Grandparents raising grandchildren
Skipping a generation
Millions of grandparents are filling in for missing or misguided parents
Jun 14th 2007 | chicago | from the print edition
SOME kinds of non-traditional family get more attention than others. In the 1990s welfare reform flashed a spotlight on America's poor single mothers. More recently, ballot initiatives on gay marriage and unions have put more children with two mothers or a pair of fathers in the public eye. By contrast, children being brought up by their grandparents rarely attract public interest. Yet over the past few years federal and state governments have quietly been fiddling with their policies in order to help these families more effectively.
Grandparents are now raising an awful lot of America's poorest and most troubled children. In 2000, the first time that the Census Bureau took a proper count, 2.4m grandparents were bringing up their children's kids. To put that in perspective, fewer than 2m poor American families now receive formal welfare payments under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the programme that sparked a fierce national debate when welfare was reformed a decade ago. Many of those grandchildren are in poor shape. For starters, the events that have left them parentless usually mean that their lives have been hard. In most cases, the parents are missing because of drugs, prison, mental illness, or a history of neglecting or abusing their child.
Moreover, the grandparents in these families tend to have their own limitations. A 2003 study by the Urban Institute, a centre-left think-tank, found that among grandparents responsible for raising children, 37% had incomes below the federal poverty threshold, and 66% were low-income (less than twice the poverty level). One-third of the grandparents raising children had not finished high school, and 62% had no college education. There is also an obvious generational gap in energy levels: whereas 70% of the grandparents were over 50 years old, the study found, 70% of the children were 11 or younger. Statistics apart, it is also clear that many of these grandparents did not do a good job of bringing up their own children.
One way federal and state governments have tried to help is by tweaking elderly-assistance programmes to account explicitly for grandparents' needs. In 2000, when Congress renewed the Older Americans Act (a collection of goodies for retired folk) it added a new programme offering the states grants to help grandparents.
Some states now offer better information and counselling: on what kind of health care is available, how to help with homework and so forth. Bruce Carver, who co-ordinates many services for old people in western Kentucky's Pennyrile region, says that one popular part of the new programme has been respite care. This pays for the grandparents to have someone else mind the kids for a few weeks when school is out, since the teachers can no longer give them a breather everyday. Two problems still stand out, however. One is mental health. A study last year by the Chapin Hall Centre for Children, at the University of Chicago, focused on child-rearing grandmothers in a couple of Chicago suburbs. It pointed to a link between the grandmothers' symptoms of depression and the grandchildren's emotional and behavioural troubles, but found that many of these families were not getting the help they needed.
The other problem involves custody. For various reasons, such as a private agreement with the parents or some sort of dispute, grandparents often do not have formal custody. Yet without it, many find it extremely difficult to obtain the health care to which their grandchildren are entitled, or to get them into a convenient public school. Some grandparents also face a deeply painful choice: whether to fight for custody when the parents want their children back but still seem unfit. A legal battle generally means the grandparents attacking their own children in court.
from the print edition | United States
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