Eight out of ten grandparents help their children or grandchildren financially
Grandparents are essential in any family by all wisdom that they transmit, but the economic crisis has made them necessary for another reason: The number of grandparents who help their children and grandchildren financially has increased in recent years, becoming eight out of ten (80 percent) those who do it.
The economic hardships of families They have also made half of the grandparents who help their families financially feed them daily or several days a week, according to a report made by Educo and Salvetti & Llombart.
This report, entitled 'Crisis and domino effect. Are there pieces left to fall? The well-being of children, grandmothers and grandparents in the breach ', highlights that if it was first the adults and then the children, now it is the grandparents who suffer the domino effect of the crisis, the percentage of grandparents who must help their children and grandchildren reaches 80 percent, a percentage that in 2010 was only 20 percent.
Grandparents who help children and grandchildren
This study, which has been carried out with the aim of discovering the role of the elderly in the economic crisis, reveals that grandparents spend an average of 290 euros a month to help their children and grandchildren, and that one in three (30 percent) gives them an amount on a regular basis.
This has been announced by the general director of the NGO, José Faura, who has explained the intention of the organization of raise society's awareness of the drama that many families live. They know this well, because they are dedicated to providing lunch scholarships to the most needy students and from 2013 until the end of this course they will have already financed 1.5 million grants.
State Pact for Children
With the information in this report, Faura has asked all political leaders to agree on a State Pact for Children "at once", assuring that although in Spain people speak of "malnutrition" and, luckily, not of hunger as in other countries of Africa, the NGO continues with its scholarships because "they are necessary".
In this sense, the coordinator of the Educo's scholarship program, Pepa Domingo, has highlighted that they are grandparents who help their children and grandchildren thanks to their pension, a money that they can not use for them but they have to dedicate almost entirely to their family.
The method that the grandparents have followed to be able to help their families has been the reduction of your own expenses: 46 percent of the interviewees have decreased the cost of health treatments such as the dentist or the oculist, 45 percent have reduced the consumption of light, 15 percent buy less fresh products, half have stopped doing activity physical and even one in ten has had to sell some object to cope with the new expenses.
All this has led to a logical consequence: 57 percent of grandparents say that their situation and well-being have worsened due to the economic difficulties of their family, a fact that from Educo directly relate to the INE figures that say that in the first quarter of 2015 more than 700,000 families had no income.
Family atmosphere
The economic difficulties that some families go through also make a dent in their relationships: four out of ten grandparents assures that the atmosphere in their family has worsened with the crisis, and 16 percent say that their grandchildren argue more with their parents than before. In addition, 12 percent of the grandparents surveyed believe that the grandchildren have improved their school performance during the crisis.
Angela R. Bonachera
