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The authors examined whether the provision of child care helps older adults maintain better cognitive functioning. Descriptive evidence from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (n = 5,610 women and n = 4,760 men, ages 50-80) shows that intensively engaged grandparents have lower cognitive scores than the others. The authors show that this result is attributable to background characteristics and not to child care per se. Using an instrumental variable approach, they found that providing child care has a positive effect on 1 of the 4 cognitive tests considered: verbal fluency. For the other cognitive tests, no statistically significant effect was found. Given the same level of engagement, they found very similar results for grandmothers and grandfathers. These findings point to the inclusion of grandparenting among other cognitively stimulating social activities and the need to consider such benefits when discussing the implications of this important type of nonmonetary intergenerational transfer.
Key Words: child care, cognition, instrumental variable approach, intergenerational transfers, grandparents.
Today, the lives of grandparents and those of their grandchildren overlap markedly in Western societies. As a consequence, grandparents play an active and supportive role within the family by taking care of grandchildren: Both in the United States and in Europe, about 50% of grandparents provide some type of child care to their grandchildren (see Glaser et al., 2010, for a review).
Because grandparental child care is tradi- tionally considered an altruistic act, research on this intergenerational exchange has focused on its effects on younger generations. A num- ber of studies have looked at the effects of grandparental child care not only on the grand- children's developmental outcomes, cognitive stimulation, and educational attainment (see Coall & Hertwig, 2011, for a review), but also on outcomes related to the middle generation. For example, Aassve, Arpino, and Goisis (2012) showed that grandparental child care played an important role in helping mothers balance work and family duties in several European countries. In this way, the unpaid child care provided by grandparents is also likely to produce benefits for the welfare system, especially when the child careservicesofferedbythemarketarecostlyand public provision is scarce. In some countries, the important role of grandparents as providers of child care has already been officially recognized: In the United Kingdom, for...