Do grandparents help moms with childcare and work?

Grandparents influence location decisions and often keep moms in the workforce.

Many women return home to their birth state before having children themselves, which is associated with a lower child earnings penalty for single mothers but not married mothers (Anstreicher and Venator, 2022). This finding isn't meant to be interpreted causally and the implication is that this is driven by help from grandparents. Unclear whether the effect is driven by having any job vs. having a higher-paying job.

Women whose mothers are retirement-eligible have an 11% higher chance of being in the labor force due childcare availability. This doesn't apply to maternal grandfathers or paternal grandparents (Bratti et al 2018)

In some cases, though, living near grandparents can result in lower wages for moms (Garcia-Moran and Kuehn 2017), presumably because jobs are spatially restricted. This conflicts somewhat with the first finding.

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