The Relationship Between Grandparenting And Grandchildren's Emotional Adjustment

Recently, because of the change of family structure, more and more grandparents have raised their grandchildren; furthermore, the grandparent-grandchild connection plays a primary role in spanning elations in the family, which make most of this research focus on grand parenting. Several researches have showed that the elderly played an important part in bringing up grandchildren. Furthermore, grandparents could replace parents'function and promote grandchildren's development.From the aspect of the Ecology of Human Development and the theory of family system, children are living in a series of systems which interact with each other. And these theories provide a theoretical perspective for us to explore the impact of grand parenting on children. Family is the important place for children's socialization, which member could impact children's development more or less. So grandparents who are the significant others in children's development would certainly play an key role in children's development. The dominant themes of grand parenting research are grandparents acting as parents in the prevalence of single-parent families; they often focus on the differences among races. In our country, most researches focus on the relationship between grand parenting and children's psychological development, which are also descriptive. However, Given the universal phenomenon that grandparents have been playing important role in helping rear grandchildren in Chinese families, systematic study of grand parenting has been rare in Chinese psychology. Most of research in this area focus on the relationship between grand parenting and children's externalizing behaviors; nevertheless, they pay no attention to internalizing behaviors, such as emotional adjustment. Among several children's adjustment, emotional adjustment is one of the most important indexes to evaluate children's school adjustment and mental health. Emotional adjustment is one of the children's socialization. Children who well adjust in emotion could deal with school and family environment successfully, which not only benefit to children's current development, but also to latter development. Therefore; we explore the characteristic of grand parenting and the relationship between grand parenting and children's emotional adjustment. So, at first step in the present thesis, comprehensive literatures reviews were made with regard to grand parenting, then 1026 children grade three, 596 grandfathers and 430 grandmothers take part in this study. On the base of data, we examine the characteristic of grand parenting and the relationship between grand parenting and children's emotional adjustment. The main findings are as follows:(1)Among the two domains of grand parenting which are nurturance and psychological pressure, the most frequent grand parenting grandparents used was nurturance. They often showed their warm, concern and love, and they less showed their control and requirement.(2)Grand parenting styles were different on the basis of grandparents'gender, age and their kinship. More grandmothers are inductive and indulgent styles, whereas grandfathers are the indifferent and dictatorial styles. Furthermore, more grandparents above 70 years old are the indifferent style; more matrilineal grandparents are the indulgent and indifferent styles, more patrilineal grandparents are the dictatorial styles.(3)The nurturance of grand parenting could negatively predict children's loneliness, that is, the more grandparents care for children, and the level of children's loneliness is lower. The psychological pressure of grand parenting could positively predict children's loneliness and depression. Namely, the more grandparents show their psychological pressure, children are more lonely and depressive.