Babysitting your grandchildren doesn’t make you any younger

Young parents who like to use grandparents’ free babysitting service can use this as an argument: keeping grandchildren keeps you young. It’s life’s wisdom that fits on a tile, but now science has taken a hard look at it.

A word of warning: these young parents might as well read no further. Or don’t let grandma and grandpa read the following. Because very little of that tile wisdom remains.

Recall

Babysitting young children does indeed have beneficial effects, but these are negated by the fact that they are your own grandchildren. explains lead researcher Valeria Bordone to British newspaper The Guardian. “Having grandchildren is a strong reminder of your own age† It won’t make you feel any younger.”

Yes, it is true that previous studies have seemed to indicate such an effect, write the researchers in The Journals of Gerontology. But previous studies contain an error. They only asked caring grandfathers and grandmothers how young they felt. And it indeed showed that they felt younger than their peers who did not regularly care for a grandchild.

Only suitable for grandparents

But in this way, you miss the grandparents who stopped their childcare because they couldn’t take it anymore because of their (experienced) age. Thus, only grandparents who felt young and fit enough to care for their grandchildren were automatically included in the surveys.

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Researchers have now fixed that. In fact, the same research group that conducted one of those earlier studies has now come to this conclusion. They did this by interviewing their research group again from then on.

And with that also came the grandparents who had since stopped babysitting because they felt too old for it. And it was precisely this difference that suddenly caused that there was no longer a measurable rejuvenating effect. “This is the only study that looked at the same people before, during, and after childcare,” Bordone said.

good for others

However, young parents looking for a babysitter can make the findings of this research for them in another way. Because even if the rejuvenating effect is not there for the grandparents, it seems to exist for the others. Older people babysitting young children seem to feel younger if the babysitter is not their grandchild.