Sex-specific trajectories of mental health and life satisfaction during the transition to grandparenthood in China.

Despite the widespread experience of grandparenthood in later life, limited research has examined how subjective well-being evolves across the transition to grandparenthood over an extended period. Drawing on five waves of data from the China Family Panel Studies (2012-2022), this study applies a life-course approach to investigate sex-specific trajectories of emotional (i.e., mental health) and evaluative (i.e., life satisfaction) well-being from the pre-transition years through the birth of the first grandchild and into the early years of grandparenthood, as well as heterogeneity across key sociodemographic subgroups. Using fixed-effects models with discrete-time trends, four key patterns emerge. First, women show short- to mid-term improvements in emotional well-being beginning in the birth year, though estimates become less precise in later years and are weaker among non-coresident women. Second, men exhibit sustained increases in evaluative well-being from the birth year through six years afterward, with limited subgroup variation. Third, anticipatory associations are generally absent for both sexes. Fourth, unmarried women display larger well-being improvements than married women, whereas other moderators show minimal influence. Robustness checks indicate that these longitudinal patterns are unlikely to be driven by attrition bias, reverse causality, spurious temporal correlations, or omitted variables. Overall, the findings demonstrate that grandparenthood has sex-differentiated associations with well-being in contemporary China and stress the importance of gendered family roles and cultural expectations for understanding this transition and supporting active and healthy aging.