In the field of early childhood development, the wellbeing of primary caregivers has increasingly received attention as a means to ensure that they are providing the best environments and routines for raising young children. Findings on the connection between maternal wellbeing and child wellbeing have emphasized the need for policymakers to develop services such as home visitations, training programs, and provision of nutritional supplements. These services help expose mothers to research-based practices that can assist their young children connect with and learn about the people and world around them. Still, the work that any mother puts into raising her child requires a lot of energy, and even with the provision of assistance services, the immediate network around the mother—e.g., the child’s father, her parents, in-laws, siblings, friends, and neighbors—can be a more powerful influence in a mother’s decisions with regards to raising her child.
For my research, I decided to focus specifically on the views and influence of grandmothers in relation to those of mothers on the topic of raising young children. Recent studies emphasize intergenerational differences and learnings between mothers and grandmothers especially. My own capstone project is inspired in part by Sharma et al.’s 2009 studyon mothers’ and grandmothers’ perspectives on early childhood education in the Jammu district of Jammu and Kashmir. USAID and US foreign embassies have recognized the importance of the connections of external family members such as grandmothers, and have collaborated with local groups such as Grandmothers Raising Grandchildrenin Kenya and The Grandmother Projectin multiple countries. In the context of West Bengal, India, the family structure norms across social classes are no longer mainly those of joint families but now include nuclear families, migrant families where grandparents may serve as primary caregivers, and single parent families. As such, the role of grandmothers in a child’s life is shifting from having less presence in the lives of their grandchildren to being more involved in a child’s day-to-day care than her own parents due to larger social and economic changes in the state. While the majority of programming for families of young children targets mothers, the incentive to direct more programming to extended family members such as grandmothers has several driving factors:
- Mothers’ experiences with raising young children will be impacted by what they experienced as young children themselves; in this way, understanding how grandmothers raised their children and how they want to rear their own grandchildren can help service providers learn about mothers’ attitudes toward childrearing practices. In Birbhum district for example, Santal mothers who had participated in the non-profit program as children would cite both their personal experience in the program and their own mother’s decision to enroll them in the program as motivation to support their children’s attendance at formal schools and to pursue greater academic opportunities than they had growing up.
- For grandmothers who are more involved in caregiving for young children – such as when both parents are working outside the home – their perspectives and practices are crucial for service providers to understand what a child’s environment and routines are like and how service providers can provide appropriate resources to assist grandmothers. Many of the grandmothers I interviewed in Kolkata mentioned that it is rare for non-profit and public programs and formal schools to reach out to them for their input on caring for their young grandchildren. As a result, grandmothers may only have limited interactions with program staff, and any information that is given to parents may not always be shared with the grandmothers. Given the increasing instances in which grandmothers are taking on an increased caregiving role for young children, it is essential that they are included in servicer providers’ efforts to engage with family. Additionally, the US government’s international early childhood education initiatives that engage grandmothers can also address issues of elderly wellbeing and engagement.
- Both paternal and maternal grandmothers can be helpful in passing down positive childrearing advice to not only mothers, but to fathers as well. Several grandmothers I interviewed noted that they would use their wisdom to encourage their sons and son-in-laws, the fathers, to be active in their own children’s lives. As such, grandmothers and mothers alike described seeing fathers interact in positive ways with their children, like playing games, feeding, and conversing. This influence is important because of traditional socio-cultural that may not have encouraged fathers to be as engaged in childrearing.
- For mothers who look to both their own mothers and mother-in-laws for childrearing advice, delivering knowledge to grandmothers can help the mothers have certain knowledge reiterated to them by multiple voices and create a consensus amongst multiple family members about what is best for the child. When I interviewed mothers and grandmothers from the same family – regardless of if they were the paternal or maternal grandmother – it appeared concurrence on childrearing issues allowed them to both quickly process information received on different aspects of early childhood education and empowered the family members to be more discerning consumers of this information. Family members could collaborate to see what new information would mean for them and they wanted to adopt new practices.
Given that so many public and private sector service providers strive to impart positive childrearing practices to families of young children and generate positive outcomes for early childhood development, more effort is needed to reach out to extended family beyond mothers. Understanding the ways in which grandmothers can be part of promoting positive outcomes for their grandchildren would be beneficial for US policymakers. We require further research on the roles of grandmothers in different cultural contexts, such as that of India, and the best means to engage grandmothers as agents of change in the lives of young children.
By Paromita De, Sigur Center Field Research Grant Recipient for Summer 2019. De is a second-year student in the International Education Masters program at the George Washington University with a specialization in the economics of education.
