Bridging a Generation Gap

Around the time Sue Stutz turned 60, she took on the rigors of parenthood — again.

Ms. Stutz and her husband had already raised their two children, but when their adult daughter’s problems with alcohol and drugs intensified, the couple took their then 4-year-old grandson, Chris, into their home in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley. Gone were the plans the couple had of spending their golden years traveling and visiting with friends. Because Chris was beset by Asperger’s syndrome, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and emotional problems, “he became our life,” says Ms. Stutz, now 72.

“My husband and I had terrific friends who we’d see regularly, but it gets to the point where you have nothing in common with them anymore. They drift away,” she says. “Now, they go on vacations, while I take Chris to Disneyland. You spend a lot of time feeling isolated.”

Fortunately, not long after she took in Chris, the grandmother of one of Chris’s classmates told her about Grandparents as Parents, an organization in nearby Canoga Park that gathers custodial grandparents together in support groups, offers them advice on how to navigate the legal system, and provides space for social activities for both grandparents and the kids they raise. Soon, Ms. Stutz had a network of people to talk with about gaining access to mental-health counseling and special education for their grandchildren.

“They’ve given me all the support I’ve needed,” she says. “Through them, I’ve been able to meet 100 or more people in my situation. They’ve become my family.”

Thin Resources

But Ms. Stutz and other grandparent advocates say that just as many caregivers struggle, so do the groups that offer them support.

Charities that serve custodial grandparents say they have gotten used to taking whatever steps they can to keep going — even before the recession hit. But the downturn has even low-budget operations fighting for survival.

“I’ve got grandparent volunteers taking funding seminars,” says Kathy Brown, founder of High Desert Relative Caregivers, in Victorville, Calif. “We work too broadly to interest funders — that’s what we hear.”

Some foundation officials concede that while many grant makers support groups that serve the needs of children, too few take notice of family members who aren’t the children’s parents but who raise them.

Five million older people have, in recent years, taken on the job of raising their children’s children, or headed households in which grandchildren live, according to U.S. Census figures. This number has doubled since 1970, owing largely, experts say, to the increased prevalence of drug addiction and incarceration among younger people. By comparison, more than 500,000 children are in the foster-care system in a given year.

Even though grandparents save foster-care systems nationwide an estimated $6.5-billion each year, according to Generations United, an advocacy group in Washington, those who try to rescue their grandchildren from bad situations often pay a heavy price for opening their homes to them. Grandparents with children in their homes tend to be poorer and sicker than their peers who are not raising youngsters, according to numerous studies.

The charities that serve custodial grandparents say they are stretched paper-thin as they try to meet their clients’ many and diverse needs. For example, Grandparents as Parents operates on a $260,000 annual budget, has volunteers run half its support groups, and asks staff members to take pay cuts during economic crunches. In addition to support groups and related services, the organization tries to provide grandparents with education, food, and housing help — with admittedly limited success.

“We’ve been grass roots all along,” says Madelyn Gordon, the group’s executive director. “We had a $20,000 budget until recently. Most grandparents groups are having a hard time. We’re in a niche that is often overlooked, and always underfunded.”

Although the plight of custodial grandparents affects both the young and the old, financial support is limited because foundations frequently restrict their grants to one group or the other, Ms. Brown says.

A Tangle of Problems

Too often, advocates say, grandparents caught amid a thorny tangle of concerns are left stranded.

Ms. Stutz’s case is illustrative of the challenges custodial grandparents face. Several years ago, she and her husband fought to get Chris into a residential home and school that could help him with his problems. Along the way, they got caught up in legal issues about guardianship, sought treatment for his medical concerns, and tried to be the emotional bedrock he needed.

But the degree of difficulty has always been daunting, Ms. Stutz says. Chris, frustrated by problems communicating, would sometimes lash out violently at his grandmother. Shortly after being widowed a decade ago, Ms. Stutz suffered kidney failure, a condition she says was brought on by stress. And yet, she followed through on a move to gain legal guardianship of Chris, now 16 and still living in her home.

“I’m more fortunate than most because I am financially stable,” Ms. Stutz says.

Charities that serve grandparents rarely can deal with the wide range of needs facing people like Ms. Stutz and those with even trickier problems.

While organizations, such as Grandparents as Parents, that started as a collection of support groups have proliferated, groups with the money necessary to provide a wide array of services, covering such areas as health care, housing, legal aid, and professional counseling, have not.

Because financing is hard for organizations to obtain, those charities offer the services they can, usually focusing on one aspect of the problems grandparents or grandchildren face.

GrandFamilies of America, in Thurmont, Md., receives more than 7,000 calls to its hotline each year. The group is now trying to raise enough money to build a place in the hills of western Maryland where it and other organizations can offer services, says Pat Owens, the group’s director. It receives about $14,000 in donations each year.

“Grandparents need access to more help,” she says. “They face so much frustration because the services they need just aren’t out there.”

‘What’s Wrong With Me?’

Many custodial grandparents seek out some kind of relief from the stress of child rearing and from issues surrounding their living situations. Grandparents often carry the stigma of having raised children who have failed.

“They often have all types of guilt about how they performed as parents,” says Ms. Gordon. “Agencies and others often discount grandparents when they step in to help. Up until a few years ago, children’s-services agencies in California pushed to reunite a child with its parents, making a lot of excuses on behalf of them. Fortunately, that has begun to change.”

But old notions persist, says Eileen Mayers Pasztor, an associate professor of social work at California State University at Long Beach, who studies grandparent care.

“There’s an inherent worry among people that, because the apple supposedly doesn’t fall far from the tree, that if grandparents screwed up their kids, they’ll screw up their grandkids as well,” says Ms. Pasztor. “It can be very damaging to the grandparent who has undertaken the task of raising a child.”

Children, meanwhile, often suffer lingering effects of being separated from their parent or parents.

“The abandonment issue is one that all grandparent-raised kids have,” says Ms. Stutz. “These kids ask themselves, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ They act out in different ways — stealing, violence. They learn how to play the parent off of the grandparent. Relationships can get very twisted in this kind of situation.”

She, among others, would like to see groups deal more often with the entire family dynamic. “People need to understand that, in these families, it’s like a bomb has gone off in the middle of the house,” she says. “There are a lot of pieces to pick up.”

To help these families, some organizations have developed “respite care” programs that couple day care for children with activities designed to help grandparents relax — or merely give them the opportunity to rest at home.

A handful of organizations augment efforts by some state agencies to reach custodial grandparents who might need counseling or psychiatric help.

One group, Project Healthy Grandparents, in Atlanta, provides up to 50 families each year with visiting nurses and social workers to assess the needs of custodial grandparents and their grandchildren. Satellite programs the group runs in Augusta and Athens, Ga., reach another 50 or so families.

Grandparents prefer that mental-health professionals visit them, so they don’t have to travel to an office, says Deborah M. Whitley, associate director at Project Healthy Grandparents.

“Transportation is an issue for a lot of them,” she says. “So, we come to them. Or, we transport them to support groups and parenting classes.”

Grandparents who enter the program receive health services for only one year, but they can still attend meetings and classes thereafter. During that year, grandparents can also get help with child care, food, and housing.

When she worried that her granddaughter, Sandrea, might have fetal alcohol syndrome, Dallas Terrell, a 64-year-old grandmother in College Park, Ga., asked for and received help getting her tested.

Ms. Terrell also received assistance in insulating her home to lower her utility bill, and Project Healthy Grandparents workers advocated on her behalf with state agencies to get them to help her financially.

All of this relieved some of the stress that had been dragging her down, Ms. Terrell says.

“I worried less about putting food on the table or finding time to deal with the other relationships in my life,” says Ms. Terrell.

Stress Takes a Toll

The program, formed 13 years ago, and its $600,000 annual budget have been supported largely by grants from the Freddie Mac Foundation, the Hasbro Children’s Foundation, in New York, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta, and several family foundations in Atlanta.

The stress of watching children can have physical repercussions as well.

A Harvard University study found that people who care for grandchildren for more than nine hours each week are at increased risk of developing serious heart trouble.

In Atlanta, nearly 75 percent of custodial grandparents carry a significant risk of developing heart disease, while 25 percent are diabetic, according to Project Healthy Grandparents. Nurses at the charity attempt to reach them to check their health and get them care.

Although many are covered by Medicaid or Medicare, “grandparents often put their health care on the back burner so they can take care of the children,” says Susan J. Kelley, dean of the College of Health and Human Services at Georgia State University, in Atlanta, and founder of Project Healthy Grandparents.

Legal Aid

Other groups work to help grandparents in the courts. The National Committee of Grandparents for Children’s Rights, in Stony Brook, N.Y., uses its 38 volunteer chapters nationwide to provide legal advocacy for people who have had trouble getting medical or educational help for their grandchildren because they have not been granted status as guardians.

Without proper legal status, grandparents can’t compel doctors and educators to act on their wishes.

Backed by financial support from the State of New York and the Long Island Community Foundation, in Syosset, N.Y., the organization links grandparents with lawyers who can plead their cases, usually for free. The National Committee of Grandparents for Children’s Rights has successfully advocated for changes in New York laws that once kept grandparents from raising children who have been abused or neglected by parents.

Ms. Gordon, whose group Grandparents as Parents also provides its clients with education on legal issues, adds that since grandparents might not know whether they will be caring for a grandchild for weeks, months, or years, getting the court’s blessing to act on behalf of a child is paramount.

“We push very hard for grandparents or other relative caregivers who step into this role to get guardianship to protect themselves and their child,” she says. “Adoption is more thorny and takes longer.”

Since gaining guardianship rights for Chris, Ms. Stutz has watched him grow — something she would never give up, she says, despite his bouts of anger and defiance. “I love him to death,” she says. “We have good times.”

Things have begun to look up a bit for her family. Her daughter is now married and in recovery from her addictions; she visits Chris often.

Still, Ms. Stutz worries about people who were in her situation a dozen years ago. “There are so many people who have no help at all — people who were retired and who had plans for their lives changed. They aren’t going away,” she says. “This is a silent epidemic.”