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A study on ageing poses whether there is a relationship between people’s subjective age and the condition of being grandparents and caring for their grandchildren. The authors found a clear association between feeling young and caring for grandchildren among grandparents over 70 years of age. Now, specifically for grandmothers, this phenomenon is cumulative since they experience an additional youthful feeling just by having grandchildren.

The study has been carried out by Bruno Arpino, co-director of the Research and Expertise Centre for Survey Methodology (RECSM) at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of Pompeu Fabra University, and Valeria Bordone, a researcher at the Wittgenstein Centre in Austria. It has been published in the advanced online edition of Journal of  Aging and Health.

The authors used data from the Health and Retirement Study in the United States and used a sample of 1,701 men and 2,935 women, aged between 50 and 85. The study took into account subjective age and having grandchildren and/or caring for grandchildren, gender and chronological age.

This study also extends the research previously carried out and looks into gender and age differences with regard to subjective age-related factors. The results suggest that being a grandparent is fundamental to the subjective experience one has of ageing.

People construct their subjective age according to their own experiences

Although younger grandparents feel older than people in the same age group without grandchildren, this relationship is reversed as the age of grandparents rises. Similarly, as grandmothers’ age increases, the authors have found an inverse relationship between subjective age and having grandchildren and caring for children.

In conclusion, the authors suggest that “people construct their subjective age based on the particular circumstances of their lives”. Therefore, this study highlights the importance of considering the subjectivity of ageing which, as shown in the study, refers both to the role the person plays in society and their chronological age.

Reference work:

Bordone V. and Arpino B. (Forthcoming, 2016),”Do grandchildren influence how old you feel?”, Journal of Aging and Health. Published in the advanced online edition on 9 December 2015, doi: 10.1177/0898264315618920.