Grandparents who spend too much time babysitting could be making the children fat by overfeeding them and having low energy levels, their jobs can also affect the kid's social status down the road.
A research team studied 9,000 families in the U.K. who had a child between the ages of nine months and three years, according to the Daily Mail.
Toddlers who were babysat by their grandparents were a fifth more likely to have some extra pounds on them,
Children who spent a lot of time with their grandparents were 22 percent more likely to be overweight than kids who had younger babysitters.
"Results show that children who were cared for mainly by their grandmothers between the ages of nine months and three years were more likely overweight at age three than children who were cared for by their parents," said Dr Antti Tanskanen, from the University of Helsinki.
According to Tanskanen, traditionally grandparents raised children's survival rate by overfeeding them, but now the instinctual practice is just plumping them up.
"A significant way that grandmothers may have increased their grand children's survival rates in pre-modern and traditional populations was to improve grand children's nutritional status. The grand maternal support that improved children's nutrition status may have significantly decreased child mortality," said Tanskanen.
"However, grandmaternal support in modern societies may detrimentally affect children," he said.
Tanskanen also believes today's grandparents don't have a good understanding of what a healthy diet is for a child.
"Their nutritional understanding is from a different era so their simple understanding of what makes children fat is not as developed as later generations," he said.
A British study showed weight isn't the only thing grandparents can affect. If a child's grandparents had gone into professional occupations the child was two and a half times more likely to go into a managerial or professional job themselves, according to an American Sociological Association press release.
According to the study, grandparents have a larger effect on economic status and class than was previously believed.
The study asked 17,000 Britons what their occupation was along with how their grandparents made a living.
The team found men who had parents and grandparents in the upper managerial class were 80 percent more likely to stay there themselves. Only 61 percent of men with grandparents in the "working class" range were able to stay in managerial positions. Women saw a bit less of the "grandparent effect," they had lower numbers at 66 and 51 percent.
"The 'grandparents effect' in social mobility is found to operate throughout society and is not restricted to the top or bottom of the social class structure in Britain. It may work through a number of channels including the inheritance of wealth and property, and may be aided by durable social institutions such as generation-skipping trusts, residential segregation, and other demographic processes," said Dr. Tak Wing Chan, from the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford.
"Further investigation needs to be done to establish the precise mechanisms by which the grandparents effect endures, but our study of 17,000 Britons reveals that grandparents have a substantial effect on where their grandchildren end up in the British class system," he said.
