This article originally appeared in the July-August 1997 Children's Advocate newsmagazine, published by Action Alliance for Children. Also see the sidebar, "Policies to Fit Families."

Staying with Grandma

The old custom of caring for relatives' kids poses new challenges in the '90s

By Cassi Feldman

This month, hundreds of California foster kids will be placed in the care of people who get little or no financial assistance, access to health services, or information about community resources. They may never be visited by a social worker. Their homes may not have been assessed for safety. These unofficial foster parents have one thing in common—they are relatives, mostly grandparents, of the children in their care.

More than one-tenth of all grandparents now provide the primary care for their grandchildren for at least six months and typically much longer, according to a recent national study co-authored by Meredith Minkler of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.

Grandparent caregiving is on the rise partly because of the growing number of young adults who are unwilling or unable to take care of their children due to drug addiction, incarceration, AIDS, violent crime, teen pregnancy, poverty, or mental illness. The trend also reflects a push by Child Protective Services (CPS) to maintain the integrity of families. When a child must be removed from his or her home, the first-choice option is temporary placement with a relative, or "kinship care." The number of abused or neglected children placed with family members has steadily risen over the past decade and now almost half of California's 100,000 foster kids live with relatives—older siblings, aunts, uncles, and, primarily, grandmothers.

Some experts, like author and psychotherapist Lenora Poe, argue that relative caregiving is nothing new. Poe is co-chair of the State Coalition of Grandparents Raising Grandchildren, a network of local support groups for relative caregivers. On the basis of her research on kinship relations, she notes that grandmothers "are getting more media attention now but are still doing what they've done for years."

The difference, however, is the increasing number of grandparents who are now serving as primary caregivers. Critics charge that county child-welfare agencies are turning to relative caregivers partly because of pressure to find the cheapest placement, one which they tend to assume is safe and nurturing. But relative caregivers, service providers, and researchers say the growing reliance on relative caregivers raises new issues for the foster-care system.

Limited resources

According to a recent study of kinship care by the Children's Research Institute of California (CRIC), only a little more than half of the relatives caring for foster children receive the subsidies that are usually paid to non-relative foster parents. Many relative caregivers instead rely on welfare. Although the basic monthly payments for foster care and welfare are comparable, welfare provides no extra funds for a child's particular needs, such as tutoring or special medical attention.

Most grandparent caregivers, meanwhile, have few financial resources of their own: Their median household income is $22,000 a year, according to Minkler's study, with almost one in four below the poverty line. When grandparents take on the care of their grandchildren, Minkler says, their income frequently declines.

Many people fear that welfare-grant cuts and welfare-reform time limits may mean more children will end up in foster care because their parents won't have enough income to support them. At the same time, caregiving grandparents receiving welfare could be subject to time limits and work requirements unless the state passes laws making them exempt. "Are we going to send a 60- or 65-year-old woman off to work after two years while she is raising small children?" asks Minkler.

Extra needs

In addition to the financial burden of caring for a child, relative caregivers often shoulder difficult parenting tasks. Mary Martin, 70, who's raising several of her grandchildren, points out that when children arrive in a caregiver's home, it's usually because they've been through traumatic experiences in their original home.

Martin says these children need, not just food and clothing, but therapy, special education, and attention to their emotional problems. There may be help available, she says, but for a grandparent already overwhelmed with expenses, day-to-day caregiving, schooling, tutoring, housing, and family conflicts, the resources may feel out of reach.

The CRIC report confirms Martin's sense that caregivers often have little information about resources that exist to help them. Only 30 of the caregivers surveyed in the study reported that they had received a comprehensive HEPP (health and education passport) for the children in their care, 41 percent said they were not aware of social support services, and 62 percent reported no knowledge of financial resources available to them.

Costly conflicts

Family ties between children and relative caregivers are no guarantee that adjustment to their new relationship will be smooth. Martin says the toughest thing about caring for her grandchildren is teaching them to live by her rules. "When you are a grandmother taking over the role of caretaker, they're your blood relatives but it's still someone else's child. The parents instill the basic principles and it may not be your way, the way you would choose to raise them." In addition, relative caregivers often face complex, ongoing family conflicts stemming from the problems that brought the children to their homes in the first place.

Lynn Harrington, for example, battled her own daughter in court for custody of her two grandchildren. Several years ago, Harrington's daughter left her husband and two young children to pursue a new life with her boyfriend in Missouri. The children, now eight and 12, stayed in California with Harrington, her husband, and their father, who was stationed at a nearby naval base. When her daughter returned to California eight months later and tried to collect her kids, Harrington refused, went to court, and won three years of temporary custody of her grandchildren. A young grandma at 49, Harrington explains that her daughter not only "dumped her kids," but was living with a man who seemed unsafe.

The children rarely speak with their mother, Harrington says, and visits with either parent —the father now lives in Texas—are at their grandmother's discretion. Harrington speaks triumphantly about the case but regretfully about the enormous damage, psychological and financial, that the battle has done to her family.

Regulation: Too much? Too little?

Although relative caregivers may face extra problems, they often receive less attention than other foster parents. "Unlike other foster-care placements, many kinship-care placements occur without a thorough assessment of the caregiver's ability or desire to provide a safe and nurturing environment for the child," says the CRIC report. For example, less than half the child-welfare workers surveyed said they knew of a procedure to conduct a security clearance on relative caregivers, to determine, for instance, whether the relative had a record of child abuse.

Although social workers are usually supposed to visit foster homes once a month, three-quarters of the relative caregivers in CRIC's survey said they received a social-worker visit less than once a month, and one-quarter said a social worker had never visited. On this issue, as on many others, the survey showed a wide discrepancy between the perceptions of relative caregivers and those of professionals in the child-welfare system. Three-quarters of the county welfare directors surveyed said social workers do visit relative caregivers once a month.

While CRIC researchers identify "lack of supervision" as a problem with relative-foster-care arrangements, some relative caregivers see foster-care procedures as a burden. Sometimes, says Poe, relatives feel that the financial benefits of official foster care are outweighed by the drawbacks—having to go through formal evaluation, application, assessment, and court proceedings, then following a judge's orders, monitored by CPS workers. This is one reason why some relative caregivers make informal arrangements to care for children without going through "the system," even though that decision means they get no financial help. Other grandparents avoid formalizing the arrangement because they are reluctant to usurp their children's parental roles.

Complicated choices

Nina Villanueva and her husband are hoping to become their grandson's legal guardians, even though that will mean losing the foster-care funds they now receive for taking care of him. The Villanuevas went to court to gain temporary custody of the child when he was a year and a half old because their son and daughter-in-law were heavily involved with drugs. But Villanueva says it's uncomfortable to have CPS involved with her family.

Because their son is still battling drug addiction, the Villanuevas are permitted to see him only during his one-hour weekly visits with his son, supervised by a CPS worker; to defy this mandate is to forfeit care of their grandson. While they used to give their son food and occasional shelter, they now must send him away when he comes to the door. "The hardest part," she says, " is not seeing your child. I'm gaining a grandchild but I lost a son."

Because relative caregivers face unique situations, advocates say they need legal arrangements and support services designed for them. Responding to information in the CRIC report, a task force made up of relative caregivers, service providers, and policy experts recently drew up a list of recommendations; legislation based on these recommendations is now being introduced in Sacramento. And service providers and grandparents all over the state are inventing new forms of support to meet the unique needs of relative caregivers.

Extra resources from the Children’s Advocate bulletin 2006

To stay informed about new and upcoming Children’s Advocate articles, related resources, and advocacy opportunities, sign up for our Children’s Advocate bulletin

What do YOU think? Give us your feedback.

Action Alliance for Children
e-mail aac@4children.org
1201 Martin Luther King Jr. Way
Oakland, CA 94612
(510) 444-7136