Grandparental involvement and child social, emotional, and behavioral health: a systematic review and meta-analysis

• In Event: Children's Emotion Socialization Within the Family: Mothers, Fathers, and Grandparents

Abstract

Background:
The number of people residing in multigenerational families is growing worldwide, leading to more discussions on grandparental involvement in the family literature. Grandparental involvement has been seen as a multidimensional construct of the roles that grandparents play in grandchildren’s lives. Prior research has shown mixed findings on the association between grandparental involvement and grandchildren’s social, emotional, and behavioral health (SEB health) (e.g., Hoang et al., 2016). It is unclear to what extent the SEB health of children is affected by different grandparental factors and how the effects vary across contexts.
This study aims to fill this gap by synthesizing global evidence on the effects of grandparental involvement on child SEB health and discussing these effects in different contextual backgrounds.
Methods:
We identified 42 relevant studies from eight English and Chinese databases on November 21, 2021. We excluded studies in which the mean or median age of participants was more than 18 years, grandparental involvement was not the focus of the study, or grandchildren were in formal institutional care (see figure 1). The authors worked in pairs and screened studies using a systematic review platform (Covidence) and extracted summary estimates from published reports independently. The overall effect size of grandparental involvement was estimated with the pooled standardized mean difference (SMD) using random-effects models. Risk of bias and publication bias were also assessed.
Results:
Our search identified 2,920 records, of which 42 studies were included for analysis, including a total of 189,494 children. Compared with children without grandparental involvement, children who were living with and/or being cared for by their grandparents did not differ significantly in emotional problems such as anxiety and depression (SMD= -0.08, 95%CI [-0.25,0.09], p=0.31) and externalizing problems (SMD= -0.59, 95%CI [-1.93, 0.76], p=0.29), but had increased risk of overall SEB problems (SMD= -0.24, 95%CI [-0.41, -0.06], p=0.01), and lower SEB competencies (SMD= -0.38, 95%CI [-0.64, -0.13], p=0.01).
Due to the insignificant difference found for emotional outcomes (k=11) and externalizing problems (k=5, not sufficient for moderator analyses), we further performed a moderator analysis to explore the variability in the effects on emotional health. The results showed that the effects of grandparental involvement on child emotional health varied significantly by participant gender and living arrangement; girls and children in skipped-generation families showed poorer emotional health (Table 1). Study quality varied across the included studies, with 16.7% of studies at high or unclear risk of bias across five or more domains.
Conclusion and Implications: The results suggested that the relationship between grandparental involvement and child SEB health varies according to grandchildren’s socio-demographic characteristics (e.g., gender), living arrangements (e.g., three-generation or skipped-generation households), and indicators of SEB health. This study highlights the need of comprehensively understanding the roles that grandparents play in grandchildren’s well-being. More supportive programs and interventions should be delivered to multi-generational families.

Authors

• Yihang WANG, University of Hong Kong (HKU)
  Presenting Author

• Shuang Lu, University of Central Florida