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If you have the luxury of dropping your kids off at grandma and grandpa’s house, don’t feel guilty about it. Not only do they love that special bonding time, it turns out, babysitting the grandkids may help grandparents stay sharp in old age.
Being a grandparent can be good for their brains, but only if they’re actually taking care of the kids, according to a new study of nearly 3-thousand grandparents with an average age of 67.
- It tracked how much time they spent with their grandchildren, what kind of care was involved, if the kids spent the night, if gran and gramps made meals, helped with homework, drove kids to activities and played with them.
- After adjusting for age, health and other factors, researchers found grandparents who provided childcare scored higher on tests for memory and verbal fluency than those who didn’t.
- The news is even better for grandmas, as those who were caregivers show less cognitive decline on tests than those who weren’t.
- The results were true regardless of how often grandparents took care of the kids and what kind of care they gave.
“What stood out most to us was that being a caregiving grandparent seemed to matter more for cognitive functioning than how often grandparents provided care or what exactly they did with their grandchildren,” explains lead researcher Flavia Chereches with Tilburg University in the Netherlands. She says more research is needed, but the benefits “might not depend on how often care is provided, or on the specific activities done with grandchildren, but rather on the broader experience of being involved with caregiving.”
Source: Talker