American grandparents are more actively involved in bringing up their grandchildren, a new study says.
Researchers from the University of Chicago found the childcare role and responsibility of grandparents increasing and becoming the primary care givers in majority of American families.
According to the findings, 60 percent of the grandparents looked after their grandchildren for 10 years and 70 percent reported providing care for two years.
The findings support the 2010 U.S. data that found eight percent of grandparents staying with their grandchildren. The data also found the responsibility of grandparents increasing. The number of grandparents who looked after most of their grandchildren's requirements reached 2.7 million in 2010 from 2.4 million in 2006.
Apart from that, 30 percent of working mothers were reported to be depending up on grandparents to take care of their children.
Investigators from University of Chicago set out to examine the factors that led to the occurrence. They looked at 13,614 grandparents who were part of the Health and Retirement Study conducted between 1998 and 2008. All the participants of the study were 50 or older and shared their family details with researchers during two-year intervals.
At the end of the study, education, income and ethnicity were found playing major roles.
"Our findings show that different groups of grandparents are likely to provide different types of care. Importantly grandparents with less income and less education, or who are from minority groups, are more likely to take on care for their grandchildren," Linda Waite, the Lucy Flower professor in Sociology and co-director of the Center on Aging at NORC at the University of Chicago, said in a statement.
American, African and Hispanic grandparents were found more active in child care than whites. Well educated and financially secure grandparents were found providing babysitting, particularly grandmothers. Grandparents having minor children of their own, older, unmarried and unemployed were also reported to be not providing child care.
Findings of the study have been published in the September issue of the Journal of Family Issues.
The findings come at a time when some grandparents in U.S., face difficulties to even meet their grandchildren and seek legal help. Reality TV star Kim Zolciak, weeks after giving birth to her son was recently sued by her own mother for gaining visitation rights to her grandchildren.
