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NEW YORK, USA, November 5, 2002: The name “Grandma” conjures up varied images for each of us, depending on the personal experience we may have had with this individual in our family. This long and informative article reveals that grandmas have been the objects of many studies around the world. Biologists, anthropologists, sociologists and demographers have focused on grandmothers to understand, “What they did in the past, whether and how they made a difference to their families’ welfare, and what they are up to now.” Dr. Ruth Mace and Dr. Rebecca Sear, University College Department of Anthropology in London, studied child mortality in rural Gambia from 1950 to 1974. Dr. Mace said, “The surprising result to us was that if the father was alive or dead didn’t matter. If the grandmother dies, you notice it, if the father dies, you don’t.” The study also indicated that it was the maternal grandmother that affected the child’s outcome. A similar study done by Dr. Donna Leonetti, an anthropologist at the University of Washington, of two ethnic groups in NE India, one Bengali, the other Khasi revealed, “Khasi women stay in their natal homes and their husbands join them. Ninty-six percent of Khasi children lived to age 6 if their maternal grandmothers were alive, compared with only 83 percent if the grandmother had died. For Bengali women who move to their husband’s households, the paternal grandmother has no effect on mortality rates of her grandchildren.” A study done by Dr. Harold A. Euler, a professor of psychology at the University of Kassel in Germany, on 700 people who had all four grandparents alive until they were at least seven years of age indicated that 50 percent of the participants cited their maternal grandmother as their favorite grandparent. Dr. Martin Kohli, director of the Research Group on Aging and the Life Course at the Free University of Berlin explains that he finds it logical that the maternal grandmother would be closer to the family. It would be the woman a mother would turn to when she needs help with her children.

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