Are grandchildren good for you? Well-being and health effects of becoming a grandparent

Older individuals commonly go through a few major life transitions which can impact their health and well-being. While transitions like that into retirement have been extensively investigated, little research focused on the transition into grandparenthood. Understanding effects of this highly common event is not only important from a descriptive viewpoint, but is also informative for the active aging policies that are increasingly pursued to deal with aging populations. Using data from ten Western European countries, we show that grandparenthood on average leads to a reduction in well-being while hardly impacting physical, cognitive and mental health. The effect is heterogeneous by family closeness, though. Grandparenthood reduces well-being for those having relatively little family contact and not providing child care. But it leaves well-being unaffected while improving health along some dimensions among those with the opposite profile. The only exception to the latter are grandmothers providing daily child care, for whom grandparenthood appears to be burdensome. This pattern of results suggests that involving grandparents non-intensively in child care may lead to beneficial side-effects. Becoming a grandparent induces people to retire, but retirement seems no relevant channel for well-being and health effects.