Introduction

Over the last 20 years grandparental relationships have received a good deal of attention from social scientists, especially in North America (eg Cherlin and Furstenberg, 1992; Szinovacz, 1998; Rosenthal and Gladstone, 2000; Attias-Donfut and Segalen, 2002; Crosnoe and Elder, 2002; Gauthier, 2002). One factor that generated interest in these ties was a growing awareness of the surprisingly high amount of full-time and part-time care that some grandmothers (and to a lesser extent grandfathers) were routinely involved in, especially in instances where parental care was problematic or lacking, for whatever reason (Minkler, 1999; Goodman and Silverstein, 2001). Overall, in the context of continuing claims about contemporary family decline, research tended to focus on the emotional and material contribution that grandparents made to their grandchildren's wellbeing, as well as on how grandparents acted as a family resource for the ‘middle’ generation of adult children/parents.

The findings reported in these recent studies resonate in some ways with the conclusions reached about grandparental involvement in mid-20th-century studies of traditional working-class localities. In these, intergenerational female kinship networks were often identified as central to domestic and familial organisation. Certainly many of the best-known British family and community studies of the period demonstrated the routine ways in which grandparents provided parents with help with young children, through childcare provision, the giving of gifts and/or providing advice about child-rearing practice (eg Young and Willmott, 1957; Rosser and Harris, 1965; Bell, 1968; Leonard, 1980). However, even if grandparental support for the second and third generation has an established history, certain features of contemporary grandparenting are significantly different from those characteristic of much of the 20th century. Two issues are particularly important.

First, the social, demographic and economic circumstances of grandparents have been altering. Not only do people typically first become grandparents at a relatively youthful age – currently by their early 50s, though recent childbearing patterns are beginning to alter this – but equally many do not now live near to their children, many are in full-time employment and many have active work, social and leisure lives of their own. Consequently the ‘space’ they have in their lives for ‘doing grandparenting’ is likely to be more restricted than it was in the past, especially for women. Second, the demography of household formation and dissolution has altered radically over the last 30 years.