Childcare arrangements are one of the primary determinants of labor market decisions undertaken by working parents with women, who are still primary undertakers of caregiving and domestic activity in a household, being at the center of the tradeoff between unpaid household work and paid work in the labor market. Despite the increasing availability of organized childcare facilities, grandparents of the child still remain an important source of unpaid childcare by working parents. Using the micro-data from the U.S. census, I measure the impact of informal childcare arrangements by grandparents by using two separate proxies: living in one's birth state and co-residence with an individual over 65. Using one's birth state as a proxy for residing close to one’s grandparents, I find that living in close proximity to grandparents increases their odds of being in the labor market; however, for mothers that are already in the labor market this results in an insignificant decrease in the work hours. Contrarily, using co-residence with an individual over 65 indicates that coresiding with the childs' grandparents has a negative correlation in both labor force participation as well as hours worked for working mothers. The magnitude and direction of these results vary by major ethno-racial groups in the U.S.

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