ArticleRoyal Society open science2016
Do grandparents compete with or support their grandchildren? In Guatemala, paternal grandmothers may compete, and maternal grandmothers may cooperate.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 41 citations in OpenAlex.
- Family networks and infant health promotion: a mixed-methods evaluation from a cluster randomised controlled trial in rural Malawi.BMJ open · 2018Trial
- Demography of grandmothering: a case study in Agta foragers.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Children's Caregiving and Growth in Northwestern Tanzania: Limited Evidence That Support From Specific Caregivers Is Associated With Better Growth.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Article
- Close and more distant relatives are associated with child mortality risk in historical Finland.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Grandmother effects over the Finnish demographic transition.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Maternal grandmothers buffer the effects of ethnic discrimination among pregnant Latina mothers.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Factors Affecting Thai Fathers' Self-Efficacy to Support Exclusive Breastfeeding.Nursing reports (Pavia, Italy) · 2023Article
- Adoption, Fostering, and Parental Absence in Vanuatu.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- How prenatal cortisol levels relate to grandmother-mother relationships among a cohort of Latina women.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2023Article
- Article
- Do maternal grandmothers influence breastfeeding duration and infant nutrition? Evidence from Merida, Mexico.American journal of biological anthropology · 2022Article
- Matrilateral bias of grandparental investment in grandchildren persists despite the grandchildren's adverse early life experiences.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Does maternal grandmother's support improve maternal and child nutritional health outcomes? Evidence from Merida, Yucatan, Mexico.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Children are important too: juvenile playgroups and maternal childcare in a foraging population, the Agta.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Maternal Grandmothers' Household Residency, Children's Growth, and Body Composition Are Not Related in Urban Maya Families from Yucatan.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2021Article
- The contribution of grandmother involvement to child growth and development: an observational study in rural Pakistan.BMJ global health · 2020Observational
- Hired helpers at the nest: The association between life-cycle servants and net fertility in North Orkney, 1851-1911.American journal of physical anthropology · 2020Article
- When the mother-in-law is just as good-Differential mortality of reproductive females by family network composition.PloS one · 2018Article
- Grandparental co-residence and grandchild survival: the role of resource competition in a pre-industrial population.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Previous research has found that the presence of grandparents, particularly grandmothers, is often positively associated with child survival. Little research has explored the potential mechanisms driving these associations. We use data from rural Guatemala to test whether contact with and direct investment (advice and financial) from grandparents is associated with child health, proxied by height. Our results demonstrate the complexity of family relationships and their influence on child health, suggesting that both cooperative and competitive relationships exist within the family. The clearest evidence we find for grandparental influence is that having a living paternal grandmother tends to be negatively associated with child height. By contrast, contact with maternal kin appears broadly to be beneficial for child height, although these relationships are weaker. These patterns are mirrored in maternal body mass index, suggesting grandparental influence acts partly through maternal health. These findings support the hypotheses that, under conditions of limited resources, family relationships may be competitive within the family lineage which shares the same resource base, but cooperative when there are few costs to cooperation. Finally, financial assistance from maternal grandfathers is positively correlated with infant length but negatively with the height of older children, perhaps because the receipt of financial support is an indication of need. The provision of advice shows no associations with child height.
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