Contemporary Grandparenting: Changing Family Relationships in Global Contexts

With rampant changes to family structures over the past decades, grandparenting has gained new and profound social and economic significance. Despite its importance, however, grandparenting’s many dimensions are still poorly understood. Contemporary Grandparenting provides a much-needed corrective to this. The first book to take a sociological approach to the new roles grandparents have, it combines new theories with up-to-date empirical findings in an effort to document the changing nature—across the globe— of these important family members.

Taking up this unprecedented task, the contributors here analyze how grandparenting changes under different welfare states and within different cultural contexts. It examines a range of specific topics, such as the breakdown of the nuclear family and the gender roles of grandfathers. Sensitive to the conflicting norms and expectations grandparents face, this book shows how they can act to forge new identities within today’s powerful societal and cultural constraints

Sara Arber is professor of sociology and codirector of the Centre for Research on Ageing and Gender at the University of Surrey and the author of Gender and Later Life and Women and Working Lives. Virpi Timonen is associate professor and founding director of the Social Policy and Ageing Research Centre at the School of Social Work and Social Policy at Trinity College, Dublin.