Grandparents who spend time caring for their grandchildren may be doing more than just helping out the family—they could be protecting their own brain health in the process.

Flavia Chereches, a doctoral candidate at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, led a study examining 2,887 grandparents over age 50, with an average age of 67. Her team tracked participants through three waves of testing between 2016 and 2022, drawing from data in the English Longitudinal Study of Aging.

The findings showed that grandparents who provided any form of childcare in the previous year performed better on tests measuring memory and verbal fluency compared to those who didn't. Even more striking, grandmothers who cared for their grandchildren experienced less cognitive decline over the six-year study period.

The type and frequency of care didn't seem to matter. Whether grandparents were helping with homework, cooking meals, driving grandchildren to school, caring for sick children, babysitting overnight, or simply playing together, the cognitive benefits appeared consistent.

"What stood out most to us was that being a caregiving grandparent seemed to matter more for cognitive functioning than how often grandparents provided care or what exactly they did with their grandchildren," Chereches explained.

The researchers note an important caveat: these benefits likely depend on care being provided voluntarily within supportive family environments. When grandparenting feels like an unsupported burden rather than a choice, the effects may differ.

For context, around five million grandparents in the United Kingdom regularly help with childcare, with nearly 90 percent babysitting at least weekly. It appears those weekly visits might be as good for grandparents as they are for the grandchildren.