time these once divergent roles have converged for many, but certainly not all, families. Studies have noted that as parenting has intensified, so has grandparenting. But the intensification of grandparenting may be for very different reasons. While parenting intensifies primarily as parents try to assure their own children competitive advantages, grandparenting appears to be intensifying primarily due to unmet need. Many families in the US have only one parent, or no paid vacation, paid sick leave, parental leave, or affordable, flexible childcare. Desperate to balance work and family obligations, families often turn to grandparents for assistance. When children have disabilities, these trends are magnified because families have fewer childcare options, more health care expenses, and more care work demands. The dearth of supports for families of children who have disabilities often means that grandparents do even more. As cumulative inequality theory points out, the costs of providing more intensive care may be more readily absorbed by families with higher incomes and educations, but may be more difficult to absorb for families who are already struggling to make ends meet.
Measurements of income at the household level have traditionally only recorded income received by household members. This has generally been reflected in qualitative research. However, using interview data from two studies of British mothers and children on low incomes, we find that for some, cash and in-kind transfers from family and friends outside the household form a significant proportion of household income. In some cases, income is doubled once gifts are included. Thus, gifts make a substantial contribution to living standards, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The implications of this finding for income measurement are discussed, and further research is recommended.
Much has been made over the years of the view that health-related geographical research has failed fully to explore the complex and mutually reinforcing impact of social and spatial relations on individual health-related behaviours. At the same time, there is a growing awareness elsewhere in the social sciences and in health services research of the generally inadequate exploration of the role of place particularly at the scale of the local community--in the social construction of health, illness and health care use. This paper aims to contribute to the debate by offering a clear framework within which to analyse the impact of spatially configured social relations at the micro-level. In-depth interview evidence from Liverpool shows that, looking at the problem from the perspective of the opportunity-costs of time-space constraints, is a useful means to understand the distinct ways in which health services are used, when and why, across different social groups and geographical areas. Particular attention is drawn to the different thresholds for decision-making depending upon whose health-related needs are being negotiated within the family. The paper concludes with the latest policy developments in UK primary care which offer professionals the clear opportunity to develop much more sophisticated understandings of what constitutes locally-sensitive health service provision. The argument is that such developments must be based on a firm sense of how individual time-space circumstances interact with conditions in the local area if the best possible use of increasingly scarce and valuable resources is to be achieved--particularly in communities characterised by poverty and social exclusion such as those in Liverpool.
Drawing on data from a study of grandparenthood, this paper examines the nature of projected action, and the value of the concept of `rule' in both lay and sociological reasoning.
The way in which people becoming grandparents for the first time defined grandparenthood is analysed through an examination of their formulations of appropriate grandparenting behaviour, as elicited in qualitative interviews. Although much was left ill-defined, grandparental involvement with the younger generations was accounted as being bounded by certain rules or guidelines which served to restrict grandparental action, and set limits to their intended behaviour.
Three main restrictions on potential action were noted: `not-interfering', `sharing', and `not-spoiling'; the grandparents' elaborations of these will be examined. They seemed to express underlying `rules' which represented a way of speaking about or making sense of a future role. However, the failure of these `rules' to perform as clear cut prescriptions for behaviour enabled the grandparents to develop a role for themselves.
Nations of appropriate grandparenting behaviour were found to be based on personal experience or commonsense knowledge. Drawing on their knowledge of family life, the grandparents were able to give themselves a positive but nonetheless non-interfering role.
The personal characteristics and expectations of the grandparents, as people able and willing to spend time with their families, seemed to create an inherent contradiction in their projections of a grandparental role. Yet it was such different relevances which facilitated the production of a potentially satisfactory set of practices for `doing grandparenting'.
This paper applies the seminal insight of Elizabeth Bott (1957) to an analysis of the domestic organisation and local social networks of 40 redundant steel workers and their wives.
Certain methodological problems which arose in the course of the research prompted a reconsideration of particular aspects of existing work in this field, and a more detailed specification of the possible patterns of interaction resulting from the independent and joint activities of husband and wife.
The paper outlines three models of social interaction which emerged from the research data, and uses these models as a means of highlighting certain aspects of independent male and female social activity. Finally, the work discusses the implication of different social patterns for the organisation of domestic life and the management of household finance.
This paper provides the first report of an intensive empirical study of social relations of unemployment on a Glasgow housing estate. Its sample is divided into two equal, age-based categories corresponding to families where the male ‘head of household’ is over 25 and has a previous record of regular work, and those under 25 where such experience is absent. The paper identifies and examines a domestic and work-linked cycle which has been disrupted by unemployment. On this basis we then consider the differential adaptation to unemployment of the two groups; differences in their gender relations and differences in the forms and degrees of their reliance on kin and other support. We finally and tentatively propose some connections between unemployment and domestic conflict.
Children and Poverty
- D Piachaud
- Bell C.