An increasing number of children in our community have grandparents and other relative caregivers as their primary caregivers. Among the factors contributing to this rise are the ever growing rates of incarceration, substance dependency, and further polarization of the poor. Grandparents and other relatives have stepped in to stabilize the situation for millions of children impacted by these trends, to share resources and to prevent another generation from cycling into the criminal justice system.

Extended family caregiving is not a new phenomenon and has been extensively documented in African-American families in classic studies such as All Our Kin, which testified to the positive force of this response.¹ The phenomenon has also been misunderstood and vilified in the now infamous "Moynihan Report". However, new attention has been called to this phenomenon in two helpful studies: Black Grandparents As Parents² and Grandmother as Caregivers: Raising Children of the Crack Cocaine Epidemic³.

The recent attention is warranted because of the dramatic increase of grandparents as primary caregivers. In 1997, 5.5% of children lived in their Grandparent’s homes, compared to 3.6% in 1980.⁴ The burden falling heaviest on the African-American community. According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census (1991), nearly 4 times as many African-American grandparents have primary responsibility for their grandchildren as do their white counterparts and there are twice as many African-American grandparent caregivers as there are Latino grandparent caregivers⁵. 27% of children who live in their grandparent’s homes live in poverty, and that rate is much higher for children who live with a single grandmother⁶.

However, regardless of the community, these families share many of the same problems. The children suffer the trauma of separation from their parents. The grandparents must redefine their relationship to their grandchildren since they no longer have the welcomed traditions of "doting grandparents" but must parent with difficult obligations of discipline and other stresses. The children and grandparents must struggle with their new relationship to the absent parent and the grandparents must readjust their households financially and physically for infants and young children⁷. Typically, a grandparent in this situation would go to a legal services agency and separately to a social services agency to meet their varied needs.

LSPC publishes a self-help legal manual entitled Manual for Grandparent-Relative Caregivers and Their Advocates, which is available on our Web site.

Notes:

1. Stack, Carol, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (1974).
2. Poe, Lenora Madison, Black Grandparents as Parents (1992).
3. Minkler, Meredith, Grandmother as Caregivers: Raising Children of the Crack Cocaine Epidemic, Sage Publications (1993).
4. Bryson & Casper, “Co-resident Grandparents & Grandchildren”, Census. Bureau Current Population Reports (May 1999) p.1.
5. Id.
6. Id., pp. 7-8.
7. Bloom, Barbara, and Steinhart, David, Why Punish the Children: A Reappraisal of the Children of Incarcerated Mothers in America, (1993).