Grandparental Childcare for Biological, Adopted, and Step-Offspring: Findings From Cross-National Surveys

Based on kin selection theory, amounts of grandparental investment should reflect the probability to share common genes with offspring. Adoption may represent a special case, however, yet grandparental investment in adopted children has previously been both theoretically misconstrued and little investigated. Here, we study for the first time how grandparental childcare provision is distributed between biological, adopted, and step-offspring. Using Generations and Gender Surveys (n = 15,168 adult child–grandmother and 12,193 adult child–grandfather dyads) and the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (n = 17,233 grandmother–adult child and 13,000 grandfather–adult child dyads), we find that grandparents were less likely to provide care to stepchildren than to adopted and biological children, but no difference between adopted and biological children. These findings were present in both data sets and for both grandmothers and grandfathers, after several potentially confounding factors were taken into account. The stepchild disadvantage is in line with kin selection theory. The congruent amounts of care provided to adopted and biological children may reflect similar levels of adult–child attachment, selection effects, and greater need in adoptive families, as well as some degree of genetical relatedness in the case of kin adoption. The study provides new evidence of biased kin investments in contemporary societies and stresses the importance of psychological motivation and attachment in evolutionary studies of kin investment.</p

Entry into grandparenthood and subjective well-being among older Europeans

The birth of a grandchild is often assumed to increase subjective well-being of older adults. Previous studies, however, have been both scarce and methodologically limited. Here, associations between grandparenthood and subjective well-being (measured by self-rated life satisfaction and meaning of life scores) were investigated using data from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). SHARE is a longitudinal study of individuals aged 50 years and above from 16 countries, including five follow-up waves between 2004 and 2015 (n = 67,110 person-observations from 41,123 persons). Within-person regressions focusing on each participant’s variation in subjective well-being over time were applied to detect changes longitudinally. Becoming a grandparent was associated with increased meaning of life scores among participants. However, similar effects were not found in the case of self-rated life satisfaction. The results are discussed in relation to studies examining whether entering parenthood is associated with subjective well-being.</p

Relationship quality among younger and middle-aged siblings: the role of childhood family arrangements

Sibling relationships are the social bonds with longest duration across the life course. Using a large and population-based data of younger and middle-aged Finns, we test how childhood co-residence duration and maternal perinatal association (MPA) correlate with contact frequency, emotional closeness and provision of help between adult siblings. Employing sibling fixed-effect models we find that duration of co-residence in childhood and MPA are indeed associated with increased relationship quality in all three measures. Provided MPA, sibling relationship quality is high independent of co-residence length, but in the absence of MPA, increased co-residence duration is associated with better relationship quality. Co-residence duration is more strongly associated with provision of help in same-gender than opposite-gender sibling dyads. Full siblings report better relationship quality than half siblings do, although the co-residence duration mediates the effect of genetic relatedness in emotional closeness between full and maternal half siblings and in provision of help between full and paternal half siblings. Moreover, MPA serves as a mediator in the case of contact frequency and emotional closeness between full and maternal half siblings. These findings are discussed with reference to key theories of kin detection.</p

Tying the Extended Family Knot: Grandparents’ Influence on Educational Achievement

In present-day western societies grandparents and grandchildren have longer years of shared lifetime than ever before. We investigate whether children with more grandparent resources have a higher probability of achieving the general secondary degree compared with children with fewer resources, or whether shared lifetime with grandparents increases the probability of achieving the general secondary degree. We use high-quality Finnish Census Panel data and apply sibling random and fixed-effects models that also control for all unobserved factors shared by siblings. Grandparents’ education and socioeconomic status have only a limited ability to explain a grandchild’s educational achievement. However, the sibling fixed-effects models reveal that every shared year between grandparents and grandchildren increases a grandchild’s likelihood of completing general secondary education by 1 percentage point, on average. The effect of shared lifetime is conditional on grandparental type, family resources, and the size of the extended family. Maternal grandmothers have a positive effect on grandchildren’s education in low-income families. Paternal grandmothers provide a link to the resources available through the extended family network, independent of their own resources. The same effects were not observed for grandfathers.</p

Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes

Cancer is driven by genetic change, and the advent of massively parallel sequencing has enabled systematic documentation of this variation at the whole-genome scale. Here we report the integrative analysis of 2,658 whole-cancer genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types from the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We describe the generation of the PCAWG resource, facilitated by international data sharing using compute clouds. On average, cancer genomes contained 4-5 driver mutations when combining coding and non-coding genomic elements; however, in around 5% of cases no drivers were identified, suggesting that cancer driver discovery is not yet complete. Chromothripsis, in which many clustered structural variants arise in a single catastrophic event, is frequently an early event in tumour evolution; in acral melanoma, for example, these events precede most somatic point mutations and affect several cancer-associated genes simultaneously. Cancers with abnormal telomere maintenance often originate from tissues with low replicative activity and show several mechanisms of preventing telomere attrition to critical levels. Common and rare germline variants affect patterns of somatic mutation, including point mutations, structural variants and somatic retrotransposition. A collection of papers from the PCAWG Consortium describes non-coding mutations that drive cancer beyond those in the TERT promoter; identifies new signatures of mutational processes that cause base substitutions, small insertions and deletions and structural variation; analyses timings and patterns of tumour evolution; describes the diverse transcriptional consequences of somatic mutation on splicing, expression levels, fusion genes and promoter activity; and evaluates a range of more-specialized features of cancer genomes