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Primary Submission Category: Aging
How Living Arrangements Shape Grandparent Food Insecurity
Authors: Madonna Harrington Meyer,
Presenting Author: Madonna Harrington Meyer*
Nearly half of US grandparents feed their grandchildren. For many the cost may be easily absorbed into the budget, but for low-income grandparents it may stretch tight budgets too far. Food insecure grandparents worry about where the next meals will come from, having enough nutritious food for themselves and their grandchildren, or being hungry due to a shortage of food. How do living arrangements shape grandparent food insecurity? Generally, the more grandchild care low-income grandparents provide, the more likely they are to be food insecure. Residential grandparents typically provide the most care and report the highest rates of food insecurity. But nonresidential grandparents also provide a great deal of grandchild care, which puts some at risk of food insecurity. Evidence that nonresidential grandparents make substantial contributions to grandchild care is growing. Only 10% of grandparents reside with their grandchildren, yet 47% of all grandparents feed them and buy groceries for them. Like residential grandparents, nonresidential grandparents may meet the bus, pick up grandchildren after school, keep them overnight, take them to doctor or therapy visits, help with homework, care for them before they drop them at school in the morning, buy groceries, prepare meals, and feed grandchildren. The US does not measure what proportion of nonresidential grandparents are food insecure due to feeding grandchildren, however, because the official USDA Food Security Scale asks residential, but not nonresidential, grandparents about food insecurity linked to feeding grandchildren. Drawing on sixty-three in-depth interviews with adults ages sixty and older living below 130 percent of the federal poverty line, and using a life course perspective, I show how common their daily experiences may be even though their residential settings differ. Both groups are likely to prioritize grandchildren’s needs over their own in ways that may fuel grandparent food insecurity. I explore three patterns residential and nonresidential grandparents adopt when feeding themselves and grandchildren on tight budgets including (1) delaying meals until after grandchildren have eaten their fill of the more nutritious food, (2) skipping meals, and (3) curtailing care for grandchildren when feeding them becomes financially untenable. These findings reveal that feeding grandchildren contributes to grandparent food insecurity across types of living arrangement, undermining grandparent health and wellbeing, and making grandparenting more challenging.