Many have argued that non-parental caregivers are the key ingredient that enables human beings to successfully raise multiple dependent children at the same time. Cross-culturally, assistance from extended family, especially grandmothers, has been found to have large effects on child well-being and even survival. In this talk, I will explore theoretical reasons why grandmothers, particularly maternal grandmothers, may have evolved to become especially important non-parental caregivers. I will also consider the domains in which they seem to excel, and discuss how we might use this information in practical ways when working with families. This knowledge has implications for people working with vulnerable families and children, including those in child protection, fosterage and adoption.

Dr. Gretchen Perry is an Associate Professor at the University of Canterbury in the Social Work Department. She has 25 years of social service and social work experience in developmental services, serious mental health and child protection services in Canada. In her last eight years of direct practice she worked as a Kin Assessor, in a highly multicultural community, tasked with determining whether prospective extended family caregivers met the government standard for foster or adoptive caregivers. She did not believe the assessment tools she had been trained to use adequately addressed the complexity and nuance of extended family caregiving, or essential cultural aspects of family and extended family childcare, and was thus inspired to pursue a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology in 2012. She completed her dissertation on the effects of non-parental caregiving in families of varying marital statuses in rural Bangladesh, and obtained her Ph.D. in 2016. She continues to conduct research on non-parental caregiving from a cross-cultural perspective, with attention to both the theoretical and practical aspects of grandparental caregiving.