Three-Generational Households and Child Well-Being. Demographic understanding of the household in relation to child welfare has often focused on parents, with analyses exploring tensions between fathers and mothers. I have contributed by expanding analyses to include grandparents in these frameworks. In Brazil, I explored decision-making between adolescent mothers who lived with their mothers. Through economic games and a household survey that I developed and administered to over 150 families, I concluded that these families are mainly cooperative but still maintain a hierarchical structure. In a paper examining how child gender is associated with household composition in Brazil, I find less evidence for gender bias in Brazil than in Asia and the U.S. I contrast likelihood of subsequent fertility by father presence, as is typical of the literature, but I also introduce a new analysis that contrasts by grandmother presence. Women may have a preference for the gender of their grandchildren, and this may influence whether they live with a particular set of grandchildren. I find that maternal grandmothers are more likely to live with granddaughters than grandsons. My research contrasting the impacts of fathers and grandparents finds grandparent coresidence is more supportive of child vocabulary development than father coresidence is. In Peru, however, coresidence with grandparents who have fewer years of schooling may hinder children’s mathematics scores. Additional research combines qualitative and quantitative data to contrast the caregiving activities of mothers and grandmothers, and examine if mothers’ caregiving changes with grandmothers’ role. We find mothers take a more educational and disciplinary role, while grandmothers prefer to spoil and coddle grandchildren. Thus, grandmothers who are majority caregivers experience tension around having more responsibility than the idealized grandmother role.
Selected Papers
a. Reynolds, S. (2015). Behavioral games and intrahousehold allocation: Teenage mothers and their mothers in Brazil. Review of Economics of the Household, 13(4), 901-927.
b. Zegers M, Reynolds S. Mothers’ and grandmothers’ caregiving for young children in Chile: Roles and responsibilities. Journal of Family Psychology. 2022 Dec;36(8):1285–1295. PMCID: PMC9885970
a. Reynolds, S, Fernald, L, Deardorff, J, & Behrman, J. (2018). Family structure and child development in Chile: A longitudinal analysis of household transitions involving fathers and grandparents. Demographic Research, 38, 1777-1814. PMC6430138
b. Reynolds S. Household transitions between ages 5 and 15 and educational outcomes: Fathers and grandparents in Peru. Demographic Research. 2022 Mar 15;46(14):397–440.