Study finds grandparent support may not significantly improve maternal mental health

It may give you a beautiful break when your parents or in-laws come to take care of your little one (or the whole crew), but a new study says that extra grandparent support may not ultimately do much to help strengthen the maternal-child bond or improve your mental health.

The researchers looked at data from 1,495 mothers and their toddlers. All of the children were from the UK, and born in the early 2000s. A total of 39.3% of the kids spent 1 to 10 hours with grandparents per week; 33.7% spent 11 to 20 hours with them and 27% of children spent more than 21 hours a week with their grandparents. 

Researchers then set out to assess whether kids spending time with grandparents helped their mothers’ mental health, hypothesizing that “grandparental support could benefit maternal mental health which could in turn positively influence maternal capacity to parent with long lasting effects for child social and emotional development.” 

However, the link wasn’t there. The findings showed that time spent in the care of grandparents for at least six months did not support a direct relationship between grandparent childcare and maternal mental health, and was not significantly associated with better social and emotional outcomes for children when they were 7.

“Our findings suggest that there is no direct relationship between maternal psychological wellbeing and the quantity of support provided to families which rely primarily on grandparental childcare arrangements,” said Angeliki Kallitsoglou, PhD, an education and psychology lecturer at the University of Exeter. “While an extra pair of hands may impact maternal outcomes such as stress with child upbringing, it may not potentially be enough to alleviate more distal parenting outcomes such as maternal psychological distress.”

More mother-child conflict and lower mother-child closeness when kids were 3 was linked with fewer prosocial behaviors and higher levels of inattention/hyperactivity, emotional problems, peer problems and conduct issues at age 7.

The study is observational—and didn’t account for mothers who do not utilize grandparent support, nor did it incorporate mothers who might use additional forms of childcare support.

It focused on the quantity of childcare support provided by grandparents without exploring other potential benefits like emotional support. 

More research is needed to confirm the findings—but grandparent support may be helpful in other ways.

Dr. Kallitsoglou says support from grandparents can have different implications for mothers’ mental health if the family has fewer external support resources (if they’re a single-parent household, for example). Overall, though, the team didn’t find evidence to suggest that support from grandparents directly helps strengthen the parent-child relationship.

This doesn’t mean there’s no value in letting your kids hang out with their grandparents, of course. It gives them a chance to have a relationship with extended family members, and can benefit the health of the grandparents as well. A recent survey found that kids are more likely to open up to their grandparents rather than their parents. And grandparent support does give you a much-needed break when it comes to childcare—which previous research has shown can have positive mental health impacts. The results simply suggest that it may not do much for child behavioral development, which means that kids’ behavior may be more closely tied to the parent-child bond.