Exogenous shocks during sensitive periods of development can have long-lasting effects on adult phenotypes including behavior, survival and reproduction. Cooperative breeding, such as grandparental care in humans and some other mammal species, is believed to have evolved largely in order to cope with challenging environments. Nevertheless, studies considering whether grandparental investment can buffer the development of grandchildren from multiple adversities early in life are few and have provided mixed results, perhaps owing to difficulties drawing causal inferences from non-experimental data. Using population-based data of English and Welsh adolescents (sample size ranging from 817 to 1197), we examined whether grandparental investment can reduce emotional and behavioral problems in children resulting from facing multiple adverse early life experiences (AELEs), employing instrumental variable regression in a Bayesian structural equation modeling framework to justify causally more interpretable results. When children had faced multiple AELEs, the investment of maternal grandmothers decreased, but could not fully erase, their emotional and behavioral problems. No such result was observed in the case of the investment of other grandparent types. These findings indicate that in adverse environmental conditions the investment of maternal grandmothers can improve child wellbeing.