“This research adds important insight to a question that hasn’t previously been interrogated by going back to the same people,” says Professor Cecilia Tomassini, a leading member of the Grandparenting in Europe network of researchers.
“Even studies that have gone back to the same group have tended to lose sight of grandparents in ill health because they’ve dropped out of the research. This means those papers have ended up by only looking at healthy grandparents, which is why they’ve been getting, until now, largely positive responses.”
In short, what the new study seemed to prove, is that rather than childcare making grandparents feel young, it’s the grandparents who feel young already who do more childcare.
However, what the researchers did find, which they deemed rather interesting, was that there are slight benefits in older adults looking after young children who are not their own kin. The hypothesis, said Bordone, is that unrelated children bring with them the rejuvenating effect of youth – without the same reminder of old age that grandchildren do.“Grandparenthood is a powerful reminder of a person’s ageing and as such, it is likely to affect subjective age,” Bordone explains.
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