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Chapter six explores the relationship between declining birth rates and family supportive policies. Research on the social construction of parenthood shows that Italians continue to desire children and see parenthood as an important and fulfilling role. Disincentives to childbearing include economic insecurity, escalating costs of childrearing, and insufficient funding of family supportive policies. Rather than avoiding parental responsibility, fathers are increasingly involved in childrearing and grandparents and extended family provide significant caregiving support. The author’s field observations in the village of Scanno confirm the positive involvement of fathers, extended family, and the community in childrearing. The principle of duty on the part of government to protect and support families is embedded in the Italian Constitution, so there is broad support for policies such as universal healthcare, paid parenting leave, subsidized day care and early childhood education, and cash subsidies for families raising children. In the United States, traditions favouring individualism and assigning responsibility for childrearing to the private family have blocked the development of universal, family-supportive policies. Despite its wealth, the U.S. lags far behind peer nations in providing public support during early childhood, exacerbating inequalities between rich and poor children.

It is important that patterns of contact and transfers of time and material resources between family generations continue to receive attention, yet it is also essential to broaden the enquiry to examine the evolving nature and meanings of these transfers, and changes in intergenerational relationships more generally. The demographic and welfare state contexts of grandparenting have retained their central importance, and evince some intriguing developments, not in the least the postponement in the age of becoming a grandparent in some contexts. Grandparenting in countries that are undergoing rapid economic and social development is flagged as an area of growing interest. Gender and intersectionalities are brought into particularly close focus, through investigations into the gendered divisions of labour among grandmothers and grandfathers. The growing importance of transnational grandparenting is emphasised. Grandparental roles, agency and influence are highlighted as topics that deserve more attention.

In this chapter we argue that to understand the ways that policy, structure and culture all shape how grandmothers help to care for children, we need to re-think our approach to these issues. We need in particular to think about policies in terms of how they impact on mothers and grandmothers simultaneously, providing different and complex incentives and opportunities in each generation. This leads us to conceptualise childcare as something that is organised in the wider family, and to think of family care versus formal care when considering the wider impacts on individuals and society, rather than focussing on maternal versus non-maternal childcare. It also necessitates thinking about how cultures of gender, family and paid work might be influencing family-level discussions and negotiations. We show that conceptualising childcare as a family collaboration framed by policy and culture helps to explain substantial variations in grandmaternal childcare across Europe..

This chapter examines the impact of transnational family migration on the relationships between Lithuanian migrant adolescents living in Ireland and their non-migrant grandmothers residing in Lithuania. Drawing on cross-generational perspectives obtained through multi-sited, in-depth interviews, this chapter focuses on three major themes, namely: 1) the changing nature of grandmother-grandchild relationship as perceived by both parties involved; 2) practices endorsed in maintaining intergenerational ties transnationally; and 3) the key factors contributing to the grandmother-grandchild relationship in transnationally dispersed families. Findings discussed in this chapter contribute to the study of intergenerational relationships by providing a more nuanced understanding of how significant physical distance and long-time separation affect relationships, contact practices, and perceived emotional ties between grandparents and grandchildren.

This chapter utilised the theoretical framework of intersectionality to provide a critical analysis of grandparents raising grandchildren, or grandfamilies, in the United States. The analysis focused on how grandparents’ multiple social identities may overlap and conflict with one another, and how these social identities are embedded within historical and cultural contexts that privilege some social identities over others. By considering representational, structural, and political intersectionality, the current analysis revealed that oppressive discourses related to age, gender, race, and class are central to understanding the challenges facing grandfamilies. Even the family structure itself can be a basis for marginalisation. Finally, the analysis also revealed how social systems of oppression are reproduced structurally through federal and state policies that, while designed to be supportive, may further oppress and disempower grandfamilies with specific social identities..

Whereas senescence is a topic that is gaining ground in adult literature, child characters seldom play a significant role in these narratives. One book which does center on the relationship between childhood and old age is the American author Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), which deals with a family’s trauma after 9/11. Foer’s story is narrated by nine-year-old Oskar Schell and his grandparents. Vanessa Joosen relates her close reading of selected passages from the novel to its narratological features and age-related ideology. Although Foer connects the stories of young and old via intertextual links and descriptions of shared experiences, a close reading of the novel and comparison of the three narrators’ accounts reveals numerous divergences, contradictions, and gaps, which underline the need for intergenerational communication to counteract ageism and nostalgic sentimentalism.

Mariano Narodowski and Verónica Gottau employ an anthropological theoretical framework to interpret the intergenerational relationships in the American television series The Simpsons as an instance of what anthropologist Margaret Mead calls “prefigurative culture.” The Simpsons parodies old series and sitcoms of American television in which old people had a central, harmonious, and balanced role within the expected limits of a postfigurative culture which admired and respected the elderly. In The Simpsons, the connection with past traditions that the grandparents might represent is buried under the cynicism and cruelty of the younger characters. Institutionalized and infantilized old people are shown to be at the mercy of young and middle-aged adults. When the transmission of historical and cultural knowledge loses value and intergenerational references are relegated to confined institutions, Narodowski and Gottau argue, any attempt to reconstruct it only provokes a brutal and ironic backlash which suppresses the memory of past eras.

The award-winning American television series Mad Men uses historical fiction to reflect on issues that remain pressing, including tensions in family and intergenerational relationships. This chapter scrutinizes the link between childhood and old age by analyzing how the relationships between Sally Draper and two of her elderly relatives are played out. The companionship between children and the elderly is constructed as rewarding for both parties, yet as provocative rather than romantic and harmless. The (substitute) grandparents take on the roles of both gatekeeper and enabler in relation to the child. When the elderly are portrayed as enablers they make it possible for the child to transgress the borders of childhood, and as such they themselves subversively transgress the borders of grandparenthood and challenge age norms and the authority of the middle generation.

As contemporary populations age in developed countries, and as the diversity of age groups leading active and productive lives increases, the construction and performance of age as a constituent of social identity becomes more varied and complex. The design of content and texts in media, which plays a critical role in introducing children to a range of age-related imaginary material, reflects these demographic and cultural shifts. Gökçe Elif Baykal and Ilgım Veryeri Alaca analyze past and present production strategies for representing youth and senescence in Turkish animated cartoons in comparison with patterns from abroad. They then present the results of an empirical research survey, which captures grandparents’ and grandchildren’s views of each other in order to provide insight into these key segments of the Turkish audience and to identify a gap between the contemporary “realistic” typology of characters and the features of a sample of real-life contemporary Turkish audiences.

This chapter discusses the minority of cases in our study in which the grandchild-grandparent relationship is seriously disrupted after parental divorce. It notes that such cases can be seen as lying at the extreme end of the third continuum. It shows the extent to which grandparents took sides after the break-up, and assumed attitudes and behaviour reflecting what they saw as the ‘rights and wrongs’ of their divorced child's situation. It also draws on interviews with members of the Grandparents' Association, the leading support and pressure group for grandparents. It turns first to the grandparents in the Cardiff study who could be described as ‘excluded’.

In this chapter, Jennifer May Hampton and Esther Muddiman turn their attention to a lifecourse event that affects older members of the family through focusing on how becoming a grandparent both hinders and fosters civic participation.  Using a combination of panel data from the Understanding Society survey and interview data with grandparents, they show that levels of civic participation, and especially volunteering, vary according to the grandparent’s employment status. In addition to their own engagement in civil society, grandparents also play an important part in the intergenerational transmission of what might be seen as ‘civic virtues’.

One of the most contentious, and recently evolving, components of a divorce agreement involves custody of the children. And, this area of family law has been particularly influenced by psychology and other social science research. The guiding principle is that of the best interest standard, which requires an inquiry that goes beyond concrete legal rules that relies on psychological principles and often introduces psychological experts into the legal setting. Those experts can aid with custody arrangements and understanding the potential impact of the divorce on the children. Legal rules define and provide guidelines for financial child support. Finally, newer areas within the law of custody focus on grandparent involvement in their grandchildren’s lives and the newer area within family law of pet custody.

The intensity and style of care for grandchildren, as well as the precipitating conditions of grandparental involvement vary substantially across countries and regions of the world. Grandparents in rural China tend to experience relatively more favourable family circumstances and have greater access to resources upon assuming the custodial grandparenting role when compared to their American counterparts, factors that appear to contribute to enhanced psychological well-being among Chinese grandparents in skipped-generation households. This finding highlights how family systems adapt to the societal demands imposed on them, with US grandparents more likely to intervene in reaction to a crisis in the middle generation such as neglect or abuse (‘child savers’), and rural Chinese grandparents more likely to be involved in pursuit of a larger economic goal such as the increased economic productivity of a migrant son (‘family maximizers’). Without Chinese grandparents being full-time carers for their grandchildren, migration certainly would be more difficult and perhaps impossible for many parents of young children in search of better employment opportunities, leading us to the conclusion that grandparents are the ‘unsung heroes’ of China's rapid economic expansion.

Interview data collected on the topic of ‘the best caregiver for children up to three years of age’ in Singapore lends substantial support to the intergenerational solidarity perspective. At the same time, there are signs of intergenerational ambivalence. The grandparental generation in Singapore is re-negotiating the norm of obligation to care for their grandchildren by contracting out part of the grandchildcare to foreign domestic workers. The data presented in this chapter suggests the need to consider to what extent intergenerational solidarity, ambivalence, and conflict characterize the relationship between older parents and their adult children in caring for (grand)children, and whether this is primarily a function of the socio-economic class positions of the families.

Talia and Jim’s fear of helping 7-year-old Anselmo with his homework, lest they create a dependent, immature child, is a peculiarly Western—and profoundly American—preoccupation. American middle-class parents typically regard young children as dependent beings who must be urged toward independence. In response to researchers’ queries, they frequently say that babies should be trained to be self-reliant from the first few months. Consequently, they place a high value on children’s learning and doing on their own. Repeatedly relying on others for assistance is construed as weakness, uncertainty, and lack of capacity. In keeping with this view, many American parents worry that if their children seek help, they may become dependent. A similar view permeates traditional classrooms, where an individualistic value system prevails. Children must “do their own work.” In the most intensely individualistic of these settings, conferring with your neighbor is worse than dependency; it is cheating, and teachers go so far as to set up barriers between pupils, such as upright books and cardboard screens, to prevent it. This emphasis on independent accomplishment is not broadly accepted around the world. Indeed, adults in some non-Western cultures regard American parents as rather merciless in pushing their young children toward independence—for example, when they insist that infants sleep alone rather than with their parents, or when they take pleasure in the earliest possible mastery of motor skills, such as crawling and walking, long before the child has acquired the reasoning powers to avoid steep staircases and busy roadways. Diverse non-Western peoples and American ethnic minorities stress interdependence—that children must feel intimately linked to others to become competent and self-reliant. Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Guatemalan-Mayan, eastern Kentucky Appalachian, and many other cultural groups regard newborn infants as psychologically separate beings whose most important task is to develop an interdependent relationship with their community—an emotional and social foundation that is crucial for survival and learning. Witness the following conclusion by a researcher who compared American with Japanese infant rearing practices: “An American mother-infant relationship consists of two individuals ... a Japanese mother-infant relationship consists of only one individual, i.e., mother and infant are not divided.”