Grandparenting and Self-Rated Health Among Older Korean Women

An increasing number of older Korean women have played an important role in taking care of their grandchildren to help their adult children. This study investigates the effects of grandparenting on older women’ health in South Korea. Using the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging (N = 3,092), we estimated ordinal logistic regression models with lagged dependent variable to examine whether and how grandparenting type and transition and grandparenting intensity are associated with older women’s self-rated health. Results show that grandmothers who provide long-term nonresidential grandparenting have better self-rated health than grandmothers who are not engaged in grandparenting. Grandmothers caring for grandchildren in skipped-generation households or multigenerational households do not suffer from a deficit in health. Grandparenting intensity is not associated with grandmothers’ health. Our findings suggest that the implications of grandparenting for older women’s health may differ in different social and cultural contexts.