'Lola' and child survival

AN entire research conference about grandmothers? It seems there was such a meeting, according to an article by Natalie Angier in the Nov. 5 issue of the New York Times.

Angier gives tantalizing details of some of the research findings but does not actually state where and when the conference was held. I did try several search engines on the Internet to get more information about the meeting but had no luck, so I'm relying on Angier's article, with some of my own thoughts about the topic.

What is so intriguing about Angier's article is that it focuses on the research looking into the relationship between grandmothers and child survival rates. Such research has been conducted by anthropologists using records from Gambia, India, and Japan. Readers can probably guess the results: the presence of a grandmother improved a child's prospects for surviving infancy and childhood. That seems logical since a grandmother augments the parenting role, mainly that of the mother. A grandmother has many more years of accumulated wisdom, having raised her own children, and is now ready to apply all she's learned to her grandchildren.

In many societies where more women are entering the labor force, one can see how crucial the grandmother is for childcare. I see this happening in many countries, with grandmothers practically taking over most of the day's child-care activities because the children's mother has to go to work.

In the Philippines, it is quite common to see parents even sending off their children to live with grandparents. Do a quick survey of your friends and I'm sure quite a number will say they were raised by a "lola" (grandmother), and how they may in fact be more attached to Lola than to "Nanay" (Mother).

Can we presume then that the presence of a grandmother automatically increases prospects for child survival? Not quite, and this is why Angier's article caught my attention. Angier says two of the papers showed it's the maternal grandmother that makes the difference.

This effect is shown rather dramatically in one study conducted by Donna Leonetti and Dilip Nath in India, where they looked at two ethnic groups, one Bengali, the other Khasi. The two groups are similar in that they're both agricultural, with low incomes and little access to modern family planning methods. But the two groups have one important difference: The Bengali are patrilocal, which means a new bride moves into her husband's household, while the Khasi are matrilocal, with the husband moving into the bride's household.

The researchers found out that among the Bengali, whether the paternal grandmother was present or not, about 86 percent of children would survive to the age of six years. Among Khasi children whose grandmother -- the maternal grandmother -- had died, only 83 percent survived to the age of six. In contrast, the survival rate rises dramatically to 96 percent for those whose grandmother was around.

You're probably asking why there is this difference. I guessed the reason even before I got through half the article, and the reason was that only a few weeks back, in one of my graduate classes, one of my Thai students shared an interesting bit of information: in her country, there is a saying that a maternal grandmother always knows who her grandchildren are, while a paternal grandmother can never be sure.

What had gotten her to share that information was my mentioning that for a woman, motherhood is an act of knowledge: She obviously knows who her children are. For men, parenting is an act of faith: He can only believe a child is his. The wise Thais have extended that aphorism to grandmothers.

For some researchers, this difference provides part of the explanation in the differences of child survival. A paternal grandmother may not be as close to her grandchildren, often with tensions wondering if the grandchildren come from her sons. If her relationship with her daughter-in-law is tense -- as they often are -- the "grandmothering" role may be even more stifled. A maternal grandmother, on the other hand, is certain about who her grandchildren are, and there will be no holds barred when it comes to her affection.

There are anthropologists who will cringe at such an explanation, since it seems to reduce affections to biological kinship. Perhaps a less biologically based explanation is that a woman would find it easier to get help from her own mother (i.e., the child's maternal grandmother) rather than from her mother-in-law. Conversely, a mother has less qualms helping out her own daughter than a mother-in-law would, again because of a perceived distance, or even tension, between in-laws.

So, here we have an example of how child health and child welfare is influenced not just by parents but by an extended system, particularly the lola, but this influence is mediated by all kinds of social and cultural considerations.

There are practical implications here. If indeed the lola figures so prominently in child care, then government and non-government health agencies should be looking for ways to tap into this valuable resource.

There's more to the lola role than child care. Research in other countries has shown that the presence of a mother or mother-in-law may increase fertility: the couple is pressured to reproduce, or may opt to have more children simply because there's an added caregiver.

Our local researchers should be looking into how the lola influences family dynamics and child care, and while they're at it, maybe we should be looking too at the roles of the lolo, if there's any. The research in other country suggests that the presence of a grandfather, like that of the father, makes no difference in child survival rates. I'd like to see what it's like for the Philippines.