ABSTRACT
Globally, grandmothers have long been essential to raising and caring for children. At the most basic level, young mothers learn what they know about parenting from their experiences watching their own mothers and grandmothers. More directly, grandmothers have been part of parents’ strategies to care for their children, through cohabitation and informal fostering networks to more formal arrangements of child circulation. Idealized grandmother–grandchild relationships emphasize affection and love, cleanliness, order, stability, and care. They also emphasize reciprocity and a promise of future care for aging grandmothers once they can no longer care for themselves. While actual relationships differ widely, grandmothers are influenced by these idealized versions of care and often take great pride and pleasure in helping to raise their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. However, globalization, migration, poverty, and illness have increasingly challenged the role grandmothers play in caring for their grandchildren. In poor communities, grandmothers often find themselves caring for children well beyond their physical and mental capacity to do so. Despite these challenges, grandmothers continue to contribute meaningfully to the health and survival of their grandchildren and comprise a key component of parents’ reproductive strategies globally. The essential contributions of grandmothers deserve a central place in the anthropology of reproduction.
