Grandparenting in rural China: A culture-centered approach (CCA) to understand economic inequality and rural labor change

Abstract

The large-scale rural-to-urban migration in China has resulted in separated families and left-behind family members in the countryside. Various socioeconomic changes took place in rural China’s daily life due to migration, which provides unique perspectives to understand the hidden costs of the national discourse on development. This study aims to reveal how rural grandparenting resulted from the uneven economic development between a Chinese city and a village. A dual-site ethnographic study was conducted in one Northern village and one Southern city. Interviews, focus groups, and participant observation were used to form methodological triangulation to understand how socioeconomic features have made grandparenting necessary. Instead of focusing only on grandparents' daily responsibilities of taking care of their grandchildren, we compared grandparents' and parents' views on the changes in grandparents' socioeconomic roles, feelings of loneliness, and economic independence, as well as grandchildren's socialization processes. The study showcases grandparenting as having a social significance larger than being individualized acts of family care.

Keywords

Culture children China culture-centered approach grandparenting

Introduction

Increased attention on grandparenting care has been witnessed internationally in recent studies (Buchanan and Rotkirch, 2018; Glaser et al., 2013; Tong et al., 2019). Such studies mainly concentrate on the physical health and mental health of caregiving grandparents (Fuller-Thomson et al., 2014; Langosch, 2012; Musil et al., 2013). Although some studies have started to look beyond health and mental health outcomes to understand grandparenting as a social phenomenon (Buchanan and Rotkirch, 2018; Glaser et al., 2013), the socioeconomic aspects of grandparenting are much less explored, let alone being integrated with health and mental health studies on grandparenting.

Yet, without understanding the socioeconomic aspects of grandparenting, our understanding of the impacts of grandparenting on grandparents' health and mental health misses the large picture of the socioeconomic roles that grandparents play in society. For instance, using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), Glaser et al. (2013) found that in places where costs of professional childcare were low, grandparents were more likely to engage in economic activities other than taking care of grandchildren. Instead, in areas where professional child care is expensive, grandparents are more likely to take the grandparenting roles. Thus, Glaser et al. (2013) showed that grandparents' roles in their families were on a sliding scale on the most needed aspects in the family economy. While Glaser et al.’s (2013) study implied that grandparenting has deep connections to social and economic aspects in a given society, such connections of grandparenting to their social and economic contexts are largely overlooked. To address this gap, we investigate how grandparents in a rural Chinese village are expected to be the primary caretakers of their grandchildren. We connect such grandparenting roles with the substantive socioeconomic differences between cities and the countryside.

This ethnographic study interviewed both parents working in a Chinese city and grandparents taking care of their grandchildren left behind in the countryside. By triangulating grandparents' experiences with parents' narratives, we examined the following research questions: 1) How do grandparents make meaning of their grandparenting experiences compared to their other socioeconomic daily activities? And 2) how do parents perceive grandparenting's functions? These two questions are vital in centralizing grandparenting in the socioeconomic changes of rural families in China's overall rural-urban development.

Literature review

Grandparenting in a psycho-biomedical framework

A growing number of studies have examined the health impact of grandparenting. While these studies contribute to the grandparenting literature from the perspectives of grandparents’ life pattern changes, caring tasks and gratifications, as well as mental and physical health, the biomedical framework that dominates such studies leaves socioeconomic factors of grandparenting much less explored. On the positive side, studies on grandparents’ health showed that grandparenting care adds to purpose in life (Langosch, 2012) and joy (Fuller-Thomson et al., 2014). On the negative side, grandparents considered caregiving resulting in physical issues such as fatigue, frustration, and physical health issues such as stomach and back pain (Grinstead, 2003) as well as mental health issues such as stress, depression, and anxiety (Mosby and Wamsley, 2012; Musil et al., 2013; Sands and Goldberg-Glen, 2004).

Studies on grandparenting have also focused on the strain, stress, and gratification. This scholarship's psychological framework clearly shows such concentrations: Role strain theory considers that individuals have multiple social roles, and these roles necessarily add responsibilities and strains to individuals' tasks and demands (Emick and Hayslip, 1999; Goode, 1960). The stress process model considers the formation of chronic stressors that become harmful to health (Hayslip et al., 1998; Pearlin, 1989; Pearlin et al., 2008; Szinovacz et al., 1999). The role enhancement theory posits that multiple roles might lead to improved well-being, given the social integration and gratification from their various social roles (Moen et al., 1995). Importantly, the stress of increased demands likely linked to multiple roles can be offset by the increased social support from intersections of roles (Szinovacz and Davey, 2006). Musil et al. (2009) used the Resiliency Model of Family Stress, Adjustment, and Adaptation to see how the demands of grandchildren's care influenced the grandmothers' mental health. They found that “less family stress and strain, and greater support and resourcefulness contributed to better mental health across caregiver groups, although family life stress did not contribute to depressive symptoms for the non-caregiver group” (p. 8). Grandparents' health is also found negatively correlated with the grandchildren's behavior issues (Leder et al., 2007). These models and theories typically demonstrate micro levels of foci, such as roles played within families and their consequences. However, larger social forces and power dynamics are usually missing from these models.

A few exceptions, though, have positioned the understanding of grandparenting in more extensive socio-political settings. For instance, Bordone et al. (2017) argued that societies with scarce public child care services and parental leave have higher demands for grandparenting. As such, their study linked grandparenting to a large-scale social division of labor and expanded our views on the social nature of grandparenting. In a similar vein, Aassve et al. (2012) concluded that grandparenting had positive impacts on mothers' participation in the labor force. If we compare the focus of this intellectual endeavor with the focus of stress and resilience models, it is clear that despite the often-claimed stress that grandparenting has on grandparents, the family role of grandparenting takes a new look when we look beyond the family and into the social formation and demand of grandparenting as an economic institution of the labor force.

Turning to look at the social construction and labor demand would promptly show different social impacts on grandparenting's social roles and meanings in life. For instance, while studies in some European nations and China have generally suggested that grandparenting contributes to middle generations' labor force participation, they differ substantially on the benefits that grandparenting can bring to grandparents (Arpino and Bordone, 2014). Arpino and Bordone’s (2014) study suggests that grandparenting pays off because childcare can positively affect grandparents' cognitive functioning. However, studies in China stated that “even a low level of child care involvement has a negative effect on health level when one is combining work and care,” suggesting that not grandchild care alone, but more of the role conflict results in adverse effects on health (Chen and Liu, 2012: 109). Furthermore, while most of the grandparenting in the US reported negative correlations between caring tasks and grandparents' health, a study using the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging (N = 3,092) suggests that “grandparenting intensity is not associated with grandmothers' health” (Choi and Zhang, 2018: 911). Notably, the authors asserted that the effects of grandparenting on grandmothers' health might differ through different social and cultural contexts (Choi and Zhang, 2018). The above studies suggest that particular national, social, and cultural structures and practices in which grandparenting functions may lead to different social effects.

Differences in such empirical results, conducted within different national and local contexts, cannot be sufficiently explained without looking at a locale with its connections to social and cultural practices of care in general and grandparenting care in particular. Such international and interregional differences suggest gaps in our understanding of how grandparenting roles in different societies can be better understood when we go beyond theories that only focus on family dynamics and incorporate the understandings of grandparenting's social demand. The specific focus on grandparenting's health and mental health seldom considers grandparenting within the larger social and economic context that necessitates grandparenting as a socially constructed way of being. Missing social and economic contexts is unfortunate because such contexts can be specific to different societies. Therefore, they can help explain the well-studied health issues and may inform culture-specific solutions.

Background

Social economic transitions in China as contexts of rural grandparenting

The urban development in China produced a need for internal migrants from its rural areas is no news. The soaring prices of city housing, living expenses, and the Household Registration System have prevented most migrants’ children from living in the cities where their parents work. Established in 1958, the Household Registration System, or Hukou, serves as a resource allocation and population control system (Chen and Selden, 1994). Its primary function was to keep the rural-to-urban migration in tight control so that urban resources such as education, employment, and social welfare that were closely connected to employment could be allocated to city dwellers, thus forming a polity basis legitimizing the rural-urban inequality in China.

Hukou requires parents to register a new-born to rural or urban residence depending on the family residence. Working together with the land distribution system in rural areas and the employment system in cities, Hukou effectively controlled rural-to-urban migration and urban-to-urban mobility in the 1960s and 1970s (Chan, 2010). However, the problems of population immobility became more evident in the 1980s and 1990s when China’s newly installed market economy incentivized the coastal areas with mushrooming private companies and factories to absorb the international investment (Knight et al., 2010; Murphy, 2002; Ngai and Lu, 2010). The number of migrant workers increased in the 1980s. In 1989, the rural-to-urban migrant workers approximated at 30 million (Scheineson, 2009). In 2016, 277 million Chinese rural migrants worked in cities (Chan and Selden, 2017). However, the economic and political reform that started in the 1970s “had only a very marginal impact on weakening the foundation of the [hukou] system” (Chan and Buckingham, 2008: 605). Together with other systems, Hukou still constrains peasant workers’ integration to cities (Tyner and Ren, 2016). In general, the often-acclaimed GDP growth rates are narrated in the discourse of development by both Chinese and Western researchers. Such dominant discourse of development subdues the voices on the hidden costs of family separation. Examining the formation of grandparenting in such a national institutional change of labor formation and labor migration offers an opening to ventilate the subdued voices on the hidden costs of development.

The traditional value associated with old people is also on the decline in the countryside. In China, with the traditional collective culture and extended family, caring for grandchildren had traditionally been practiced and been regarded as “the way it is” since parent generation is expected to take care of grandparent generation under the Confucius concept of filial piety. Thus, even before the large-scale internal migration, rural grandparents have played an essential role in helping raise children. However, with more young parents migrating to cities to work, many grandparents have become the sole caretakers of grandchildren. The internal migration, resulting from large-scale urbanization in South and East China and uneven development between rural and urban areas, has created 69.7 million left-behind children to be solely cared for by grandparents in rural China (Tong et al., 2019). Not only are grandparents’ caring roles changed with the migration, but their roles in the family and farm economy have also changed structurally. However, the latter part of such role changes has been largely missing from literature on grandparenting.

The growth in the number of grandparenting in the Western society has been studied as a social and cultural phenomenon, in terms of population changes, grandparents’ role changes, social-cultural changes, and changes in grandparenting effects on different family members (Buchanan and Rotkirch, 2018). However, seldom have such studies paid attention to how grandparents perceive their grandparenting experiences in comparison with other experiences that they have, nor have they critically connected such meanings made through grandparenting experiences with other family members’ views of grandparenting. Addressing these two aspects of grandparenting together forms a critical stance that links the experiences of grandparenting, as intergenerational views, with a nationally existing socioeconomic framework through which specific aspects of grandparenting, such as health impacts of grandparenting, can be revisited and alternative explanations found.

Theoretical framework

The Culture-Centered Approach (CCA) was developed in health communication as a critical approach to inquire about and critique the power structure. It draws from critical theoretical heritages as diverse as ethnic studies, postcolonial theory, subaltern studies, and critical health studies. It was also informed by Marxist theory and critical cultural studies on the importance of political economy and culture (Dutta, 2008). As a starting point, CCA takes as its presumption that power imbalances exist in any social issues as lived experiences. Such power imbalances usually are reified social structures, so CCA studies “the role of social structures in constraining the life experiences of the underprivileged classes” (Dutta, 2008: 9).

Thus, at the onset of CCA theorization, health is taken as a power-embedded social location and process. The examination of health both necessitates the investigation of the power structures that inform social inequality and provides a channel for such investigation. As a result of such a dialectical process of going beyond narrowly-defined health as only conditions, or lack of conditions, of illness and diseases, CCA typically dives into larger social, political, and economic structures to pin down the structures in which health as a narrowly-defined bio-medical term is positioned. CCA as a research approach can thus investigate health by tracing into different social locations and processes seemingly unconnected with health as a bio-medical concept per se.

CCA centralizes culture by questioning “the universal narratives of healthcare embedded within the biomedical model” (Dutta, 2008). Exploring grandparenting's cultural meanings carries significance because

[the] locally situated nature of health communication processes has become particularly relevant in the context of a growing awareness of the diverse ways in which meanings of health and illness are constituted in diverse societies and cultures. (Dutta, 2008: 1)

The influences of postcolonial theory and subaltern studies are clear in that it asserts the potential importance of differences in meanings as having its own cultural and social legitimacy. While such a sensitivity to different forms and contents of meanings is pegged against the Western predominance on what health means, it does not simply stop taking these meanings in othered cultural spaces as a given. Instead, while it acknowledges the importance that meanings of health can take different forms in different societies, it also investigates how power structures have socially constructed local experiences.

CCA attempts to link meanings with social structures. A structure can be viewed in two ways. First, the structure is defined as an internalized cognitive and value entity in which “the nature of how and what we communicate about health is embedded in our taken-for-granted assumptions about what it means to be healthy [and] … ill, and how we approach disease and illness” (Dutta, 2008: 2). Second, it refers to the external social organizations, processes, and systems in any given society and how they function and influence individuals. Both ways of viewing social structures help CCA to “create a space of conceptualizing the ways in which structure constrains human agency and the ways in which it facilitates the enactment of human agency” (Dutta, 2008: 62).

Although CCA was initially devised in health communication, its intent to diversify interpretations is transferrable into other fields. In this study, we examine the meanings of grandparenting by following not only grandparents’ meaning-making processes but also the parents’ in order to show how socioeconomic structures can be connected to the narrations. Unlike theoretical frameworks that isolate macro- from micro-levels of events, the contribution that CCA makes in particular is to link the mundane everyday experiences of grandparenting as narrated with the structural imbalances between rural and urban China. As such, this CCA-informed ethnographic study aims to use grandparenting as a lens to look at both the grandparenting experiences and different expectations of grandparenting by both grandparent and parent generations under the context of internal rural-to-urban migration.

Methods

Derived from a larger project that aimed at exploring the daily tasks, labor, access to health of elders in the countryside after their adult children left the countryside homes to work in cities, this study selected data from axial coding that showed grandparents’ laboring activities, including care for grandchildren and their reasoning on grandchildren. Such a selection of data forms a meaning-making process that showcases both grandparents' daily experiences and China's social structure.

Two sites were selected for the field research. One was in Nansha District of Guangzhou city, and the other was Fukong (pseudonym) village, Shaanxi Province in North China. The city was chosen after the first author communicated with three migrant parents in cities through personal connections. The selection was based on whether the site had a larger group of working parents from the same rural area in China and whether migrant workers had young children left behind in the countryside. Three migrant parents in Nasha district were from an area within 6-kilometerradius in their hometown in North China. One migrant parent recommended another three migrant parents from the same hometown.

The village in Shaanxi Province was at the center of the small area where these six migrant parents' homes were located. It was also selected because the majority of the households had at least one adult that had migrated to cities to work. Specifically, of its 126 households, 121 families had at least one family member working in cities. The first author grew up in the village and could draw more contextual connections for research and had the social connections essential to conduct in-depth interviews and focus groups. These factors converged for the choice of the two sites.

Data collection

The culture-centered approach (CCA) as a theoretical approach has its ways to organize data and analysis. It typically builds a community-based advisory board with local people and researchers to inform, discuss, and interpret the data collected both within and outside the board. The data were collected over two years from September 2012 to August 2014. The first author spent 11 days in Nansha District and later visited the village three times, in January 2012, July 2013, and August 2014, altogether spending eight months in the village. The present study used semi-structured interviews and focus-group discussions for data collection. It asked three key questions: 1), what does health mean to you? 2), what resources and barriers do you have for accessing healthcare? 3), what do you think can be done to make changes? Each question, given its openness, was supported by following-up questions such as, “can you elaborate on that?” “Can you give me an example of what you just said?” “Who was involved in it?” “What happened at the time?” “What does the example/experience mean to you and others close to you?” “Anything you would like to see different?” These follow-up questions aimed to yield detailed descriptions and story-telling from participants. When these follow-up questions opened new threads of experiences, more questions would be asked for clarification to provide detailed accounts of the interviewees' narratives.

All the interviews, small group discussions, advisory board discussions, and decision-making processes were audio-recorded. After each interview, the first author immediately took down field notes. In total, 70 interviews and 12 focus groups with 6 to 12 participants were conducted for the large project. Of the interviews, 24 were migrant workers (eight female and 16 male) from their 20s and early 40s who had returned home during the Chinese spring festival or the harvesting season. Also, 39 participants in their 60s to 80s (13 female and 26 male) participated in interviews and focus groups. Besides, two local doctors, two village officials, and three county officials (all male) were interviewed to explore the government resources related to elderly healthcare. The interviews lasted from 45 to 90 minutes, and the focus group sessions from 60 to 120 minutes.

Data analysis

The field researcher translated all the interviews and open-coded 10 interviews. The same interviews were open-coded by another coder who also grew up in rural China. Codes were compared, discrepancies were discussed, and agreed principles were used to open code the remaining interviews and focus-group transcripts. Then the field researcher open-coded all the rest interviews. Selective and axial coding were performed referring to the field notes. The resulted categories were regrouped into several more general themes for different writing projects. Two of the themes, on the meanings of structure and the local healthcare insurance system, have been published (Dutta and Sun, 2017; Sun and Dutta, 2016). The current study is based on the grandparenting experiences from both parents' and grandparents' perspectives. The paper selected six parents interviewed in Nansha District of Guangzhuo (N = 6) and 18 grandparents who participated in either interviews or focus groups in Fukong (N = 18). All grandparents included in the study were taking care of at least one grandchild at the fieldwork time. Any interviewee who also participated in focus groups counted only as one interviewee, and the transcribed data were positioned under the same pseudonym for analysis.

Results

Daily tasks of living for grandparents

With the large-scale migration of the parent generation, daily tasks of farming and housing are shifted to grandparents besides their grandparenting duties. Such duties, increasingly tenuous to the aging grandparents, have both a local context of demands and a national labor migration context. For instance, in Fukong village, the water shortage has been a problem for more than 20 years. To solve the problem, the village head asked each family to build an underground concrete water tank in their front yard or inside their houses to store either rainwater or water from the communal well, which has an intermittent water supply. When neither is available, carting water from nearby villages is needed. With the parent generation moving to cities, carting water became the task for grandparents. One parent working in a city stated:

Last time I called [my countryside] home and my mother answered the phone. She told me that she “went to fetch water home.” The cart holds a petroleum burro repurposed to carry 60 gallons of water, and it takes about two hours for my father and mother to go to another village to get water and come back. My Gosh, he’s almost 65 years old and still does such hard labor.

This statement suggests that grandparenting involves tasks much broader than caring for grandchildren under the existing social and material contexts. What is often taken for granted in the developed industrial society as basic living standards constitutes daily tasks of labor in other cultures. And with labor migration, the resulting shift of tasks includes changing grandparents’ respite care of grandchildren into full guardianship. It also includes reshuffling tasks necessary for household economic and social functioning. Included in this list of changed tasks that grandparents need to manage now are transportation of human waste and household stock manure to the field, crop irrigation, farm pest spraying, and other farm work, cooking, and household maintenance. While it is important to note that the shortage of water mentioned in the village we interviewed might be an exception, it is common that task shifting in different rural areas in China after the parent generation working in cities has much broader social and everyday contents.

Grandparenting as socialization through a changed social network

Shifts are not restricted to physical tasks; social relationships are essential dimensions of the transitions. One theme that emerged from our study is the shift of grandchildren’s social relationship affiliation. As one city-working parent shared, their child was emotionally detached from them when they went back home to visit:

After being away from home for too long [almost two years], then our kid does not even accept us and come to us. When we call them over the phone, she would still call us Daddy and Mommy. But when we are back home and want to hold her, she will not come to us. The last time we were home, our daughter was two, and she would not come to us … . My wife became so hurt and felt so guilty about all this.

Such emotional distance with parents is echoed by some grandparents as well. According to grandparents, it becomes more common for grandchildren to have closer relationships with relatives on grandma’s side instead of mother’s side. They suggested that since grandchildren lived with them, they tend to associate with grandmother’s relatives more than their mother’s relatives. In a focus group discussion with all grandparents participated, one grandparent’s view was unanimously agreed by other grandparents:

Now many little kids are not close to their mother’s parents and relatives but are very close to their grandma’s relatives. This is because grandmas will visit their relatives with grandchildren while mothers are out in cities to work.

Such views from grandparents’ interviews did not appear in parents’ interviews. However, parents who had their children living with them in cities during school holidays or before primary schools have generally expressed municipalities as having more and better opportunities for kids to socialize beyond family’s social relationships. In such cases, parents mentioned socialization opportunities such as attending their company parties and outings in cities that are not available in the countryside when they lived with grandparents.

Because, in here [meaning in the city], my son had the chance to be together with his parents and go to many different social settings, he became more extroverted. The company can organize outings for workers, and there are workers that I cannot recognize. But my son has become so extroverted that he would approach these guys to talk with them. My parents both noticed this change after he went back. That was when I realized that my parents might be a bit overprotective of him in everyday life.

The change of social relationship for grandchildren in the context of grandparenting also shows that the impacts of changing parenting to grandparenting include aspects beyond household caring activities. Grandparenting includes more than caring actions. It also consists of social networks, daily accommodation and disciplining, and family education that may expose grandchildren to different socialization processes. In China, under the context of rapid social change, the effect of rural grandparenting as a socialization process is likely to have a far-fetching impact on grandchildren.

Grandparenting through affection

Data show that parents' views on grandparents converged that grandparenting was not necessarily the best option for kids. Grandparents being too lenient to grandchildren and lack of teaching and disciplining are the most common reasons by parents. While such common views show clear differences between grandparenting and parenting, lack of teaching and disciplining cannot be regarded as verifiable problems of grandparenting. Instead, it may be possible that parents' views are biased towards education and strict disciplines. One parent expressed his opinions about grandparenting that most parent participants shared. When asked on what advantages grandparenting can have for kids, he stated,

Not necessarily advantages. Grandparents will love the kids too much, and the kids will not be very well disciplined. My father considers that the wilder the kids are, the more capable they will grow to be. My wife is not very patient with the kid and cannot tolerate my son's misbehavior. So, the kid [when he lives with us] can be punished by her.

Another parent confirms grandparents’ lenience or lack of discipline in raising grandchildren:

Grandparents tend to do so. Whatever seems to be a bit risky to them, they would stop kids from doing it. And when kids want something, grandparents tend to try their very best to satisfy them.

One example from one peasant worker tells how far an extent the situation can go for grandparents' tolerance to their three-year-old son's misbehavior: “[They would believe] grandchildren are always right, for our parents. Even if kids slap them in face, they would still smile.” Grandparents almost unanimously confirm such leniency in grandparenting in laterinterviews.One grandparent stated openly,

I do not have the heart to discipline my grandchildren as I did for their fathers. For their fathers, I was very strict and forceful. For them, I would want to play with them more. My wife insisted that I needed to be tougher because “you are spoiling your grandchildren.” But when I think about my peers, they seem to have treated their grandchildren as lenient. Everyone seems to be like me.

Terms such as lack of discipline” “too much leniency” that frequently appear in parents' interviews are explained in grandparents' interviews as “love” and “joy.” The above-quoted grandparent also framed his account of grandparenting in both terms of generational differences, such as being stricter as a father but more lenient as a grandfather, and possibly in terms of social expectations for grandparenting, as in “people's heart changes when it comes to grandchildren.”

It is worth noting that although most parents considered the lack of discipline from grandparenting to be accurate, they were not unanimous in considering the lack as detrimental to the children's growth. At least one parent believed that such grandparenting provides a more accessible environment and may help children develop more confidence in their personality:

When parents raise kids, they tend to be stricter than when grandparents raise kids. Thus, kids raised by parents might lack confidence. You can see that the firstborn usually has a more reserved character and is more conservative than the second kid. It is because the firstborn is usually raised with stricter rules and discipline from their parents.

These generally convergent views from both parents' and grandparents' generations, not without their respective nuances, altogether draw a picture of common themes with rich shades: While both generations agree that grandparents are more lenient to the grandchildren generation, parents tend to view such leniency as a lack in answering to the demands of contemporary society. However, grandparents frame such grandparenting features as a comparable trait of other grandparents in the village and as a feature of a development stage in their lives.

Furthermore, while grandparents agreed on the importance of teaching and disciplining, their views differ from parents'. For instance, one grandparent suggested that his two primary school grandchildren learned from TV series about the Japanese invasion in China during WWII and considered the TV series as providing quality educational information for grandchildren. However, parents' views of teaching and disciplining are more inclined to monitor the process of finishing schoolwork and help kids preview and review school work content, a task that grandparents are generally not capable of doing.

Grandparenting in the context of family economy

According to parents, grandparenting can appease the grandparents' loneliness otherwise experienced if the children move to live with their parents in cities. Parents generally agree that raising grandchildren diverts grandparents' attention from the farm to grandchildren. One parent stated,

My parents often feel lonely. I feel that when my son stays at home [in the countryside], my mother seems to have better health. Taking care of my son means that she cannot do hard farm work and might thus keep her from overly spending her energy. Without my son, she will go to the field to do farm work and can easily get injured or fall ill.

The shift of concentration from farming to grandparenting is confirmed by other parents, when another parent stated,

When the grandchildren are at home, they prioritize our parents' schedule. Our parents will take less care of the farm work, weeds, or anything. Our parents are happy too when grandchildren are around them, even if that means unattended crops on the farm [so that might prevent our parents from overworking themselves.]

While grandparents confirm the priority shifts, such shifts do not necessarily mean lighter work according to grandparents: One point is that grandparenting represents different types of work and it is not necessarily lighter. The other is that grandparents do not drop farming as parents would like to believe. The tasks shifted from grain farming to other economic activities. In the village, many have started to raise goats and pigs.

In the village, grandparents usually quit farming by renting the farmland out to the emerging farming companies at 4,000 yuan per acre per year (roughly $600 per acre). At a per capita land of .16 acres in the village. One acre of land is the typical total acreage of a six-member family. Apart from sustenance grain production, the profit margin over such a small acreage is minimal. Renting it out and raising farming animals on the house stead offers a slightly more lucrative and labor-saving alternative.

Although the parent generation tends to consider grandparenting to be good for grandparents' health since the presence of grandchildren can appease their feeling of loneliness, only some grandparents identify loneliness as the chief reason for grandparenting. Instead, they consider grandparenting in terms of the family's overall economic security and development. One grandparent emphasized that the middle generation must go out and work: “Since my wife and I can support ourselves and take care of the grandchildren, what they can earn can be saved, and that is how [inter-]generational development happens.” Clearly the role of grandparenting is set in a larger strategy of division of labor so that parent generation can be more stably positioned as the labor force.

In addition to the narrative that portrays grandparenting as an essential way to contribute to the parent generation's work, some grandparents directly refute loneliness as the explanation of their grandparenting choices. One grandparent considered that instead of feeling lonely, he thinks that the family relationship becomes much more straightforward. He stated,

What do I feel about the empty nest? I feel so happy about it and so natural with it. I can live with ease and not feel restrained by my role – that is the best way of life. There are fewer conflicts and complaints now.

He further explained that the relationship could have become strained when the three generations lived under the same roof. Now, with his sons and daughters-in-law working in cities, things are different:

Now without them [the sons and daughters-in-law] around, we do feel so natural about the freedom we can enjoy. If the conversation is between my wife and me, then, even if we said something wrong, neither would overthink about the hidden meanings. Such a straightforward relationship is excellent.

Contrary to the parent generation’s consideration that grandparenting is beneficial to grandparents’ health, the actual reasons might be that the more direct familial relationship constitutes a more relaxed everyday living environment for grandparents and a shifting local economy in the national development scheme.

Discussion

The present study is the first one to use the Culture-Centered Approach (CCA) in social work field to examine grandparenting as a social institution in rural China. We interviewed both parent generation working in a Southern city and grandparent generation in a Northern Chinese village to yield triangulated perspectives on grandparenting. First, grandparenting is connected to the shift of the rural economic forms as often the subdued voices in the nation’s turn to market economy and adevelopment discourse. Grandparents' daily tasks changed within a changed national economic scheme which caused parent generation’s migration. Grandparents’ changes in everyday practices are often untold stories overshadowed bydominant development discourses.

Second, as a social institution, grandparenting functions as a different socialization process for the grandchildren than parenting. Grandchildren's alienation from their parents, closeness to grandparents' social network, and other differences between the countryside and rural environments contain different factors that affect grandchildren's socialization processes. The long-term effects of such different socialization are yet to be explored.

Third, grandparents' economic activities through alternative farming result from both the grandparents' demands and a changing social-economic environment in rural China. Their shifts from grain farming to small-scale animal farming show their ingenuity in reestablishing a working and caregiving balance. Speaking the attitudes towards grandparenting, grandparent's shift of priority from farming to grandparenting tasks is interpreted by parent generation as out of love for grandchildren and loneliness. However, grandparents framed the cause of the shift of priority in the low profit in traditional farming and in the importance of their self-reliance and family overall economic development. Supporting parent generation and maintaining financial independence are two intertwined themes of changes in grandparenting. However, while most grandparents in our study considered it essential for them to be economically independent and support the parent generation through grandparenting, the importance of grandparents' efforts in economic independence was not recognized by the parents we interviewed. Such changes are connected to a national migration of the labor force and the traditional family values of collectivism. In other words, grandparenting as a social institution can be seen as a national neoliberalism development scheme’s exploitation on the traditional collectivism family values, ties, and senses of family duties and responsibilities.

Fourth, while parents’ generation usually considers leaving their children to grandparents beneficial to grandparents’ health by reducing their loneliness, grandparents appear to be less prone to feel lonely than assumed by the parents’ generation. The grandparent generation’s narratives show that while grandparenting might be beneficial to grandparents, parent generation leaving the family can help grandparents as well because of the resulting simple family relationship. The health benefits for grandparents mentioned in other studies (Fuller-Thomson et al., 2014; Langosch, 2012) might derive from better family economic prospects and more direct intergenerational relationships without the middle generation involved in everyday life. The benefits might also come from the more general purposes of supporting the family instead of purely grandparenting experiences. Thus, grandparenting as a social institution to grandparents serves to mediate family value changes.

More generally, grandparenting in rural China constitutes an essential part of perpetuating social inequality between rural and urban China. Within such social inequality, rural grandparenting forms a vantage point to critique the imbalances of social resources. More importantly, since grandparenting becomes part of the children’s differentiated socialization process and growing up memories, the impacts to children and society are likely to be long-term.

The present study went beyond the previous research by showing grandparents flexibly adjust their caregiver tasks and duties to maintain their financial capability. Our results are consistent with findings of previous studies that grandparents in rapidly developing countries are “family maximizers [by] allowing adult children to take advantage of expanding labor markets and acquire resources from which all generations in the family benefit” (Silverstein and Cong, 2013: 46).

Limitations and future studies

The unique contributions of the present study rest on the perspective of viewing grandparenting not as only a health issue, but as socioeconomic issue that is linked to a national development discourse and structural changes as mediated in the formation of grandparenting in its present manifestations. However, this unique perspective could have been better supported if the following limitations had been resolved.

First, although this study included both grandparents' and parents' voices on the roles of grandparenting in the family dynamics, the grandchildren's voices were not included in the data collection phase; therefore, future research on the roles of grandparenting in rural China can include grandchildren's voices.

Second, further explorations on grandparents' productive labor is an important direction to situate grandparenting better. Different from the urban elderly population, grandparents in rural China do not have a pension or a clear-cut retirement age and remain in the productive labor force for much longer in life. However, because of the lack of formal records on farm work and household maintenance, such data on grandparents' labor other than grandparenting care is often missing.

Third, this study is based on one Chinese village and migrant workers in one city, with an overall small size of research participants and even smaller parent generation size. Future studies can keep including both generations' voices while expanding sampling sizes, using multiple sites, and conducting longitudinal studies of grandparenting.

Conclusion

Grandparenting can be critically viewed as a social institution established at the social and historical moments of intersections between a national progress discourse and its rural costs, between parent generation serving as a nationally circulated labor force and the reshuffle of grandparents’ family roles, between a fast-paced urbanization and industrialization process in cities and a much blighter rural economy. Grandparenting can also dialectically be viewed as older adults socially and structurally determined intersections with grandchildren when the social roles of parenting are absent.

Such social alternatives can include the following: In terms of long-term development, the socially imbued roles of grandparenting in rural China can change if the peasant workers' social isolation from urban life can be improved, or if the support systems for grandparents and grandchildren in rural China can change, or if the differences between rural and urban China will change in a national scale so that the currently existing unequal conditions that make the large-scale increase of grandparenting can be eliminated by a more equal footing on citizenship. These are significantsocial structural differences from a sociological perspective. However, grandparenting's double nature as both a family issue and a large-scale social issue might indicate that large-scale social changes can be devised by examining small-scale changes. Thus, shifting the understanding of grandparenting from a bio-medical health issue to a socioeconomic construct expands the potentiality of examining social and economic structural issues through the unique positionality of grandparenting.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study received the Office of the Provost funding from the National University of Singapore.

ORCID iD

Kang Sun

References

Aassve

Arpino

Goisis

(2012) Grandparenting and mothers’ labour force participation: A comparative analysis using the generations and gender survey. Demographic Research 27(3): 53–84.

Arpino

Bordone

(2014) Does grandparenting pay off? The effect of childcare on grandparents’ cognitive functioning. Journal of Marriage and Family 76(2): 337–351.

Bordone

Arpino

Aassve

(2017) Patterns of grandparental child care across Europe: The role of the policy context and working mothers’ need. Ageing and Society 37(4): 845–873.

Buchanan

Rotkirch

(2018) Twenty-first century grandparents: Global perspectives on changing roles and consequences. Contemporary Social Science 13(2): 131–144.

Chan

(2010) The household registration system and migrant labor in China: Notes on a debate. Population and Development Review 36(2): 357–364.

Chan

Buckingham

(2008) Is China abolishing the hukou system? The China Quarterly 195: 582–606.

Chan

Selden

(2017) The labour politics of china’s rural migrant workers. Globalizations 14(2): 259–271.

Chen

Liu

(2012) The health implications of grandparents caring for grandchildren in China. The Journals of Gerontology Series B Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 67(1): 99–112.

Chen

Selden

(1994) The origins and social consequences of China’s Hukou system. The China Quarterly 139: 644–668.

10.

Choi

Zhang

(2018) Grandparenting and self-rated health among older Korean women. Research on Aging 40(10): 911–932.

11.

Dutta

(2008) Communicating Health: A Culture-Centered Approach. Malden, MA: Polity.

12.

Dutta

Sun

(2017) Complex structures: Meaning formation amid china’s new rural cooperative medical scheme. International Journal of Communication 11: 1618–1634.

13.

Emick

Hayslip

(1999) Custodial grandparenting: Stresses, coping skills, and relationships with grandchildren. International Journal of Aging & Human Development 48(1): 35–62.

14.

Fuller-Thomson

Serbinski

McCormack

(2014) The rewards of caring for grandchildren: Black Canadian grandmothers who are custodial parents, co-parents, and extensive babysitters. GrandFamilies: The Contemporary Journal of Research, Practice and Policy 1(1): 4–31.

15.

Glaser

Price

Ribe Montserrat

, et al. (2013). Grandparenting in Europe: Family policy and grandparenting in providing childcare: Summary. Grandparents Plus. Available at: www.grandparentsplus.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/EU-report-summary.pdf (accessed 5 May 2021).

16.

Goode

(1960) A theory of role strain. American Sociological Review 25(4): 483–496.

17.

Grinstead

Leder

Jensen

, et al. (2003) Review of research on the health of caregiving grandparents. Journal of Advanced Nursing 44(3): 318–326.

18.

Hayslip

Shore

Henderson

, et al. (1998) Custodial grandparenting and grandchildren with problems: Their impact on role satisfaction and role meaning. The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 53B(3): S164–S174.

19.

Knight

Deng

(2010) The puzzle of migrant labour shortage and rural labour surplus in China. Unpublished paper, Oxford: University of Oxford.

20.

Langosch

(2012) Grandparents parenting again: Challenges, strengths, and implications for practice. Psychoanalytic Inquiry 32(2): 163–170.

21.

Leder

Grinstead

Torres

(2007) Grandparents raising grandchildren: Stressors, social support, and health outcomes. Journal of Family Nursing 13(3): 333–352.

22.

Moen

Robison

Dempster-McClain

(1995) Caregiving and women’s well-being: A life course approach. J Health SocBehav 36(3): 259–273.

23.

Mosby

Wamsley

(2012) Healthy Grandfamilies Project Focus Group Report. USA: Western Virginia State University.

24.

Murphy

(2002) How Migrant Labor is Changing Rural China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

25.

Musil

Jeanblanc

Burant

, et al. (2013) Longitudinal analysis of resourcefulness, family strain, and depressive symptoms in grandmother caregivers. Nursing Outlook 61(4): 225–234.e2.

26.

Musil

Warner

Zauszniewski

, et al. (2009) Grandmother caregiving, family stress and strain, and depressive symptoms. Western Journal of Nursing Research 31(3): 389–408.

27.

Ngai

(2010) A culture of violence: The labor subcontracting system and collective action by construction workers in post-socialist China. The China Journal 64(64): 143–158.

28.

Pearlin

(1989) The sociological study of stress. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 30(3): 241–256.

29.

Pearlin

Mullan

Semple

, et al. (2008) Factors associated with stress among grandparents raising their grandchildren. Family Relations 49(1): 97–105.

30.

Sands RG and Goldberg-Glen R (2004) Factors associated with stress among grandparents raising their grandchildren. Family relations 49(1): 97–105.

31.

Scheineson

(2009) China’s Internal Migrants. New York: Council on Foreign Relations.

32.

Silverstein

Cong

(2013) Grandparenting in rural China. Generations 1: 46–52.

33.

Sun

Dutta

(2016) Meanings of care: A culture-centered approach to left-behind family members in the countryside of China. Journal of Health Communication 21(11): 1141–1147.

34.

Szinovacz

DeViney

Atkinson

(1999) Effects of surrogate parenting on grandparents’ well-being. The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 54B(6): S376–S388.

35.

Tong

Yan

Kawachi

(2019) The factors associated with being left-behind children in China: Multilevel analysis with nationally representative data. PLoS One 14(11): e0224205.

36.

Tyner

Ren

(2016) The hukou system, rural institutions, and migrant integration in China. Journal of East Asian Studies 16(3): 331–348.