Choosing to live with your children’s grandparents, the whole extended family under one roof? It is a real investment, which has a positive impact on the couple.
This is proved by a survey based on Istat data (“Families and Social Subjects”) carried out by two scholars from the University of Bologna and the University of Padua: the presence of grandparents in the home helps to lighten the burden of routine houseworkwhich still today often, almost completely, weigh on the shoulders of women. The study, published in the journal Genius (the title: Grandparents, family solidarity and the division of housework: evidence from the Italian case) and signed by Marco Albertini (University of Bologna) and Marco Tosi (University of Padua), demonstrates that, when grandparents live with children and grandchildren, the division of household chores within the couple is more egalitarian and therefore less unbalanced to disfavor of women.
Although childcare, particularly among highly educated couples, has been shared more equally between the two parents in recent decades than in the past, more routine household tasks such as cooking, cleaning the house, doing the laundry and doing the shopping still weigh heavily on women. This distribution does not change if the grandparents are not living together, even if the visits are frequent. Instead, it becomes more balanced, within the couple, when the grandparents are a stable part of the family unit.
“In terms of equity in the division of domestic labor, having grandparents living in the house has a effect comparable to that of paying a domestic helper and greater than that of a babysitter assumed ”, explains Marco Albertini. “Outsourcing domestic work therefore tends to favor gender equity within couples.” The presence of grandparents helps couples to outsource the most intense and routine tasks, often on the shoulders of women. And if the amount of housework decreases, couples have less need to negotiate splitting of tasks and less chance of dividing them unevenly.
“In a context like the Italian one, in which extended coexistence between generations is part of a culture of strong family ties and traditionalism, families made up of three generations living together have a more egalitarian division of domestic tasks, due to the support that grandparents provide within the family nucleus », confirms Marco Tosi. “In this sense, a more equitable division of domestic work is due to the fact that mothers tend to benefit more from living at home with their grandparents.”
Source: Vanity Fair