Kids’ injury risk lower when grandma is in charge

Young children whose working parents have a grandparent care for them are less apt to suffer a serious injury than children with other caregivers, a new study suggests.

The findings, reported in the journal Paediatrics, counter the idea that grandparents may put children at greater risk of injury – the concern being that many may not be up on the latest child-safety advice.

Instead, researchers found that among the more than 5,500 children they followed from infancy to the age of 2.5, those whose parents left them in the care of a grandparent had a lower risk of serious injury. This was true even in comparison with children of stay-at-home mums.

“There have been worries that the older generation would carry on an outdated set of safety measures because they parented before the day of baby monitors and cabinet latches,” explained lead researcher David Bishai, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore.

“These worries are unfounded,” he said.

The findings are based on 5,565 infants from 15 US cities who were followed until they were 30 to 33 months old. Prof. Bishai’s team used medical claims data to record child injuries serious enough to need medical care.

Among families where the mother worked, about 15 per cent had a grandparent watch the child, while nearly one-third had a non-relative caregiver. Other caregivers included fathers and other family members.

Overall, Prof. Bishai’s team found, children whose grandparents watched over them had lower injury rates than those with other caregivers. Their risk of injury was cut by nearly half when compared with children of stay-at-home mums.

The protective effect of grandparents remained even when the researchers factored in other family characteristics, including the mother’s age, education and marital status.

Of course, this does not mean that grandparents are always the best option for child care, Prof. Bishai said.

Caregivers in this study, he noted, were not just “any grandparent,” but were chosen by parents for a reason.

It’s not clear why child injury rates were lower when grandparents were in charge, even in comparison with stay-at-home parents, according to Prof. Bishai.

One possibility his team would like to study is whether grandparents do less “multi-tasking” and focus only on monitoring their grandchildren.

“We suspect that mono-tasking when watching children is an old- fashioned child safety measure that is extremely effective, but may be waning,” Prof. Bishai said.

Reuters

Source: Paediatrics, November 2008.