To the Editor: While visiting our kids and grandson last year, I had a recurring thought: being a grandparent is not for 'sissies'. My wife and I thought about how grandparenting challenged our health; each day saw some insult to body homeostasis and we were grateful each night for another day survived. Don't get me wrong, we wouldn't trade days with our little man for all the gold in China or ...

OBJECTIVES Parents' difficulties in perceiving children's weight status accurately pose a barrier for family-based obesity interventions; however, the factors underlying weight misinterpretation still need to be identified. This study's objective was to examine parents and grandparents' perceptions of preschoolers' body sizes. Interview questions also explored perceptions of parental responsibi...

BACKGROUND We examine the association between family structure and children's health care utilization, barriers to health care access, health, and schooling and cognitive outcomes and assess whether socioeconomic status (SES) accounts for those family structure differences. We advance prior research by focusing on understudied but increasingly common family structures including single father fa...

OBJECTIVES To understand how caring for grandchildren affects the physical and mental health of grandparents in Taiwan. METHOD Grandparents aged 50 and older from 4 waves of the Taiwan Longitudinal Study on Aging (1993-2003, n = 3,711) were divided into 7 categories based on living arrangement and caregiving history. Generalized estimation equations controlling for sociodemographic characteri...

What motivates grandparents to their altruism? We review answers from evolutionary theory, sociology, and economics. Sometimes in direct conflict with each other, these accounts of grandparental investment exist side-by-side, with little or no theoretical integration. They all account for some of the data, and none account for all of it. We call for a more comprehensive theoretical framework of...

To analyse the influence of the sex of the transmitting grandparents on the occurrence of the congenital form of myotonic dystrophy (CDM), we have studied complete three generation pedigrees of 49 CDM cases, analysing: (1) the sex distribution in the grandparents' generation, and (2) the intergenerational amplification of the CTG repeat, measured in its absolute and relative values, between gra...

This study seeks to demonstrate the intersecting structural and compounding challenges African American custodial grandparents experience collectively, rather than as separate non-competing factors, which has been modeled in prior studies. Using a mixed-method research design, explored faced by white grandparents. These included difficulties attaining different types of support, respite care, p...