Invisible Care: An Urgent Call for Gendered Recognition of Grandmother Care

Introduction

Caregiving is a gendered activity, with women undertaking caring responsibilities more broadly across the lifespan for children, partners, and parents. Being outside the formal market sphere, this work lacks recognition, and is considered a “moral responsibility rather than a calculated exchange” (Folbre, 2002, p. 66). Women's unremunerated labour has been the subject of feminist analysis since the 1970s. Globally, women's unpaid care work is valued at $10.8 trillion per annum, three times the size of the highly valued technology industry; this work is “the ‘hidden engine’ that keeps the wheels of our economies, businesses and societies turning” (Oxfam, 2020, para. 2).

The detrimental effects of caregiving on women's finances are well-established in the literature (Gillen & Kim, 2009; Martin-Matthews, 2011). “The unequal burden of care work” (United Nations, 2022, para. 2) contributes to older women's financial insecurity and the lack of remuneration in the private sphere is largely responsible for single older women's housing insecurity (Darab & Hartman, 2013). Older women are more likely to rely on the age pension in retirement, with a higher proportion of single women over 60 in permanent income poverty, compared with single older men or couples (Feldman & Radermacher, 2016).

The contribution of grandmothers who provide non-custodial care (babysitting and child minding) for their grandchildren is well-accepted. The inequity is also evidenced: these grandmothers are 1.5 times more likely to provide regular care than grandfathers, who, in turn, are more likely to provide care when partnered (Craig & Jenkins, 2016). Grandmothers are responsible for domestic chores; grandfathers do recreational activities (Horsfall & Dempsey, 2015). However, there is a subset who provide full-time custodial care at a time when, for a variety of reasons, the child/children's parents are unable to do so. In South Africa, this has been largely precipitated by HIV/AIDS (Casale, 2011). In the United Kingdom, an estimated 162,400 children are cared for by kin (including grandparents), on a formal and informal basis (McGrath & Ashley, 2022). In the North American context, there is clear evidence of care by Latinx, Hispanic, and First Nations (see Fuller-Thomson, 2005) grandmothers. Stephens (2019) reports that, of the 2.7 million children in the care of a grandparent in the US, at least 60% of caregivers are grandmothers and 50% are African American.

This subset of grandmother carers – that is, grandmothers with full-time custodial care of their grandchild/ren – is the focus of this paper. This reflexive piece emerged from our individual and collective experiences as researchers on a 2017 ‘grandparent carer’ research project. Whilst conducting this research, we grappled with the noticeable absence of the gendered nature of grandparent-care in the literature, noticing that, although the majority of the research participants we read about were grandmothers, the use of the term ‘grandparent’ was ubiquitous. We were funded to map services and supports and our final research report, although identifying gendered poverty and the gendered division of care, did not specifically include a gendered analysis. Therefore, to meet our responsibility as social workers to conduct socially just research that advocates for “the equitable distribution of resources and wealth” (IFSW, 2018, para 13), we subsequently embarked upon this project. We were concerned that we, as researchers, were the “systemically privileged”, “complicit in the perpetuation of systemic injustice” (Applebaum, 2010, p. 2); accomplices in “part of the chain of events that leads to the wrong” (p. 121), which in this case is the invisibilisation and misrecognition of the salience of gender in scholarly and sector understandings of custodial grandparent-provided care.

This paper is an attempt to move beyond just acknowledging this complicity and to act by interrogating the literature; to shine a light on the gendered normalisation of care, where grandmothers’ care is unremunerated and unacknowledged labour performed by older women, and often poor women of colour. We present our analysis of a large body of international literature, using specific examples from the Australian context with which we are most familiar. We hold this literature in a database established in 2017 during the aforementioned grandparent carer research, which searched PsychInfo, Scopus, ProQuest, Google Scholar, Google, and Informit using the search terms Grandparent Carer, Grandcarer, and custodial Grandparent, with specifically focus on studies involving Grandcarers in rural and remote areas, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, people from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds, and people with disabilities and/or mental health issues. This database was used as a pre-existing dataset for the analysis conducted for this article, with additional hand searches conducted in subsequent years for articles specifically referring to gendered care. Authors 1 and 2 then examined what was and was not covered in the literature regarding the gendered aspects of grandparent care, via an inductive narrative review. Our narrative analysis was supported by our pre-existing familiarity with the literature in the database, and by iterative searching, reading, and discussion.

In our analysis we interrogated this literature to better understand how custodial grandmothers’ care work is normalised and rendered invisible. We found that, with a few exceptions, gender as a socio-political construct is generally absent alongside the invisibility of the unpaid labour provided. We argue that this absence reflects the dominant discourses in society that take for granted women's care work. Custodial grandmothering is a socially constructed experience, like mothering, and is located in the social and cultural fabric of society, subject to the normalised expectations and surveillance of intensive mothering. In previous work (Fernandes et al., 2021) we highlighted grandcarer vulnerability, inequity, and injustice, calling for “increased visibility and recognition” (p. 8); here, we focus more specifically on grandmothers’ gendered invisibility and the naturalisation of caregiving as women's work, inherent in accounts of “grandparenting” as a gender-neutral category. We draw on our work (and complicity) and that of others to explore the role researchers should play in highlighting inequity and injustice. We hope to unearth the reasons for this invisibilisation and resulting “life changing economic penalties” (Birchall & Holt, 2022, p. 9) and join calls for a revaluation of care work. We hope that by highlighting how grandmothers are rendered invisible as a specific gendered category in favour of the gender-neutral category of ‘grandparent’ we politicise and make calls for the recognition of this unpaid older women's labour.

Theoretical Framework

We start from a feminist post-structuralist ontology, in which language is accorded a pivotal role as a meaning-constituting system. We were concerned with the ways in which gendered identities are discursively constructed through language, yet often represented through literature and policy as fixed. We draw from theory on Epistemic Justice (Fricker, 2007), to better understand the discrimination experienced by custodial grandmothers. When marginalised groups are positioned in certain ways it undermines or downgrades their status as epistemic agents. We seek to address the “distinctive class of wrongs” (Fricker, 2017, p. 53), and correct the injustice that occurs when individuals are wronged in their capacity as knowers (Fricker, 2007).

Fricker (2007) identifies the different ways in which epistemological power can create or compound injustice, disempowerment, marginalisation, and oppression. Power can be lost or gained via hermeneutical injustice, whereby the knower (the subject) is empowered by their possession of knowledge, knowledge with, ideally, the language with which to articulate this knowledge, and a subjective position that carries some credibility from which to speak about this knowledge. In testimonial injustice, a subject is denied credibility or status when seeking to share their knowledge, including knowledge about what is happening to them. Many people subjected in this way also experience intersectional disadvantages, such as people, people with low socioeconomic status, people from minority groups (racial, sexual, geographic), and people with disabilities (O’Connor et al., 2019). Epistemic justice has real everyday effects for people who are impacted, adding to their marginalisation through lack of access to support services, for example. As we consider it in this article, epistemic injustice causes harm to grandmother carers by making them invisible in policy and service provision, and by silencing them and obscuring their needs.

Method

Our method involved reviewing the literature we had used in our Grandcarer report (Blundell et al., 2019) with this lens. Author 1 led an inductive narrative review focussed on the presence or absence of gender in discussions of grandparent care. The literature consisted of an Endnote library of over 300 items of peer reviewed and grey international literature. Author 1 conducted further literature searches beyond this database, specifically looking for references of inequity resulting from gender and care work, for explorations of grandmothers’ intersectional disadvantage and sociological explorations of grandmothers as older women experiencing such intersectional disadvantage. We searched specifically for articles with ‘grandmother’ in the title, expecting that these would most likely contain references to gendered care-labour. We broadened our search to the fields of critical and critical feminist gerontology. This literature was then closely read, searching for all articles with gender in the title or abstract and narrative analysis conducted with a careful eye on whether and how gender was mentioned or examined. We first provide a short overview of the literature to contextualise the ensuing interrogation. Findings are organised under six subheadings: choice; discourses of resilience and empowerment; grandparent as a euphemism for grandmother; description and explanation; disadvantage and intersectionality; and, noticeable gaps. In the discussion section we consider the broader complications, implications, and consequences of invisibilising gender in discussions on custodial care by grandmothers.

The Literature

The broad and extant literature highlight that grandparent custodial care is a growing phenomenon; the most prevalent group of out-of-home or kinship carers in Western society (Hayslip et al., 2019). In Australia, during 2020-21, 46,200 children were in formal out-of-home care, with 54% of these in relative/kinship care (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2018), a significant number of whom are grandparents. In the United States, 2.7 million custodial grandparents care for their grandchildren, representing 36% of all grandparents residing with their grandchildren (Kelley et al., 2021).

Irrespective of where and how the children come into their care, there is a significant impact on grandparents (Hayslip et al., 2019), including when compared with non-coresiding grandparents (Danielsbacka et al., 2022). This includes poor health experiences and outcomes (Di Gessa et al., 2016), a decline in mental health (Whitley et al., 2016), social isolation (Hillman & Anderson, 2019), financial stress (Davis et al., 2020), and risks of family violence due to “unravelling family circumstances” (Gair et al., 2019, p. 326) that precipitated the care.

Several cohorts are more vulnerable due to intersectional disadvantage. In Australia, the impacts of colonisation are significant, with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children over-represented in the care system and their grandmothers representing a significant majority of formal and informal kinship care (Senate Community Affairs Committee Secretariat, 2014). The impact of intergenerational trauma and the history of forcible removal of children (in Australia called ‘The Stolen Generations’) adds additional context to the complex stressors experienced. Aboriginal grandmothers have vociferously campaigned to reduce the number of children being placed in out-of-home care and argue for placement with Aboriginal families (Culpitt et al., 2018). African American and Hispanic grandparents are more likely than white grandparents to commence and maintain care of their grandchildren (Luo et al., 2012), often because of colonisation and segregation history, to protect grandchildren from entry into state care (Murphy et al., 2008). Canadian First Nations grandparents take on care to keep “the state's hands off” (Hill, 2016, p. 281), drawing on “their own experiences of cultural disruption to reinvest in the cultural health and well-being of their grandchildren” (Thompson et al., 2013, p. 55).

Overall, the existing literature is extensive and comprehensive, calling for increased support to address the caregiving ‘burden’ or the impact of care, from increasing awareness of the existence of grandparents as kin carers, to systemic advocacy for “universal kinship care support” (Kiraly et al., 2020, p. 97). Grandparents’ functionality as care providers is centralised; grandparents need to be supported so that they can provide good or better care, not because they are providing care that benefits the State and society, as reflected in the emphasis on the enhancement of grandparents’ parenting skills (see Hayslip et al., 2019).

Interrogating the Literature

We now revisit the literature with a gendered, post structuralist intersectional feminist lens oriented towards epistemic justice and recognition. Our intention is to explore the effects of discursive constructions that render invisible older women's unpaid work.

Bringing Gender Back into View

Thus far we have argued that, whilst there is some recognition of the pressure faced to take on care and of gaps in systems and structures, there is insufficient attention to the embodied gendered experience around decision-making and choice for this cohort of older women. We have established that caregiving, as gendered work is undertaken by older, often disadvantaged women, is also a neglected area. MacKenzie et al. (2011) note that 77% of Canadian grandparent carers are mainly single women for whom “the caring labour provided free of charge to the state by grandparents raising their grandchildren is an economic good that must be acknowledged and adequately supplemented with an integrated system of support” (p. 209). Grandmother's care enables mothers to meet their gendered moral care obligations; this extension of maternal care means that mothers can engage in paid work and maintain “idealised versions of child-rearing at the same time” (Hamilton & Suthersan, 2021, p. 1654). Grandmothers are influenced by the dominant discourse of intensive mothering, always putting the child/children first (Harman et al., 2022).

Cass (2007) positions grandparent care within a social care framework; she notes that custodial grandparents are more likely to be on government pensions or low incomes, and therefore experiencing social and financial strain, and nearly half of those grandfamilies consist of a lone grandparent, 93% of whom are grandmothers (p. 247). Many of these grandparents are Indigenous carers, largely due to the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle (which prioritises kinship child placements) being the preferred care strategy for Indigenous children which has been adopted in all Australian jurisdictions to address/redress harm committed under historical policies around child removal. Thus, kinship care placements need to be seen as embedded in the normative familial relations of care, invoking obligation and responsibility.

The broad interrogation of the literature has led us to some provocations; thus, rather than a presentation of ‘findings’, we pose some questions, for researchers and academics like us, for policymakers, service providers, and practitioners. We ask firstly, is misnaming grandmothering, as a form of older women's unpaid labour, for the more gender-neutral term grandparenting, a form of epistemic injustice? This slippage occurs in other fields as well. Maker and Bowman (2012) note that the Australian income support payment called ‘Carer Payment’ implies carers are men and women; they argue “By encouraging and supporting care by family members in the home in gender-neutral terms, income support policy obscures – or at least does not challenge – this gender inequality” (p. 436). Similarly, in the literature on ‘parenting,’ ‘parent’ or ‘parenting’ act as an all-encompassing gender-neutral substitute for ‘mother’; Daniel and Taylor (2006) highlight the replacement of “mother” with “parent” in UK policy documents on the topic of child neglect, despite in practice, a “gendered focus on mothers” (p. 426). Media coverage on the topic of food and obesity uses the term parent, but it is mothers who are held responsible; parenting is a ‘code for mothers’ who have ‘gendered responsibility’ for the provision of healthy food and preventing obesity (Zivkovic et al., 2010; see also Vaillancourt, 2015). Although magazine titles may seem more ‘inclusive’ by using the term “parent”, the three magazines on baby care analysed by Sunderland (2006) primarily addressed the mother, reproducing gendered care relations. The same can be seen in the literature on caring for children with disabilities (Bailey, 2007, p. 292). In all these settings, an ostensibly neutral word obfuscates, and obscures gendered labour.

What does this representation of grandparenting as a de-politicised, child-focused, and somewhat normalised parenting activity do? Who benefits? The misnaming of grandmothering as grandparenting is a form of epistemic injustice, specifically, wilful hermeneutical injustice, because ‘grandparenting’ suggests a gender-neutral activity. Hermeneutical injustice, according to Miranda Fricker (2007, p. 1) is when there is a gap in “collective hermeneutical resources”: the terms, concepts, and frameworks we use to understand the world are such that marginalised groups and individuals are unable to understand their experiences as injustices. It may also account for challenges discussing gendered care with grandmothers; the absence of a collective hermeneutical understanding of gendered care and the lack of appropriate concepts for grandmothers makes it difficult—or inconceivable—to articulate gendered caregiving experiences. Talking about ‘parenting’ is normative; therefore, grandmothers may be precluded from the knowledge production around gendered care; particularly older grandmothers, who may have grown up with gender norms that pushed the normativity of women as carers even further than today.

Recognition has traditionally been considered a relational phenomenon, with a subject and an ‘other’, where recognition or misrecognition impacts upon a person's experience of subjecthood or otherness (Honneth & Margalit, 2001). We hope that by raising the profile of this issue, the, perhaps inadvertent, rendering of grandmothers as invisible, might be resolved by calling upon the ethical obligations—particularly the ethical obligations of researchers and social workers—to ‘witness’ these inequalities and highlight them.

Additionally, the absence of interrogation of the ways in which the cultural contradictions of mothering are apparent in grandmothering is troubling. The culture of care around mothering involves mothers being, on one hand, independent and self-sufficient members of society, but on the other, always ‘there’ physically and emotionally. These expectations seem to exist for grandmothers, but the silence is deafening. Grandmothers undertake care as a relational activity to meet the need to “maintain, continue and repair our “world” so that we may live in it as well as possible” (Tronto & Fisher, 1990, p. 40). However, the limited attention to caring as a gendered activity leaves grandmothers invisible both in terms of figurative or metaphorical recognition and access to material resources (Fraser & Honneth, 2003). Despite being largely unrecognized work, providing care work can be a demanding task, and custodial grandmothers who provide this labour do so often without remuneration or appropriate support. As suppliers of emotional labour, they are expected to create a warm emotional climate for grandchildren care-receivers, often to the detriment of their own well-being (Hochschild, 1983). We see this in the literature: Simpson et al., (2017) identify grandmothers’ survival strategies such as ‘being strong’ and ‘self-sacrificing’ in the absence of appropriate social support. Sharon Hays (1996) speaks of the dominance of expert knowledge in influencing intensive mothering discourses; these inform the ideologies and practices of care and what constitutes ‘good care’. The message is conveyed via the literature's focus on parenting skills, “attitudes and practices” (Hayslip et al., 2019, p. 1). The ideology of intensive motherhood stands beside the ideology of the modern mother as an efficient producer: there is pressure on women to do more than ‘just be a mother’. In capitalist economies care in the home is undervalued in comparison to public work, with ‘stay at home mums’ viewed as “bludging” because society translates a task with no market value into a task with no value (Manne, 2005, p. 259). The gender revolution has resulted in a situation where women have emulated men, and both have taken on a modern capitalist role. Within an economic rationalist climate in which social welfare is denigrated, the normative (and often) tacit discourses of welfare dependency and intensive mothering result in grandmothers, as surrogate mothers, being expected to provide for their grandchildren financially, rather than be reliant on ‘handouts’ from the State.

Key Implications and Contributions

We have highlighted the absence of a politicised discussion of gendered care provided mainly by older women in the field of grandparent care. In ‘Of women born’, early in the text, Rich (1986) describes connotations of “fathering” a child as providing sperm, yet “mothering” is an ongoing act of care; we extend this to custodial grandmothers. Older people are already an invisible group, no longer considered ‘socially meaningful’ or of high social status (Honneth & Margalit, 2001; Inglehart, 2002). This is more so for custodial grandmothers, and society bears a collective responsibility, as do policymakers, to address both the invisibility of care provided by grandmothers and also the overall devaluation of older women who, as Freixas et al. (2012) says, experience “double standards of lack of prestige – women and old age” (p. 46), are invisible in the media (Edström, 2018), and experience gendered ageism, including disrespectful treatment in the health care system (Chrisler et al., 2016).

The de-politicisation and invisibility of grandmothers’ physical, emotional, cultural, psychological, and practical labour in the context of growing unpaid care provision reflects conservative discourses around ‘welfare dependency’, where requests for assistance are seen as ‘handouts’. We have argued that this invisibility and devaluation of grandmothers’ labour, in which we participated as researchers, serves the State and society well. As older women, grandmothers’ free labour is expected, normalised gender work. The added complexity of the labels of informal and formal care “align with other societal contracts and arrangements” and categories serve as “vehicles for transferring embedded discriminatory and/or unequal practices and processes” (Kovalainen, 2022, p. 60).

Grandmothers deserve epistemic justice and cultural and economic recognition (Fraser, 1995) of their labour through appropriate financial remuneration, and meaningful consideration of the multidimensional impact of their care work so that they are better provided for by the State and society they serve. The State and society benefit from their labour and the financial cost alone of replacing kin care with stranger care would be formidable. We have a moral and social responsibility to correct the many inequities, from the lack of financial remuneration for informal grandmothers, to the recognition of their caring status. This involves shifting from a focus on their functionality as caregivers to a recognition of the value of their labour. Given that the family is a key provider in the provision of welfare, the State has a responsibility to recognise this care and redistribute resources. Rather than an “ornamental intersectionality”, which fails to address “interlocking power structures” that create and sustain inequity, we need to create “an ethics of non-oppressive coalition-building and claims-making” (Bilge, 2013, p. 408).

So where does this leave us as social work researchers, responsible not only for the production of new knowledge but also for considering that our research will be used in attempts to solve societal issues, which includes caring “for the body of knowledge that societies can tap into for solving societal problems both today and in the future” (Felt et al., 2018, para. 1)? Researchers’ claims of “interpretive authority” (Mason, 2011, p. 295) means that our voices dominate, rather than those of disadvantaged groups. The individualised and almost disembodied representation of grandmothers in the literature results in a collective action point, being rendered both invisible and impossible. By rendering gender invisible in the body of grandparenting research, strategies and solutions for addressing these issues will in turn neglect gender, reproducing harm and epistemic injustice. As researchers, we need to challenge research that “reproduces inequality or causes epistemic injustice” (Koch, 2020), including our own, to advocate the implementation of the following strategies: recognising, reducing, and redistributing unpaid care work (Elson, 2017).