Taking care of grandchildren may help slow cognitive decline

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Being a grandparent may mean many things: making the best cookies, giving the warmest hugs, passing along hard-won wisdom and sharing family stories.

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But beyond giving you a sense of joy and meaning, there’s emerging evidence that being a grandparent has other benefits: It may help protect your brain during aging.

Recent research has found grandparenthood may be linked to not only slower cognitive decline, but also a lower risk of dementia and even a younger-looking brain.

There are still relatively few studies looking at how grandparenthood changes cognition and the brain, but more research is underway. “This is kind of a new frontier, and we’re just kind of at the beginning of it,” said James Rilling, a professor of psychology at Emory University.

But the benefits of caregiving as a grandparent make sense, considering scientists have also identified long-term benefits in mothers and fathers, in which parents with more children had increased functional connectivity in brain networks that tend to thin with age.

“By taking care of others, it might help us to support healthy brain aging,” Rilling said.

In one of the first population studies of American grandparents and dementia, researchers looked at over 10,000 grandparents and found that caring for grandchildren was linked to a lower risk of dementia over 16 years of longitudinal data, said Seung-won Emily Choi, an associate professor of sociology at Texas State University who researches cognitive health in aging and conducted the study.

A study published in 2025 of over 10,000 older adults in China found that caregiving for less than 40 hours a week was associated with a 24 percent reduced risk of dementia compared with grandparents not providing care for grandchildren. The researchers’ analyses concluded this could be in part because of reduced loneliness and increased digital technology access.

Also, the act of caregiving itself may be linked to the cognitive benefits. Compared with grandparents not involved in caregiving, those who were involved had higher verbal fluency and episodic memory, according to a 2026 study conducted by Flavia Chereches, a graduate student of developmental psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

Intriguingly, the research suggests there may be differences in the effects for grandmothers and grandfathers. In Choi’s study on the link to dementia risk, for example, grandmothers had the most benefits when they were engaged in lower-intensity caregiving (less than 500 hours over two years), while grandfathers benefited from higher intensity (over 500 hours). And in Chereches’s research, only caregiving grandmothers had less cognitive decline.

This may be, in part, due to cultural gender differences. Grandmothers tend to be more involved in the more physically demanding labor of feeding, cleaning and managing care, which may be more beneficial in lower amounts.

The differences may also relate to the “grandmother hypothesis” for the evolutionary reasons adult female humans live long past their reproductive age, a trait shared by few other mammals, including some whales and chimpanzees. Evidence suggests that grandmothers have a consistently positive impact on their grandchildren’s health, Rilling said.

However, for cognitive benefits, it might not “necessarily matter if you’re a grandma or grandpa, but more like how you experience caregiving,” Chereches said.

There are many known ingredients that go into healthy aging, such as being embedded in a social network, staying physically active and stimulating your mind.

“Caregiving is one meaningful social role that might provide access to all of this,” Chereches said.

When grandparents are with their grandkids, they report more instances of feeling sadness or worry – perhaps due to concern over the children’s well-being, as well as bittersweet feelings about the transience of life – compared with when they spend time with others.

But more often, they report more feelings of pride and love, Chereches and her colleagues found in a 2026 study.

“There seems to be something special about this connection,” she said.

Time connecting with grandchildren can connect grandparents with others, too. While “interacting with the grandchildren, they have more chances of getting along with their other children or the other family members and even well in the community,” Choi said.

At the same time, the kinds of interactions nanas and pawpaws have with their grandkids can be very mentally stimulating, with storytelling, playing make-believe and reading books.

And you don’t necessarily need to be an actual grandparent to benefit.

Research on older adults volunteering with Experience Corps, a program run by AARP that trains teams to volunteer in elementary schools, also found that the experience helped improve memory and executive function, as well as decreased brain volume loss in areas associated with dementia.

More recent research suggests that the act of caregiving as a grandparent may also be linked to a younger brain. In a 2025 study, Rilling and his colleagues scanned the brains of 50 grandmothers and compared them to those of 25 women of similar ages who were not grandparents. On average, the grandmothers’ brains looked 5½ years younger according to age estimates calculated by a computer model.

However, these studies are associational and can’t show causation. It’s very possible that people who are healthier are more likely to provide active grandparent caregiving, for example.

The grandmothers in the imaging study are “almost like super-grandmothers” because they signed up for a study about grandmothers, Rilling said. “They were very mentally, physically healthy, financially stable. They’re not overextended, and they’re really highly engaged with their grandchildren.”

The research also points to the importance of balance: Caregiving can be physically and mentally exhausting – perhaps an obvious statement to anyone who has engaged in it – which can detract from the benefits. Research shows that grandparents who are the sole caretakers of their grandchildren are less likely to have cognitive benefits, for example.

“We should not expect that grandparenthood or grandchild care is the right thing for everyone,” Chereches said. “If grandparents want to provide grandchild care, if the role is important to them and there’s something they want to do, then it’s definitely a great way to maintain oneself active, engaged with a meaningful social role, but then we also need to acknowledge that there are people that maybe would like to do something else.”

The key is to take care of your own physical well-being with proper sleep, diet and exercise and to maintain other social connections, Choi said, and at the same time, enjoy the more stimulating parts of taking care of grandchildren.

For more health news and content around diseases, conditions, wellness, healthy living, drugs, treatments and more, head to Healthing.ca – a member of the Postmedia Network.

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