Helping to Care for Grandchildren Can Slow Cognitive Decline

According to a study published by the American Psychological Association, caring for grandchildren can serve as a buffer against cognitive decline in older adults. The findings suggest that continuing to perform caregiving tasks can support memory and thinking skills in later life.

“Many grandparents regularly care for their grandchildren—a form of caregiving that supports families and society at large,” said lead researcher Flavia Chereches, MS, of Tilburg University in the Netherlands. “However, an open question is whether caring for grandchildren also benefits the grandparents themselves. In this study, we wanted to find out whether caring for grandchildren can improve the health of grandparents and possibly slow cognitive decline.” The study was published in the journal Psychology and Aging.

Study Design and Participants

To investigate this question, Chereches and her colleagues analyzed data from 2,887 grandparents who participated in the English Longitudinal Study of Aging. All participants were over 50 years old, with an average age of 67. Each person completed questionnaires three times between 2016 and 2022 and underwent cognitive tests. Participants were asked whether they had cared for a grandchild at any point in the past year. The survey also collected detailed information about how often grandparents provided care and what types of activities were involved.

The caregiving activities covered a wide range of tasks. These included overnight care for grandchildren, caring for sick grandchildren, playing or participating in leisure activities, helping with homework, driving grandchildren to school or other activities, preparing meals, and similar forms of support. When the researchers compared the test results, grandparents who provided childcare scored higher on memory and verbal fluency tests than those who did not. These differences remained even after taking into account age, general health, and other relevant factors. The pattern was independent of how often grandparents provided care or what types of caregiving activities they performed.

Differences Between Grandmothers

The study also showed that grandmothers who helped care for their grandchildren experienced less cognitive decline over time than grandmothers who did not provide care. “What stood out most to us was that the fact that grandparents took on caregiving tasks appeared to be more important for cognitive function than how often grandparents took on caregiving tasks or what exactly they did with their grandchildren,” Chereches said. “Further research is needed to replicate these findings, but if caregiving by grandparents has benefits, they may not depend on how often caregiving occurs or what specific activities are done with the grandchildren, but rather on the overall experience of caring for the children.”

Chereches noted that further research is needed to better understand how family dynamics and other factors influence these findings. The circumstances of caregiving may play an important role. “Voluntary caregiving in a supportive family environment may have different effects on grandparents than caregiving in a more stressful environment where they do not feel supported or feel that caregiving is not voluntary or is a burden.”

How Grandmothers’ Brains Respond to Seeing their Grandchildren

Many people who have been fortunate enough to grow up with loving grandmothers know that they can nurture a child’s development in unique and valuable ways. Previous research has scanned the brains of grandmothers as they looked at photos of their young grandchildren, creating a neural snapshot of this special intergenerational bond. Proceedings of the Royal Society B published the first study examining the brain function of grandmothers, conducted by researchers at Emory University. “What really stands out in the data is the activation in areas of the brain associated with emotional empathy,” says James Rilling, professor of anthropology at Emory University and lead author of the study. “This suggests that grandmothers are attuned to feeling what their grandchildren feel when they interact with them. When their grandchild smiles, they feel the child’s joy. And when their grandchild cries, they feel the child’s pain and distress.”

In contrast, the study found that when grandmothers looked at pictures of their adult children, they showed greater activation in an area of the brain associated with cognitive empathy. This suggests that they are trying to cognitively understand what their adult child is thinking or feeling and why, but not so much from an emotional perspective. “Young children have probably developed traits that allow them to manipulate not only the maternal brain, but also the grandmother’s brain,” says Rilling. “An adult child doesn’t have the same cuteness factor, so it may not elicit the same emotional response.” Lee added that it is relatively rare for scientists to study the older human brain outside of the context of dementia or other age-related diseases. “Here, we are shedding light on the brain functions of grandmothers, which may play an important role in our social lives and development,” Lee said. “This is an important aspect of the human experience that has been largely overlooked in neuroscience.” Grandmothers interacting with their grandchildren offered new neural territory.

Higher Activity in Brain Areas Responsible for Emotional Empathy

For this study, the researchers wanted to examine the brains of healthy grandmothers and find out how this relates to the benefits they provide to their families. The 50 participants in the study completed questionnaires about their experiences as grandmothers, providing details such as how much time they spend with their grandchildren, what activities they do together, and how much affection they feel for them. They also underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure their brain function while looking at pictures of their grandchild, an unfamiliar child, the grandchild’s same-sex parent, and an unfamiliar adult. The results showed that most participants showed higher activity in the areas of the brain responsible for emotional empathy and movement when viewing images of their grandchildren compared to the other images. Grandmothers who showed greater activation in the areas responsible for cognitive empathy when viewing images of their grandchildren indicated in the questionnaire that they wanted to be more involved in caring for their grandchildren. Compared to the results of an earlier study by the Rilling Lab in which fathers viewed photos of their children, grandmothers showed greater activation on average in the regions responsible for emotional empathy and motivation when viewing pictures of their grandchildren.