Grandparents' caregiving doesn't harm their health

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - Caring for grandchildren isn't the easiest job but it does not seem to have any dramatic impact on the health of grandparents, according to a new study.

Researchers found that the overall health of grandparents who care for their grandchildren either full-time or part-time does not decline despite the demand it makes on their lives.

"There tended to be this perception that grandparent care is terrible for grandparents," said Dr. Mary Elizabeth Hughes of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland.

"And our evidence would suggest it's not, but it's not a completely rosy picture, either."

Researchers from four U.S. universities looked at nearly 13,000 American grandparents between the ages of 50 and 80 who provided various levels of care for their grandchildren, and who did so at the outset with varying levels of personal health.

Hughes said that the point of the complex study was to examine grandparents with different qualities of health who provided different types and amounts of care to their grandchildren -- and how it consequently affected their lives.

"I do want to stress that this doesn't suggest that grandparents raising grandchildren isn't a social issue, because it is," said Hughes. "We're trying to say you need to see the full perspective, and you need to think about grandparents' health at the outset, because they are (at higher risk of being) sick to begin with."

That raises important issues about the quality of care for the children and about what it may do to grandparents' care for themselves in the long run."

Previous research showed that much of the demands on grandparents who provide care suffer a health toll, in combination with suffering from the effects of ageing.