Children's Access to Coresident Grandparenting in Contemporary Pacific Societies and Its Impact on Educational Attainment

Sela Panapasa, University of Michigan
Timoci Bainimarama, Fiji Islands Bureau of Statistics
Vasemaca Lewai, Fiji Islands Bureau of Statistics

The role of custodial or coresident grandparenting has become a necessary and important response to the care and upbringing of children in contemporary pacific societies. With more and more people working away from the home combined with women entering the labor force, and with young adults migrating to urban centers or overseas, children will spend greater amounts of time in the care of grandparents. While this trend was not feasible before the worldwide onset of increased life expectancy, it now represents a strategic arrangement for young families and their older parent to maximize both the economic and social resources that make up household economies. It also reflects a growing pattern of increased reliance on the part of young adults and their children upon the older adults within households to care for grandchildren as parents seek cash based alternatives to traditional subsistence approaches. This paper will address global shifts across the Pacific in terms of the child-grandparent support dyad, and then focus on the specific case of Fiji where the author has been working intensively on this topic. During the past two decades Fiji has undergone rapid demographic, socioeconomic and political changes and it is unclear how these changes have influenced the interactions of children and grandparents within the society (Riley, 2001; Fiji Government, 1998; Panapasa, 2000). The social folklore attributed to developing countries often portrays a strong and supportive intergenerational relationship between children and their grandparents. This construct is increasingly called under question simply because most children, until quite recently, never knew their grandparents due to short life spans. Only in the past few decades have their been sufficient numbers of elderly to significantly impact their role with children in intergenerational households. Ongoing research has show clearly that this co-residential relationship is not always beneficial to either side if the child/grandparent dyad. While multigenerational households represent opportunities for mutual support between children and their grandparents, they must also be seen as competitors for often scarce resources within the household economies. How (and if) a balance between these dual factors of support and competition can be achieved represents a long term goal of the broader body of research underlying the specific focus of this paper. Using individual level data from the 1966, 1986 and 1996 Fiji census , this paper will examine patterns of household structure containing children and older adults and measure changes in the rate of coresidence among child/grandparent dyads in multigenerational households. Using census data, the prevalence and composition of extended-family households containing an elderly resident will be contrasted with nuclear households consisting of child/parent dyads and extended family households lacking elderly family members. The focus of the paper will be on how the composition of households impacts the educational attainment of children. Educational attainment among children in Fiji and the Pacific more generally remains low. While most children receive some form of primary education, the proportion continuing into secondary education and beyond remains low by Western standards. This is driven in part by the need to pass standardized tests to proceed to each level of advancement within secondary schools but it is also due to costs factors. Primary school is free for the majority of Fijians if they send their child to a government school, but subsequent education requires the payment of school fees that are often beyond the means of many households. There are several paths by which family structure impacts the ability of children to follow a consistent educational attainment track. The presence of elderly grandparents, for example, can facilitate the ability of children to attend school by freeing up females within the household to work. This childcare function could increase household cash economies that could then be invested in the education of the child. In contrast, having a elderly person in the house who needs care could impede a child’s educational success by drawing needed resources from the household economies that might otherwise be applied to the child. Similarly, nuclear families, lacking direct in-home childcare resources might be unable to afford the higher education of children unless these kinds of household represent higher income households under a modernization model. While some work has been done on the impacts of household structure on the elderly in Pacific, this paper represents a newer perspective that looks at the impacts of household structure on the child’s success. The paper will measure educational success in two ways, one being active enrollment in school and the other being whether the child is enrolled in at a grade level appropriate to their age cohort. The analysis will address where household type makes a difference in educational achievement controlling for other factors. The paper will test explicitly if multigenerational households represent a benefit or cost to the educational achievement to children. The paper will conclude with some discussion on how the Fijian case can be extended to other Pacific societies. A central issue from a policy perspective revolves around our ability to interpret cross sectional measures of household structure from the cultural perspectives that influence pacific society thinking and governmental responses to the challenge of educating children. It is clear that pacific society is cognizant of the need to educate children in a way that prepares them for interactions with Western society. Conversely, there is also a desire to maintain traditional values that are often in conflict with the need to educate children for a global economy. While it is unclear how pacific society will balance these challenges, the desire to educate their children is universal and families are increasingly testing new strategies to maximize the chances for children to attend school. On the surface, the presence of elder caregivers seems an obvious advantage to achieving this goal, but the consequences of coresidence the aged and the children they are increasingly responsible for may represent costs. This paper will help explain some of the costs and benefits of coresidence on children’s education and will provide information that may be useful in policy formation among Pacific Island governments.