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When Does It Matter? The Effect of Three-generational Household Arrangement on Children’s Well-Being across Developmental Stages

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Abstract

Recent social-demographic trends predict a growing importance of grandparents’ role in family wellbeing. Over the past years, the three-generational household arrangement has become more prevalent in western countries. However, the implications of three-generational household arrangements for children’s development are less known, particularly over children’s different ages. Using five waves of data from the British Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), we examine whether a three-generational arrangement influences children’s cognitive and behavioral outcomes and how these effects vary from early childhood to adolescence. Fixed effects regressions results reveal that three-generational household arrangement has a negative effect on children’s cognitive and behavioral outcomes in early childhood (ages 3 and 5), and such arrangement matters less for children during middle childhood and adolescence (ages 7, 11 and 14). This study illustrates heterogeneous influences of multigenerational household arrangement on children’s wellbeing across different developmental stages and calls for more thorough research on various multigenerational interactions and mechanisms that may underly such changing patterns.

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Notes

  1. In this study, we use the terms “three-generational household arrangement,” “multigenerational household arrangement,” or “grandparent coresidence” interchangeably.

  2. The prevalence of three-generational households, however, is relatively low in the U.K. compared to that in the U.S. For example, statistics show that less than 2% of adults aged 40 years and over live with their children and grandchildren in 2011 (Glaser et al., 2018).

  3. In particular, if the true effect of grandparent coresidence is positive, it would be biased by the negative selection towards zero or even become negative; if the true effect of grandparent coresidence is negative, it would be inflated by the negative selection.

  4. In almost all cases, the primary respondents in MCS were children’s biological mothers, and we exclude the few cases where the primary respondent was the child’s stepmother, adoptive mother, foster mother, or others (3.0% in the original sample). We also restrict our analyses within singletons by excluding the small number of cases of twins or triplets (2.7% in the original sample).

  5. There are 14,985 children in wave 2 successfully linked with their parents and family dataset before implementing sample restrictions, and 8,261 of them (55%) have remained through waves 2 to 6.

  6. In our data, the partner of a child’s mother could be the child’s biological father, a stepfather, or simply an unmarried partner.

  7. The NS-SEC is the official socio-economic classification in the UK developed from the Goldthorpe Schema, which is a nested classification with 14 operational categories and some sub-categories. The most commonly used versions are eight-class, five-class, and three-class versions. Here we adopt the simple three-category NS-SEC. Please refer to https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/classificationsandstandards/otherclassifications/thenationalstatisticssocioeconomicclassificationnssecrebasedonsoc2010.

  8. Namely \(E\left({\epsilon }_{it}|{3G}_{it}, {D}_{ij}^{child Age},{C}_{it},{U}_{i}\right)=0.\)

  9. The cross-lagged designs would restrict the analysis to a reduced sample including four waves at the child’s ages 5, 7, 11 and 14 because we do not have lagged measures of the outcomes prior to child’s age 3.

  10. A similar pattern is observed in the U.S. (Dunifon et al. 2014; Pikauskas & Cross, 2018).

  11. Social policy research shows that private center-based childcare services are too expensive in the U.K. (among the highest cost of all OECD countries) and public provision are insufficient (Saraceno & Keck, 2010).

  12. We note that least square estimations of dynamic panels controlling for lagged outcomes are usually biased, so we do not regard our results of cross-lagged designs as causal effects estimates. They should only be regarded as robustness checks which may help set bounds for our main model estimates. See Appendix II for detailed procedures and discussions on the methodological limitations of these designs.

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Acknowledgements

This research was conducted at the Center for Demography and Ecology and the Center for the Demography of Health and Aging at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (T32 HD007014-42 and T32 AG000129-30). We thank Jim Raymo, Felix Elwert, Christine Schwartz, Marcy Carlson, Pablo Mitnik and Xi Song for comments and suggestions. Our work has been presented at the Population Association of American Conference 2019, Annual Meetings of the American Association of American 2019 and Family Inequality Workshop, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison. All errors are our own.

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  1. Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania, 3714 Locust Walk, Mcneil Building 328, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Jingying He

  2. Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Jia Wang

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He, J., Wang, J. When Does It Matter? The Effect of Three-generational Household Arrangement on Children’s Well-Being across Developmental Stages. Child Ind Res 14, 2471–2493 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-021-09857-6

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