CHILD AND FAMILY PSYCHOLOGY

Child and Family Psychology

Child and Family Psychology

Introduction

Because older adults in Western nations are living longer than ever before, relationships between grandparents and grandchildren now last longer than they have in any previous historical era, significantly extending opportunities for interaction between grandchildren and their grandparents. Increases in longevity, however, have not brought an end to aging itself and, despite advances in medical care, old age continues to be a time of heightened vulnerability to illness, impairment, and disease (Federal Interagency Forum on Aging-Related Statistics, 2006; Smith, Borchelt, Maier, & Jopp, 2002). Thus, although the increasing lifespan of older adults may offer substantially greater opportunities for grandchildren and grandparents to build and maintain their relationships, it also increases the likelihood that illness, disability, and/or disease will impinge on these relationships as grandparent's age.

The present study explored impairment-related variables as predictors of several aspects of young adults' relationships with grandparents who live with one or more conditions affecting their physical, cognitive, and/or psychological wellbeing. Our goal was to determine whether young adults' experiences in these relationships were predicted by these impairment variables and, thereby, to build a case for the importance of considering grandparent health in future investigations of intergenerational ties between young adults and their elders.

Most of the research that has directly investigated the role that declining health and wellbeing play in grandparent-grandchild relationships has compared the experiences of adolescents and young adults with grandparents diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease with the experiences of grandchildren whose grandparents do not live with cognitive impairment. These investigations indicate that intergenerational relationships involving grandparents with severe cognitive impairment differ in a number of important respects from intergenerational relationships involving cognitively intact grandparents. For instance, compared to grandchildren with cognitively intact grandparents, grandchildren with grandparents with Alzheimer's disease report less interaction with their grandparents (Werner & Lowenstein, 2001) and less satisfaction with the quality of their grandparent-grandchild relationships (Creasey, Myers, Epperson, & Taylor, 1989).

Other research corroborates the view that grandparent illness, disease, and/or disability holds considerable potential to affect grandchildren in negative ways (e.g., Dellmann-Jenkins, Blankemeyer, & Pinkard, 2000; Howard & Singleton, 2001; Sanders & Trygstad, 1993). At the same time, however, there is evidence that grandchildren do not necessarily experience the impairment's impact as unequivocally negative and, moreover, that poor health may not always result in diminished contact. For example, although the majority of young adults in Dellmann-Jenkins, et al.'s (2000) study reported experiencing increased stress as a result of taking on primary responsibility for providing care for their ill grandparents, they also reported a variety of positive outcomes associated with the caregiver role. In addition, the adult grandchildren in Silverstein and Long's (1998) study reported increased-not decreased-contact with their grandparents after the onset of problems affecting their grandparents' health.

We designed the present study to serve two goals. First, we wanted to enlarge on the scope of previous investigations by exploring a broader range of impairments than has been investigated to date. Second, we wanted to test hypotheses concerning the role that three impairment-related ...