The Effect of Grandparents’ Co-parenting on Young Children’s Personality and Adaptation: Chinese Three-generation-families

Due to the prevalence of grandparents’ co-parenting of children in China, this study aimed to examine its influence on young children's personality and adaptation. With the cooperation of a kindergarten in Shanghai, 530 parents of children 3-6 years of age were invited to answer the questionnaire after giving their consent, and 422 of the questionnaires were effective. Three factors were extracted by Exploratory Factor Analysis for children's temperament: Fearfulness in Strange Situations (FS), Intensity of Reaction (IR) and Pro-social Activity (PA). Two factors were examined for children’s adaptation: Separation Anxiety in attending kindergarten (SA) and Anxious Preoccupied Attachment (APA, one of the insecure types for parent-child attachment relationship). The results show that the children raised by only parents had higher PA than those co-raised by grandparents and lower APA than those raised by only grandparents. Even after controlling for the influence from temperament and grades, the effect of parenting styles on APA was still significant. For Grade 1 children, the parenting style was also significantly related to children's temperament (IR).