Are Grandparents’ Social Values Associated with Support to Grandchildren? Evidence Across Three Decades

We investigated whether grandparents who hold stronger individualistic values, relative to collectivistic values, provide less instrumental and emotional support to their grandchildren and whether this association has changed over the last 30 years. While the significance of individual values in family dynamics is widely acknowledged, the connection between values and grandparenting remains underexplored. Based on Beck’s individualization theory, we expect an inverse relationship between grandparents’ supportive behavior and individualistic (vs. collectivistic) values, reflecting a preference for achieving individual over collective goals. We expect this relationship to strengthen over time with the growth of personal autonomy in how the grandparent role is enacted. We used data from seven waves of the Longitudinal Study of Generations between 1991 and 2021 to examine 3465 observations deriving from 1309 grandparents whose youngest grandchild was 16 years of age or younger. Multilevel random-intercept models estimated associations over 30 years. Findings revealed that stronger individualistic values were associated with providing less instrumental support to grandchildren, while associations with emotional support were not evident. Tests of interactions demonstrated that the negative association between individualistic values and instrumental support became stronger over historical time. Findings demonstrate that grandparental support has increased over time and that its instrumental aspect is connected to collectivistic values. We conclude that behavioral aspects of grandparenting are connected to individualistic/collectivistic values on the continuum between self-interest and altruism, and that contemporary grandparents have greater discretion in how they perform the grandparent role in accordance with their personal preferences.