Global Awards News

LONDON: Five per cent of seniors are now raising their grandchildren in full time carer roles.

Martina Singh is raising her grandkids “old-school style.”

The single retiree has spent her life volunteering, distributing food and finding ways to care for her neighborhood. And beginning ten years ago, Singh agreed to take over caring for her grandkids during her son’s military deployment.

“I just take everything day by day, and count my blessings,” Singh said. “I don’t let life get to me, the same thing that I teach them: there’s always someone out there worse off than you.”

Singh is one of a growing number of grandparents taking care of their grandchildren. Seniors are finding themselves in parenting roles for several reasons, including substance abuse, unstable housing, domestic violence, disability or death in the family.

As these conditions have intensified for vulnerable families during the pandemic, an increasing number of seniors are abandoning plans of retirement to take on the challenge of parenting for a second time.

Most seniors who step in to raise relative children are doing so informally, a practice called kinship care. This arrangement allows grandparents to receive information about medical needs and the children’s education, but it sidesteps the particulars of adoption and legal guardianship, which require time in the court system and can be expensive, time consuming and emotionally difficult for the children.

Heightened COVID-related risks, particularly in populations over 50, have pushed some seniors caring for their grandchildren to take extra health precautions.

Singh, who also manages a chronic illness, is especially at risk of serious medical repercussions if she were to contract COVID or another severe illness. As a result, she and her grandkids were homebodies even before the pandemic – which has helped keep Singh safe – but the prolonged isolation has pushed other grandparents to the limit.

“Everything tends to work out,” Singh said, “but never feel afraid to reach out for support and help, because the person next to you may be in the same shoes you’re in and you’ll never know.”

Promoting positivity

Mary Vaughn knows all about seniors’ need for community.

As the founder and president of Grandparents Raising Children, she has worked to alleviate loneliness – both pandemic-related and otherwise – and other difficulties seniors raising relative children struggle with through the support group she founded in 2017.

The Indianapolis-based group socializes and invites guest speakers twice a month, and host a litany of positivity-oriented events for both seniors and youngsters. Vaughn created the group during a three-year period caring for her granddaughter; the sudden change to her routine impacted her mental health, and she feels strongly about making sure other grandparents don’t feel the same.

“It’s hard,” Vaughn said, “and a lot of grandparents feel like they’re alone because they can’t do what their friends are doing because they’ve got children, so they kind of get isolated.”

“We are here to help, and we are here to empower.”

Playing both sides

Debbie Pierle’s granddaughter is a girl of many passions. The 13-year-old loves basketball, softball and swimming. She’s a fan of Greek and Chinese food, and – when the weather is nice – spends hours fishing at Dietz Lake with her grandmother. She’s the smartest kid Pierle thinks she’s ever met and has received top grades throughout her elementary school years.

Pierle doesn’t take any of it for granted.

Her granddaughter has overcome insurmountable obstacles; her biological mother, who became pregnant as a senior in high school, has been in and out of her life since she was born. Pierle’s health issues have caused several unforeseen scares, which has intensified her granddaughter’s stress about her grandparents, whom she’s described as “the two most important people.”

Starting middle school during a global pandemic hasn’t helped matters, either.

“My granddaughter witnessed a lot of things that were going on,” Pierle said. “It got to the point where I could no longer let my granddaughter be around (her biological parents).”

While Pierle has no regrets about taking on a second round of parenting, it certainly doesn’t come without difficulty. Economic, physical, and social challenges are a part of life with senior parenting.

“Grandparents want to spoil their grandchildren,” Pierle said, “and we’ve had to play both sides of it.”

More than anything else, the pandemic has been her granddaughter’s academic undoing. For months, Pierle leaned on teachers at school, who she says have helped as much as they can with home-schooling techniques and homework assistance.

But she has struggled to fill in as a tutor in situations where her granddaughter needs help with her coursework, and in the situations where she’s been unable to help, her granddaughter’s grades have suffered. Technology has been no friend, either.

“She used to tell me all the time that she would rather be home-schooled — well, she changed her mind after the pandemic hit, because the pandemic hit her hard,” Pierle said. “She would say ’mamaw, I have no idea how to do this,’ and I’d go ‘well, I have no idea how to do it either.’”

Pierle said her granddaughter’s recent return to in-person classes is like “a breath” for her granddaughter, which allows her to pace herself against her peers, ask for help when she’s confused and escape the pressure of home life uncertainty.

“She’s been through a lot, not just with her parents but with our health issues,” Pierle said. “The constant fear the child has gone through over all these years has really taken a toll on her, and I’m really surprised that she was able to do as well as what she’s done and focus on school.”

Online community

Marla Andrusczak’s favorite moments of relaxation are the early mornings, when her two grandchildren are still sleeping.

On sunny mornings, she makes a beeline for the glider swing in her spacious backyard. She listens to the birds as she sips her coffee. Before her family’s hectic schedule begins, she takes her alone time as a moment to breathe deeply.

Andrusczak and her husband have been raising their two grandchildren, an eight-year-old and a 15-year-old, since they were born.

When her daughter needed support caring for her children, Andrusczak took them in without question.

“For me it wasn’t a difficult choice or a really hard thing to do,” Andrusczak said, “… there hasn’t really been any amount of time in my life that hasn’t been without a child, so to do this again is like any other day.”

Taking on the care of her grandchildren came at the cost of friendships and social opportunities and left her feeling adrift without others in her shoes. But she’s pieced together a new circle and found community with other seniors raising their grandchildren in the area using Facebook and YouTube.

Over the years, she’s joined several Facebook groups that allow seniors to share activities and recipes with others in their position – the baking and arts and crafts groups are quite popular – and she’s used YouTube to fill in the gaps, designing elaborate Halloween costumes and painting planters with her online engagement as inspiration.

“If you even look on the ‘grandparents raising grandchildren’ page on Facebook, there’s over 50,000 participants in the group, and that’s just that group – there’s probably at least 10 different groups now,” Andrusczak said. “My thing is, can you imagine how many people that are doing this that aren’t in any groups?”

Supporting seniors

For Lorraine Conwell, helping kinship caregivers – particularly the ones Andrusczak worries about – is a vital part of supporting the community.

Conwell is the director of kinship care for Family Connection Network at The Villages of Indiana, which aids families with mental, emotional and financial services. She said that nearly 77% of the kinship care providers she works with are over the age of 55; the support group provides them a place to connect with resources, share their concerns and triumphs with other seniors, and find friends who understand their experiences.

Programming is need-based, and topics are chosen by the participants themselves. Guest speakers have covered topics ranging from vaping hazards to affordable healthy eating, and seniors take time afterwards to ask questions and discuss their own tips and tricks.

“It’s important for caregivers to be connected to those that are going through similar situations,” Conwell said. “Their social circle now changes, and it’s important for them to be around others who are now parenting for a second time around.”

Moving forward, Andrusczak believes government support for seniors caring for relative children ought to be a priority; as their numbers increase, access to funding for food, housing and medical needs – and support for grandparents themselves – ought to increase in tandem. Non-profit organizations like Conwell’s should similarly be able to access additional grants, which will provide leadership for groups of grandparents going it alone.