Juggling grandchild care and labor force participation: the effect on psychological wellbeing of older women

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• dc.contributor.author Arpino, Bruno
• dc.contributor.author Bellani, Daniela
• dc.date.accessioned 2023-05-09T06:18:52Z
• dc.date.available 2023-05-09T06:18:52Z
• dc.date.issued 2022
• dc.description.abstract Although it is well-known that care responsibilities are strongly gendered also in later life, the consequences for older women of juggling work and care responsibilities are understudied. This study contributes to fill this gap by focusing on the wellbeing implications for older European women of combining work and grandchild care. The role strain and role enhancement theories guide our theoretical predictions. While the former predicts a lower wellbeing due to the double burden of grandchild care and paid work, the latter posits an increase in wellbeing through the accumulation of social identities or roles. By using longitudinal data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we investigate whether grandmothers who do and those who do not work experience different levels of quality of life, depressive symptoms and life satisfaction. Our statistical model consists in a fixed-effect regression that adjusts for the lagged outcome. Results show that, among grandmothers engaged in paid work, grandchild care is not significantly associated with any of the three outcomes considered. Instead, non-working grandmothers seem to benefit from provision of grandchild care, in terms of higher quality of life and lower number of depressive symptoms. As thus, the provision of grandchild care tends to be beneficial for grandmothers’ wellbeing only if they do not combine this activity with paid work. Juggling paid work and childcare to grandchildren may result in an excessive burden which eliminates the potential benefits of grandchild care on older women’s wellbeing.
• dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
• dc.identifier.citation Arpino B, Bellani D. Juggling grandchild care and labor force participation: the effect on psychological wellbeing of older women. Front Sociol. 2022;6:806099. DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2021.806099
• dc.identifier.doi http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2021.806099
• dc.identifier.issn 2297-7775
• dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10230/56726
• dc.language.iso eng
• dc.publisher Frontiers
• dc.relation.ispartof Frontiers in Sociology. 2022;6:806099.
• dc.relation.isreferencedby http://www.share-project.org/data-access.html
• dc.rights © 2022 Arpino and Bellani. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
• dc.rights.accessRights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
• dc.rights.uri http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• dc.subject.keyword grandchild care
• dc.subject.keyword labor force participation
• dc.subject.keyword work-family balance
• dc.subject.keyword psychological wellbeing
• dc.subject.keyword older adults
• dc.title Juggling grandchild care and labor force participation: the effect on psychological wellbeing of older women
• dc.type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
• dc.type.version info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion