The Health Implications Of Grandparents Caring For Grandchildren In China

With the coming of an aging society,the health problems of the elderly are receiving much attention.While whether it is in urban or the rural areas,the caring of grandchildren by grandparents has become a mainstream way of caring for children.Because the advantage and disadvantage for the grandparents' health always co-exist while grandparenting,the health implications of the custodial grandparenting for grandparents is still an empirical proposition that to be tested.Using data from China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study 2015(CHARLS 2015),and employing the instrument variable "the number of grangchildren under age of 16"to overcome the endogeneity problem,this paper evaluates the health implications of grandparents caring for grandchildren.Empirical results show that:The custodial grandparenting has negative effects on grandparents,health while decreasing the Self-Reported Health Status and increasing the depression status.And there is heterogeneity of the negative implications of grandparentig.Compared with the female caregiver,the nagative effect is larger for the male caregiver.Compared with the caregiver living in urban,the negative health effect of grandparenting is more obvious for the caregiver living in rural.While in the aspect of living arrangement,the grandparents who are caring grandparents suffer more health problem while living in skipped-generation family compred with grandparens live in three-generation family.This paper has some policy enlightenment that we shold foucu more attention on the health problems of the grandparents who are caring grandchildren and interventions should be taken to improve the health status of them.