Grandparents face special challenges when they become parents to grandchildren

Annabel Baird did not expect to be arranging play dates or going to school meetings once her son and daughter were grown.

However, four years ago her son, now 29, became unable to care for his infant daughter. Baird and her husband gained legal custody of their granddaughter, who is now 5 years old. Baird will be 68 and her husband 70 when their granddaughter graduates from high school.

Her long-term friends have grown children and often can't relate to Baird's care of a small child. And the parents of her granddaughter's peers may be 30 years younger than Baird.

"I feel a real sense of not having a place to belong," Baird says. "The issues and problems that I faced when my own children were small, I'm having to face again."

The Bairds are not alone. Some 3.7 million grandparents are currently helping to raise 3.9 million children in the United States, and the number of children raised by grandparents increased by 53 percent between 1990 and 1998, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In Texas, 6.5 percent of children live in grandparent-headed households, and census figures show 7,150 children under age 18 living in grandparent-headed households in Denton County alone. About 2,400 Denton County children live in "skip generation" households like the Bairds', with no parents present.

Few resources exist for grandparents who are raising grandchildren. For this reason, Baird, who works for the Denton County Retired and Senior Volunteer Program, is seeking funding to establish resource centers for custodial grandparents. The centers will offer classes and support groups.

"What kids face today is much different from what my kids faced when they were small, and I'm not that far removed from raising children," Baird says. "More great-grandparents are now gaining custody, so you may have an 80-year-old raising a teen-ager."

Bert Hayslip, Regents Professor of psychology, notes that grandparents, particularly grandmothers, often accept surrogate parent roles because there is no one else to help and because they feel a special sense of commitment to the grandchildren for whom they are caring. Hayslip interviewed 300 grandparents in the Dallas-Fort Worth area who are guardians of grandchildren.

He says grandparents may step into the role of parents not only when their grandchildrens parents die, but also when their grandchildren are abused, separated from or abandoned by their natural parents, or when the natural parents are abusing alcohol or drugs or are divorcing, he says.

Hayslip says custodial grandparents usually do not receive child support from their grandchildren's natural parents. As a result, grandparents who are looking forward to retirement must continue working, or even return to work, "often at the expense of spending time with their grandchildren," he says.

In addition, custodial grandparents often feel isolated since they no longer have the "empty nests" of others their age, and they struggle with parenting issues that have changed since their own children were young, he says.

Baird says she misses her "freedom and ability to get up and go."

"Our old friends, whose kids grew up at the same time as ours, want my husband and me to be able to go to a movie on a moment's notice. We can't do that," she says.

Hayslip notes custodial grandparents may feel torn between their roles as parent for one set of grandchildren and traditional grandparent for other grandchildren who do not live with them.

"Parenting grandparents must be authority figures and disciplinarians, but traditional grandparents often enjoy spending time with their grandchildren without having to discipline them," he says. "Custodial grandparents found it was difficult to separate the two roles. As a result, their relationships with their non-custodial grandchildren suffered."

Baird's granddaughter is her only grandchild, but she says her daughter, now 25, was still living at home when she and her husband became legal custodians of their granddaughter.

"Our daughter loves her niece, but she really resented the fact that our granddaughter took up so much of our time," she says. "Also, she will have difficulty with the fact that this grandchild will have more attention from me than her own children will."

Baird's granddaughter sees her mother only every two or three weeks and rarely sees her father.

"Her parents are more like the visiting grandparents now," Baird says.

Hayslip says custodial grandparents may be raising grandchildren with behavioral and emotional problems that may stem from the problems of the children's natural parents. Forty percent of the grandparents in his study had obtained mental health services for their grandchildren, and 25 percent planned to seek such services.

The grandparents may need these services as well. Hayslip says a 1997 study found that grandparents raising grandchildren were twice as likely to say that they were depressed than their traditional, noncustodial counterparts.

Baird says her granddaughter has abandonment issues but is otherwise "a little ray of sunshine."

"She makes us laugh every day," she says. "I cannot imagine my life without her, and my husband is closer to her than he was to our own children at her age, since he's now working at home."

Being around younger parents "makes me feel younger," she says.

"I'm the same age in my mind as I was when I was raising my own children, and I feel very current," she says. "I know who the Power Puff Girls are – my old friends don't."

Hayslip says custodial grandparenting can have many rewards for the grandchildren as well. He cites a study that shows that children and adolescents are more likely to achieve in school, get off welfare, demonstrate more autonomy in decision making and engage in fewer deviant activities when residing with grandmothers.

"In African American families, grandmothers are seen as buffers against the detrimental effects of insensitive mothers, and grandfathers can serve as role models for boys who do not often see their fathers, according to one study," Hayslip says.

Baird says she feels "privileged to take part in another child's growing up."

"There is some guilt because I feel that her parents should experience her first plane ride and her birthdays," she says. "Raising another child was not something I would have done by choice, but I can't imagine not having done it."

BY NANCY KOLSTI nkolsti@unt.edu

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• UNT Psychology Clinic to offer group for children of divorced parents
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