Grandparents have  acquired a more central position in family relationships, especially with respect to the care of grandchildren, but also as financial support. However Europe presents a big cultural divide between north and south on the role of grandparents. In Southern Europe to help grandchildren’s parents in looking after young grandchildren is considered a grandparent’s duty much more than in the North. (Glaser et al. 2013, Hank and Buber 2009, Attias-Donfut and Segalen 2005)

To this day, the effect of this unprecedented grandparents´ family centrality on their quality of life is not clear in literature.

On the other hand, healthy aging has become of the utmost importance in Europe. The WHO define health no longer as merely the absence of disease, but as a global wellbeing (bio-psycho-social) of the individual, that is, the quality of life related to health (WHO, 2008).

The objective of the present study is to estimate variation in well-being  of european grandparents over a period of 9 years (2004-2013) from longitudinal data and examine whether such variation is significantly different both between countries and from the not-grandparent population in the same time period, controlling by demographic and socioeconomic variables.