This blog post is based on an article published in Social Policy and Society by Jiayi Ma, Yazhen Yang and Yu Ding.
Across ageing societies, governments are increasingly attempting to address two demographic challenges at the same time: extending working lives and encouraging higher fertility. In practice, however, these two goals may not always align.
China provides a particularly important example of this tension. Beginning in 2025, China officially started to gradually raise its statutory retirement age for the first time in decades. The reform is designed to address labour shortages, pension sustainability, and rapid population ageing. At the same time, the country continues to face persistently low fertility despite the transition from the one-child policy to the three-child policy.
These developments raise an important social policy question: what happens when older adults are expected to work longer in a society where grandparents play a central role in childcare? The study explores this question using a survey experiment examining how delayed retirement may affect adult children’s fertility intentions through changes in grandparental support.
Why Grandparents Matter in China’s Childcare System
In many European countries, grandparents provide supplementary childcare. In China, however, grandparents often function as a core part of the childcare system itself.
Formal childcare provision for young children remains relatively limited and unevenly distributed. As a result, many families rely heavily on grandparents to provide regular and intensive childcare support. Grandparental care often enables both parents to remain in employment while reducing childcare costs and work–family pressures.
This means that retirement timing has implications that extend well beyond older workers themselves. Retirement also shapes the availability of informal care within families, influencing how younger generations make decisions about marriage, employment, and childbearing. The findings suggest that delayed retirement may weaken this intergenerational support system in important ways.
The Hidden Time Effect of Delayed Retirement
Public debate around delayed retirement often focuses on economic outcomes. Working longer may increase household income, improve pension sustainability, and reduce fiscal pressure associated with ageing populations. However, the study suggests that some of the most important consequences may not be financial, but temporal.
The findings suggest that delayed retirement reduces expected grandparental childcare and lowers adult children’s fertility intentions. Participants reported lower intended family size and a greater likelihood of postponing childbirth when imagining that their parents would retire later than expected.
By contrast, increased financial support from parents played a far less significant role. This distinction highlights an important social policy insight: in contexts where families depend heavily on informal childcare, time availability may matter more than income transfers.
The findings therefore point to what might be described as the hidden time effect of delayed retirement policies. Extending working lives may unintentionally reduce the supply of family-based care that many younger households rely upon when making fertility decisions.
Gender Matters: Why Mothers’ Retirement Has Greater Effects
The study also reveals important gender differences. The negative effects on fertility intentions were stronger when mothers experienced delayed retirement. The strongest effects were observed when both parents’ retirement was postponed.
This reflects the gendered nature of caregiving within families. In China, grandmothers continue to provide much more intensive childcare than grandfathers. Adult children therefore appear particularly sensitive to changes in mothers’ retirement timing when considering future childbearing plans.
The duration of retirement delay also mattered. Short delays mainly affected the timing of childbirth, encouraging postponement. Longer delays, however, were associated not only with delayed childbearing but also with reductions in intended family size. These findings suggest that delayed retirement may initially reshape fertility timing, but over longer periods may also contribute to lower fertility aspirations altogether.
Beyond China: A Broader Social Policy Dilemma
Although the study focuses on China, the findings resonate more broadly with debates in other ageing societies, particularly those where family-based welfare and intergenerational support remain important.
In many Southern European and East Asian contexts, grandparents play a significant role in compensating for gaps in formal childcare provision. Policies that extend working lives may therefore generate unintended consequences for family support systems and fertility behaviour.
More broadly, the study highlights how demographic policies are deeply interconnected. Pension reform, labour market participation, childcare provision, and fertility are often treated as separate policy domains, yet they interact within everyday family life. As governments respond to ageing populations, balancing these competing demographic objectives may become increasingly difficult.
Looking Ahead: Coordinating Ageing and Family Policies
The findings suggest that delayed retirement policies cannot be considered in isolation from broader family and childcare policies. Several policy responses may help reduce tensions between extending working lives and supporting fertility:
- more flexible retirement arrangements for grandparents involved in childcare;
- expanded parental and family leave policies;
- greater investment in affordable childcare services;
- stronger coordination between pension reform and family policy planning.
More fundamentally, the study highlights the continuing importance of intergenerational support in ageing societies. As populations age and family structures change, understanding how policies reshape relationships between generations will become increasingly important for social policy research and practice.
Reference
Ma, Jiayi, Yazhen Yang, and Yu Ding. 2026. “Delayed Retirement, Grandparental Support, and Adult Children’s Fertility Intentions: Insights from a Survey Experiment in China.” Social Policy and Society: 1–19. doi: 10.1017/S1474746426101420.
About the Authors
Jiayi Ma is an MSc student in the School of Public Affairs, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China.
Yazhen Yang is an assistant professor in the School of Public Affairs, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China, and a visiting researcher at the Centre for Research on Ageing, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK.
Yu Ding is an associate professor in the School of Public Affairs, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China.
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