Cohort Changes in the Demography of Grandparenthood: Past, Present and Future

• In Event: 4411 - Causes and Consequences of Changing Family Structure

Abstract

How has the demography of grandparenthood changed over the last century? Massive improvements in mortality, increasing childlessness, and fertility postponement have profoundly altered the likelihood that people become grandparents, and the timing and length of grandparenthood for those that do. Understanding changes in the demography of grandparenthood is an important component of taking a multigenerational perspective of stratification because these processes define the onset and duration of intergenerational relationships in ways that constrain the forms and levels of intergenerational transfers that can occur within them. However, most existing research about grandparenthood relies on poorly defined measures of its underlying demography, which offers an incomplete portrait of the phenomenon and impedes comparability across studies. Using demographic microsimulation methods, we make three contributions to this literature. First, we provide the historical estimates of how the demographic features of grandparenthood in the United States changed in the modern era by comparing over the 1880-1960 birth cohorts. Next, we decompose changes in the demography of grandparenthood into proximate determinants that contextualize how different demographic features contribute to the changes. Last, we examine race and sex differences in grandparenthood in the past and present, which reveals declining inequality in the demography of grandparenthood and a projection of increasing group convergence in the coming decades.

Authors

• Rachel Margolis, University of Western Ontario

• Ashton M. Verdery, Pennsylvania State University