Grandparents Parenting Again: Challenges, Strengths, and Implications for Practice

Approximately 2.4 million grandparents and extended family members are raising six million relative children in the United States, a 50% increase in the past decade (US Census 2005). A myriad of societal ills have contributed to the increase in kinship care families such as parental substance abuse, incarceration, physical, emotional and sexual abuse, neglect, illness, death, family violence, divorce, deportation, homelessness, and, more recently, military deployment. To counter the impact of disruptive separations, kin caregivers have assumed this significant role to help their grandchildren maintain a sense of family identity and provide continuity. The expanding phenomenon of grandparents and relatives functioning as parent surrogates for these children has posed both challenges and benefits for the caregivers. Although relatives' (referred to hereafter as grandparents or kin caregivers) homes are increasingly being considered as beneficial placements for children without parents and outcome studies show that children living in the care of their relatives function better than those in traditional foster care (Rubin et al. 2008), often grandparents enter this relationship with ambivalence and uncertainty. They care deeply about the welfare of their grandchildren, understand the importance of maintaining familial and ethnocultural ties, and do not want their grandchildren placed with strangers, but are also aware of the sacrifices involved in parenting a second time around. They struggle with the discrepancy between their hopes and plans for themselves and their concerns for their grandchildren.