Grandchildren's perspectives on relationships with grandparents: The influence of gender across generations

The study examines the relation between gender of grandchildren, parents and grandparents and grandchild-grandparent relationships. Subjects were 120 young adult grandchildren (ages 18–23) who provided information on the 375 grandparents they had known. Subjects reported how close they felt to their grandparents, how much they liked them, and what activities they engaged in with them. Strong effects were found for sex of grandparent and sex of parent. Grandchildren had closer relationships with grandmothers, particularly maternal grandmothers, and they tended to prefer maternal grandmothers over other grandparents. Maternal grandmothers seem to make themselves particularly accessible to grandchildren. The results suggest that the gender of the grandparent can be more important than proximity in determining the quality of grandchild-grandparent relationships.An earlier version of this paper was presented in March of 1986 at the annual meeting of the Southwestern Society for Research in Human Development. The authors thanks Richard Wenzlaff for his assistance in the analysis of the data, Billy Hoover for his assistance in collecting and coding the data, and Judith Loftus for her comments on earlier drafts of the paper.