Does grandparental child-care provision affect number, satisfaction and with whom leisure activities are done?

This study investigates the impact of non-intensive and intensive supplementary grandparental child care on grandparents’ involvement in leisure activities. Three aspects of leisure activities are investigated: the number/frequency of activities, with whom they are carried out and the subjective satisfaction with them. Beside the possibility of a cumulation effect, the literature suggests that providing grandparental child care might compete with other activities, especially for women. Thus, we consider role enhancement and role strain theories to derive our hypotheses. We use longitudinal data from the German Ageing Survey (DEAS) which contains rich information on the leisure activities of people aged 40 and older. To account for selection into the provision of grandparental child care, we use a within-unit estimation approach (fixed-effects panel models). Our results show that both grandfathers and grandmothers tend to engage in more leisure activities when they provide grandparental child care. While care-giving grandfathers become more likely to engage in activities with family members without changing their engagement outside the family, we found no effect for women in this respect. Nevertheless, grandparental child-care provision modifies satisfaction with leisure activities only for women, reducing it, independently from with whom leisure activities are carried out. These findings suggest that a higher quantity of leisure activities does not necessarily imply higher quality.