10 Gauthier (to/d) 26/3/02 3:14 pm Page 295

Anne Gauthier

The Role of Grandparents

Introduction

F or about 20 years, family sociology has been swamped by a flood of new

research themes, namely intergenerational relationships and family help.
Three elements seem to explain how such overwhelming interest could
emerge and grow: changed perceptions about the scale of ages and the
relationships between generations, the change in family patterns, and the
crisis of the welfare states.

Changed Perceptions about the Scale of Ages and the

Relationships between Generations

Age is not only a biological datum but a social datum also. If it were only
biological, people having lived on Earth for the same number of years would
meet with the same fate irrespective of the time they lived in. Yet, it is not the
case at all. Two centuries ago, having lived on Earth for 60 years was an excep-
tional occurrence, which was very much held in respect; one century ago, it
meant belonging to the dregs of society. Today the situation has developed
even further in the sense that reaching 60 is nearly the beginning of a new life.
In order to distinguish properly what separates those three worlds, they must
be relocated in their global context.
The first world, which is also called the Ancien Régime, takes place
before the advent of modernity: people met with their – happy or unhappy
– fate, which was determined by their rank and was thus allotted to them at
birth. It was up to the family, and thus to the community in general, to take
care of both the production tasks (managing and optimizing the means of
subsistence through agriculture and cattle breeding) and the reproduction

Current Sociology, March 2002, Vol. 50(2): 295–307 SAGE Publications

(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
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296 Current Sociology Vol. 50 No. 2 Monograph 1

tasks (‘natural’ education of the children, that is without any institutional

intervention). Moreover, this period was characterized by a weak response to
childhood. The child was not differentiated, it was represented as a miniature
adult, with no definite age and no distinctive morphology: it worked, ate,
enjoyed itself and slept among adults (Morel, 1993). Above all, a child was
the perpetuation of a lineage, the handing over of a know-how, a social rank
and a patrimony from one generation to the other. In this context, the
growing child was the community’s property, and its role consisted in accept-
ing without discussion what was accepted in its environment. Therefore,
elders were very much held in respect since they were the holders of a know-
ledge resulting from their experience.
Modernity represents a break with the traditional world. Of course, it
corresponds to the birth of industrialization and of the wage-earning class,
which separated the private sphere (i.e. the domestic space seen as a place of
gratuitousness and love) from the public sphere (i.e. the labour market
governed by the trade logic of remunerated labour). But above all modernity
sanctions the supreme value of individual autonomy, that is, the rejection of
all external or superior principle supposed to provide guidelines for action.
From then on, the individual claims to be a ‘figure of beginning’ (Ehrenberg,
1991: 215): he or she creates his or her own identity, makes his or her choices
and must support them. Of course, this ideal of autonomy stresses people’s
individual destinies, but it also contributes to create three distinct ages
(Gaullier, 1988): youth as a period of training and quest for identity, adult life
as a period devoted to professional life and/or to the education of children (it
is the period when identity is properly developed), and old age: as a period
of retirement and withdrawal. In other words, this is the autonomizing
process of generations.
Consequently, the course of history is no longer the result of an auto-
matic transmission process from one generation to the next, but rather that
of an ‘invention’, perhaps even a ‘negative acquisition’ in comparison with
the previous generation (Attias-Donfut, 1988). Somehow, a wall between
generations has been erected. As to elderly people, these are first of all
excluded from the ideal of autonomy which is conveyed by modernity: this
ideal is suited to young, affluent and mentally sane men, all the more so since
industrial society glorifies skills which the elderly seem to lack, i.e. adapta-
bility to change, physical force, profitability. Even within the family, their
experience is presented as outdated by many psychology handbooks.
Then, the mid-19th-century social issue, whose democratic objective
consists in extending the ideal of autonomy to as many people as possible
(Wagner, 1996), eventually raised an essential question: ‘What is going to be
done for the older members of our society?’ The several answers provided
include retirement pensions, old people’s homes, medical care at home, but
also, since the end of the 1950s, the organization of leisure activities for senior
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citizens during a period of their lives which is perceived as ‘the summer

holidays of one’s life’ (Combaz, 1987). This corresponds to a welfare state
based on the autonomy of generations, but also an equal distribution of risks
and on postponed reciprocity.
Today, the process of individualization has become even more acute:
identities which were still stable and cut off from one another 50 years ago
have developed into open and fluid identities, which keep being rebuilt and
redefined. It is quite obvious if one ‘films’ the life of individuals, whose
private and professional lives are likely to take on several successive shapes.
As to grandparents, their identity is difficult to define. For the young pen-
sioners, there is actually a discrepancy between biological and social old age:
they are both too young to be old, since their physical and mental skills are
intact, and too old to be young, as most of them have retired, and whether
one likes it or not, retirement remains the social marker of the beginning of
old age.
The question ‘What is going to be done for the older people in our
society?’, which is now reserved for ‘old old people’, turns into a radically
opposed question, namely ‘what can “young old people” bring to society?’
Studies indeed show that those who used to be called senior citizens do not
exist anymore: after retirement, a second career begins (Gaullier, 1988). In
other words, young retired people are productive and make up a new work-
force which is very little used. In this context, privileging the grandparents’
discourse somehow amounts to keeping up with the times: it is equivalent to
estimating their family productivity.

Change in Family Patterns

On the one hand, longer life expectation makes it possible to bring grand-
parents and grandchildren closer for a longer period. So grandparents would
be present for a longer time on average. In the same way, the fertility drop
leads to an average drop in the number of grandchildren. Now, it seems easier
to put a lot into one’s relationships with one’s grandchildren when there are
only two of them than when there are 20 brought together for family
celebrations. This demographic phenomenon would thus enable grand-
parents to be more present. In short, those two elements combine to enable
grandparents to be more present and for a longer period.
On the other hand, the number of divorces and conjugal breakups keeps
rising. Some theories emphasize the fact that this instability in relationships
between partners leads to a tendency to turn towards more stable ties. Those
more stable ties mainly consist in kinship relationships. Pitrou (1978) under-
lines that filiation is likely to override unions because its permanence is better
ensured.
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298 Current Sociology Vol. 50 No. 2 Monograph 1

The Crisis of the Welfare States

Today, one does not only speak of dynamic grandparents who listen to their
grandchildren and understand them better than anyone. One also takes the
example of young people who are happy to say that they still live with their
parents and one adds that their choice is not only justified by the fact that
their studies last longer and that they enter professional life later than before.
It seems that young people who are not yet professionally integrated are
materially, financially and psychologically helped out by their parents.
This type of discourse actually occurs in the context of welfare states
facing a crisis: they have become aware of the growing cost of insurance and
assistance systems. New risks linked to unemployment and to the difficulties
of professional integration for young people have appeared. The drop in birth
rate and the lengthening of life expectancy have led to the population’s ageing
process. All those elements lead to a dramatic shrinking of the active popu-
lation, which raises serious issues as far as the financing of social security is
concerned. Do the welfare states not expect to leave the matter to the family
– a place of gratuitousness and love – as a miracle solution?
Family solidarities may be inveterate, but they convey chronic weak-
nesses which do not enable them to replace public aids. At most, they can be
conceived as their complement. Indeed, they are deeply inegalitarian, and this
for four reasons.1
They depend on sociodemographic variables. It seems obvious that (1)
the number of children, that is the extent of the family networks that can be
summoned up, as well as the density of relationships, partly determine
people’s responses; (2) the meaning of the word ‘solidarity’ varies depending
on families; (3) solidarities are dominated by a ‘logic of affinities’, which
means that those who are actually helped are those who are liked and not
necessarily those who most need it; and (4) solidarities are asymmetrical: the
flows of help provided by the parents to their adult children are more import-
ant than those in the opposite direction.
This point has been supported thanks to two questions from the PSBH,2
i.e. ‘Over the last three months, did you help your children in the following
way?’ and ‘Over the last three months, did your children help you in the
following way?’. At first, a variable was created: it covered the various flows
which run through the relationships between parents and their children who
do not live under the same roof. Only three types of help (financial help,
emotional support, domestic help) were taken into consideration. The types
of help which are relatively rare (professional nudges in the right direction,
medical care) or unreciprocal (helping with school and homework, looking
after grandchildren) were not taken into account in the analyses. All those
items were added in the direction parents–children on the one hand, and in
the direction children–parents on the other hand. Finally, those two sums
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Gauthier: The Role of Grandparents 299

40 %

31 %

PARENTS CHILDREN
15 %

14 %

Figure 1 Directions of the Flows of Help (Financial Help, Emotional Support and
Domestic Help
Source: PSBH (1999).
N = 1033.

Table 1 Directions of the Flows of Help According to the Type of Help (%)

Downward Upward
Type of Help Direction Reciprocity Direction No Help Total

Financial help 28.1 0.9 1.8 69.2 100

Emotional support 12.3 64.0 6.2 17.5 100
Domestic help 19.5 10.8 16.6 53.1 100
Source: PSBH (1999).
N = 1033.

were compared. They can result in four situations: either there is a support
that is more important from the parents to their children, or the support is
equivalent, or the support is more important from the children to their
parents, or there is no support at all. Figure 1 summarizes those four possi-
bilities. It shows two things: the absence of help is relatively frequent (14
percent), but when there is help, it is mainly from the parents to the children
(40 percent against 15 percent in the opposite direction). Help to the children
is not only provided during infancy but endures long after children have left
their parents’ house.
Let us now examine the different types of help. Table 1 schematizes all
the flows in specific categories (financial help, emotional support and
domestic help).
One can observe that the direction of the flow of help is clearly differ-
entiated according to the type of help. While the financial help is more
frequent in the downward direction, immediate reciprocity is on the agenda
for emotional support. For domestic help, percentages are approximately the
same for the downward and upward flows. One can also speak of reciprocity
but with a slightly different impact: it is less an immediate than a postponed
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300 Current Sociology Vol. 50 No. 2 Monograph 1

Table 2 Directions of the Flows of Domestic Help According to the Parents’ Age (%)

Age 60–69 70–79 80+

Domestic help
• downward 50.39 25.44 10.0
• reciprocal 24.03 14.91 7.5
• upward 25.58 59.65 82.5
100 100 100
Source: PSBH (1999).
N = 283, 2 (p) = .001.

reciprocity. Indeed, everything happens as if, at a given moment of the life

trajectory, when the parents’ physical and intellectual skills are still intact, the
flow mainly went in the downward direction (thus from the parents to their
children), whereas it is the parents who become the beneficiaries of this help
once they have become old and dependent. This hypothesis is clearly con-
firmed by Table 2, in which only the individuals who are concerned by this
type of help appear.
One can thus contrast kinds of family help, which are flexible and selec-
tive, and kinds of public aid, which are general and planned in the long term.
The cultural context which has just been evoked explains the crop, during
the last 20 years, of research projects about relationships between generations
within families.3
What follows is the result of a thorough qualitative research project
which was carried out in 1989 with about 40 people, all grandparents, and
about 20 teenagers. As we see, being a grandmother or a grandfather is a role
which is still not really defined today: grandparenthood is to a certain extent
unknown or at least cannot be a priori defined (Cunningham-Burley, 1985).
Consequently, no wonder that different ways of behaving appear. Figure 2
shows that the factors explaining the three categories of roles which have
appeared, i.e. ‘educational subcontractor’, ‘specialist’ and ‘passive’, are linked
to the meaning of family solidarity, to the time and energy that can be devoted
to the family, as well as to the way youth is perceived.

The Grandparents’ Point of View

Educational Subcontractors
These grandparents are characterized by the fact that they tend to replace the
parents. They mainly belong to the working or middle classes, which does
not mean that they are not present elsewhere. The question is why such a
tendency is noted.
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Gauthier: The Role of Grandparents 301

Sociocultural environment

Time and energy

Perception
Family values that can be
of
devoted youth
to the family

Being a grandparent

THREE TYPES

• Educational subcontractors

• ‘Club’ and ‘roots’ specialists

• Passive

Figure 2

In those environments, the norm is to meet each other frequently, that is

two or three times a week, sometimes even every day. One element favours
those frequent meetings: the geographical closeness of homes. It is also con-
sidered normal to live near one’s parents’ place.
An interest in the way those people manage their time shows that their
activities centre on the domestic space (not only theirs but also their
children’s). The family is the place of a genuine underground economy, whose
main protagonists are the grandparents. In short, their exclusive centre of
interest is the family, as expressed by this grandfather:
I do odd jobs, I do everything in the house, even in that of my children. I’ve
just done the bathroom at the youngest’s, with the cupboard and all. My son-
in-law’s house, except for the bricks, we did everything on our own. I made
garden sheds. At my granddaughter’s, who’s married, I tiled the bathroom, we
did the kitchen up. At the moment, I’m doing the stairs up at my English son-
in-law’s.
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302 Current Sociology Vol. 50 No. 2 Monograph 1

Most of those grandparents look after their preschool grandchildren on

a daily basis. Moreover, it is often the maternal grandparents whose services
are called upon, which confirms the existence of the privileged tie between
mother and daughter brought to light by numerous anthropologists and
sociologists.
The fact that grandparents look after their grandchildren is actually a
continuation of the help that is provided to married children, which is a
typical way of expressing intergenerational solidarity. Moreover, many
grandmothers are absolutely delighted to play this role, as they experience
that ‘charge’ as a second, deeply gratifying career. Furthermore, when for one
reason or another grandchildren do not go to their places, the following
comments can be heard: ‘At those times, I go round in circles’. Grandchildren
thus have a huge importance in those environments.
A link seems to exist between the frequency of meetings and the import-
ance of the responsibility that grandparents ascribe to their role. That is why
those who look after their grandchildren daily consider that they have the
responsibility of bringing them up, in other words, to have more the role of
parents than of grandparents.
This responsibility is perceptible in the relationship that they have both
with their own children and with their grandchildren. They give themselves
the right to examine what their children do. It must nonetheless be under-
lined that it does not seem to be experienced as ‘heavy’ by their children, who
consider that it is quite ‘normal’ to be more their parents’ children than their
children’s parents. They also have specific expectations of their grand-
children, which come in four different forms: politeness, respect, honesty and
a listening ear. To achieve their ends, they do not hesitate to use verbal or even
physical admonitions. Furthermore, most of them say that they reject the
softy grandparent persona:
Normally, grandparents bring what they shouldn’t bring: they let their grand-
children do what they didn’t allow their children to do. It doesn’t go like this
with us. I don’t want to hear it and yet, this is what you hear, that grandparents
spoil.

If one relates this educational style with the perception of youth, a new
light can be shed on the situation. For those people, most young people are
stricken by the plagues of our times: drugs, delinquency, violence, excessive
liberation of sexuality. According to them, those phenomena would be linked
to the parents being too lax. Therefore, one can see in their educational style
a way to preserve their grandchildren against a pervading ‘depravity’:
Young people are unhappy. Drugs and all that. Their parents have spoilt them
too much and now that they no longer have the money they want, many things
happen which didn’t happen in my time.
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Gauthier: The Role of Grandparents 303

Specialists
They tend to belong to the middle and upper classes, where the relationships
are based on less frequent contact, and this for a simple reason: the way those
people manage their time reveals a strong associative-type social integration
(whether they belong to cultural, artistic or sports associations and so on).
This element is important inasmuch as it makes it possible to estimate to
what extent those grandparents focus less on a career as grandparents. It is
particularly obvious in the middle classes that have been provided with
schooling: there, the grandmothers, who were professionally active through-
out their career, privilege a certain independence, a certain personal blos-
soming out with their partner, but also within the family at large. In other
words, they wish for a personal blossoming out beyond motherhood, but
also beyond grandmotherhood.
Of course, this does not mean that they love each other less or that family
solidarity is less strong. Simply, it finds other modes of expression. Conse-
quently, those grandparents tend to claim a more limited and thus more
specific responsibility. They advocate a rearguard policy with regard to the
line of conduct which is determined by the parents:
I’ve never wanted to take the place of the mother, because mothers have such
an unrewarding role. If the grandmother comes and takes what the mother gets
from her children away from her, that’s not possible. . . . I’ve never been a child
minder only, one likes to be free. It’s fine to help from time to time but not
daily.
This does not mean that they do not have a relationship with their grand-
children. In this respect, two main types of relationships could be distin-
guished among specialists.

Helping out with School and Homework and Organizing Leisure Activities
– the ‘Club Grandparents’ Educational training and the organization of
leisure activities are often associated, both at the level of the grandparents’
profile and in the grandchildren’s discourse. These people turn out to be
critical towards the past and are characterized by a strong social participation
as well as by a very favourable attitude towards young people: so many indi-
cations lead to the conclusion there is a reduction of the generational effect
in the relationship with the grandchildren. These two grandparents express
this clearly:
I don’t take myself seriously, I don’t see myself as an adult and I don’t tell the
others: ‘I’ve got experience, in my time . . .’. I hope to have kept my child’s soul.
I think it is useless to judge, criticize, make radical decisions and take oneself
as a reference.
My grandchildren are very independent, they no longer accept advice, it bores
them in the same way as school. So we go on winter and summer holidays
together. I think they feel comfortable with me, they don’t tell me things like:
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304 Current Sociology Vol. 50 No. 2 Monograph 1

‘What a bore this grandmother is, she’s always lagging behind!’ During the year,
we chat about tennis, they love it.

Inculcating Roots Not all grandparents are story tellers whose only purpose
would be to create a link with the past. But the so-called ‘roots’ grandparents
have a close relationship with the past because the heritage they have to hand
over is threatened. In concrete terms, roots grandparents tend to come into
being when they are of foreign origin or when their grandchildren live
abroad, but also when they are the survivors from dying ways of life, at least
at family level, for example among farmers:
We tell them the life we had. It can seem unbelievable but when I went to
school, I wore clogs. Such a thing is unthinkable today. I see the children staring
at me wide-eyed. So we look at pictures and I tell things which relate to the
pictures. . . . Those things appeal to them because they’re different from their
daily life. I hope they’ll remember what it was to live in a farm because they’ll
grow up outside it.

Passive Grandparents
In one word, these are those to whom one pays a visit once or twice a year.
They can be divided into two categories.

Quasi-Absent Grandparents They were found across the sample. It is not

that they do not pay or get any visits, but their descendants are so numerous
that it is difficult for them to have privileged and individualized relationships
with every one of them. Eventually, it is difficult for them to plan anything
with or for them as in the previous cases. They function as a ‘spare tyre’ if
necessary.

Absent Grandparents In this case, they no longer see their grandchildren at

all after having broken up the relationships with their children and children-
in-law. They tend to belong to the popular classes, who have more difficulty
handling conflicts when relationship problems arise.
My son’s not very grateful to me. He’s got a 14-year-old son. When he left his
wife, he shacked up with a 23-year-old girl. I warned him, telling him that the
boy was soon going to become a young man. He answered that I didn’t like his
girlfriend, picked up his two children and things and I haven’t seen him again.
The grandparents’ point of view makes it possible to assess to what extent
the relationships examined are conditioned by prevailing family values. This
in turn determines a specific project and its implementation. Yet it should not
be assumed that grandparents from a given sociocultural environment all
behave in the same way. In this respect, the teenagers’ point of view makes it
possible to examine responses to the maternal and paternal sets of grand-
parents.
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The Grandchildren’s Point of View

One must be careful not to place all grandparents in the same boat. There is
a strong individualization of relationships, which can, if the case arises, lead
to the expression of preferences. The aim was thus to understand and bring
out the elements which lead to the presence or absence of preferences. The
approach is obviously coloured by responses to different types of grand-
parents.
First, the fact that grandparents get on well or don’t get on well with their
parents is fully internalized by the children. In a number of families, a
stronger affection of the women for their mothers is directly reflected in an
acknowledged preference for the maternal grandmother. In this case, it is not
unusual for the maternal line to function as an educational subcontractor,
provided it is not swamped with grandchildren. The paternal line can
possibly play this role but it is often because the maternal line is not avail-
able, or because there is a tension or even an open conflict within it. Whatever
the privileged line, the consequences are the same: eviction of the grand-
parents from the other line, both in the ‘privileged’ grandparents’ discourse
and in the teenagers’. So one can deduce that the grandparents acting as edu-
cational subcontractors are rarely put in competition with another model.
About these ‘teacher’ grandparents, the teenagers’ discourse is very closely
akin to their elders’. These young people see them as being more strict than
their parents and consider that they are their main teachers, which seems
legitimate to them since, according to them, grandparents are more experi-
enced than parents. In short, these young people have internalized as ideal
the way in which their grandparents behave:
My grandparents brought me up. It’s better that way because they have more
experience than my parents. They’re more strict.
In other families (often middle- or upper-class families), neither line plays
the role of educational subcontractor. Parents prefer turning to modes of
collective (or other) child minding because they consider that it is not up to
the grandparents to look after the grandchildren or to bring them up. In this
case, no preference is expressed. The grandparents are often of the club-type
and much appreciated. The young people see them as being ‘cooler’, more
‘relaxed’ than their parents. They consider that they are better at listening and
understanding. They are thus very powerful psychoemotional supports:
My grandmother makes me feel really valuable. Suppose I’ve just broken up
with a boyfriend, my grandmother always says: ‘Clever and beautiful as you
are, you’ll find plenty more as good as him!’ . . . My grandmother listens much
more than mum. She tries to give advice when something worries us.
Sometimes, she also says: ‘What’s wrong? I’ll take you out for an ice-cream!’
or ‘We’ll go to a restaurant.’ She always reminds me of the granny in the La
Boum movie.
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But the parents’ and thus the grandchildren’s preferences are not totally
unconnected to the grandparents’ social position. Where the maternal grand-
parents have a social position which is superior to that of the paternal grand-
parents, a real stigmatizing of the latter is noticed. The particularly spicy
example of this related by this girl speaks for itself:
They’re philistines. Besides, mum thinks so as well. When I go to their place,
it’s looking at each other or nothing. Moreover, their home is awful. So because
of these little things, I don’t really feel like going there. At least, with my
maternal grandmother, we do loads of things, we ride in her car and then we
talk about our adventures.
Here, we see to what extent a club-type model is opposed to a model whose
nature remains unknown as it is nipped in the bud. In the case where the
paternal grandparents have a social position which is superior to that of the
maternal grandparents, the latter are much less stigmatized than in the
previous case, even if a preference is clearly expressed for the first, who are
more club-type:
It’s true that my maternal grandmother is more of an old dear, that when I go
to her place, I ask her how she is and not much more. With my paternal grand-
mother, conversations are much more lively. She has travelled more and also,
she was an English teacher. I like them both, but differently.
It thus appears that maternal grandparents are more easily forgiven their
modest origins.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we can see how important the role played by parents (those
‘adults’ children’) is. They could be compared to level-crossing keepers
between the two extreme generations. In some cases they will grant ‘full
powers’ to their parents, in other cases they will prevent them from playing
any role. Grandparents then become passive. Recall the comment: ‘They’re
philistines. Besides, mum thinks so as well [and much before her daughter
did].’ But in other circumstances grandparents adopt an intermediary pose.

Notes

1 About the first three points, the interested reader will refer, among others, to
Bawin-Legros et al. (1995, 1997).
2 The PSBH, or Panel Study on Belgian Households, is a longitudinal databank under
the auspices of the University of Liege and the University of Antwerp. The data
used here are drawn from the survey conducted in 1999.
3 The Department of Family Sociology of the University of Liege has not escaped
that trend; see Clokeur et al. (1995).
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Gauthier: The Role of Grandparents 307

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