GRAND PARENTING… AGAIN 1
Grand Parenting… Again
Forget the mid-life crisis, who has time for that? This is fast becoming an age where grandparents across America are being the primary caregivers to their grandchildren. After 18 years of raising your own children and thinking it was over, suddenly, you have another mouth to feed and a diaper to change.
Why is this happening? According to an article published in the popular senior magazine, AARP, a new Pew Research Center study shows one in ten children in the U.S. now lives with at least one grandparent, that is approximately 2.9 million children, or 4 percent of all children in the United States. Washington Post Staff Writer, Carol Morello, states that this is a sharp increase that follows “the official start of the recession in December 2007”. I wonder, is the sudden increase in intergenerational households due in large part to the current state of American economics or is there another reason?
Morello does mention that the economy is not the only cause of marked increase. There has been a national effort to have children from troubled families placed with relatives like grandparents, as an alternative to foster homes. And yet other children have been entrusted to their grandparents, due to military parents facing multiple deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan. Even so, states Morello, advocates for intergenerational families say the recession has dealt numerous blows to many grandparents. While their own children have gone away to look for another job or get career retraining, the grandparent(s) are left caring for their grandchildren. Also, many economically strapped states and counties have cut programs that provided financial and emotional support to kinship families, including respite care and support groups.
I waded through the numbers, and although they can be confusing, the following is what I found. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1970, 2.2 million or 3.2 percent of American children lived in a household maintained by a grandparent. By 1997, this number had risen to 3.9 million or 5.5 percent, representing a 76 percent increase over the 27 year period. Of which only 37 percent are those living with neither parent. If we compare this to the Pew analysis that indicates the share of US children living with a grandparent(s) increased slowly and steadily during the past decade before rising sharply from 2007 to 2008, the first year of the Great Recession. There are about 2.9 million US children living with a grandparent as of 2008, compared to 2.5 million in 2000. That figure jumped 6% between 2007 and 2008. However the 2.9million figure for 2008 is less than the 3.9million children living with grandparents in 1997.
Researchers, public policy makers, and the media first began to notice the huge increases in grandparent-maintained households around 1990, prompting them to question why this was happening. A dramatic increase in analytical research occurred in the early to mid- 1990s which focused on answering this question and examining the area of grandparent caregiving in general. At the same time that research on grandparents was on the rise, the media also began to focus attention on the growing number of children being raised by their grandparents. (Casper, Bryson 1998) Several reasons have been offered for the dramatic increases in grandparents raising and helping to raise their grandchildren.
GRAND PARENTING… AGAIN 2 According to American Community Survey, 6.1 million grandparents are engaged in parenting their grandchildren, with 8% of grandchildren living with their grandparents in the year 2006 in United States (US Census Bureau, 2006). Grandparents usually accept the task out of natural love and affection towards their grandchildren and would not accept a stranger in the role of raising their grandchildren. And it seems that most of the causes for this situation would revolve around the natural parents. Most of the statistics reveal that drug or alcohol abuse by natural parents is the main cause for inviting grandparents to step in and take over the responsibility of raising their grandchildren. It has been reported that in 1998, nearly 44% of youngsters were living with their grandparents because of their parents' substance abuse. And interestingly, 28% were victims of child abuse, neglect or improper attention and 11% because of death of one or both of their parents.
Various other reasons include ill health of their parents, or inability of parents to take the responsibility of their child, divorce, unexpected pregnancy of teen or adult child, etc. In 2004, about 37 percent of births were out of wedlock. According to another Pew study a record 41 percent of births in 2008 were to unmarried women. That’s up from 28 percent in 1990, according to the study, “The New Demography of American Motherhood.” The number of infants born to unmarried women in the United States reached an historic peak in 2007(CDC 2009), the same time frame as the sharp increase that followed the official start of the recession in December 2007. In practice, single parents--most of who are mothers--often turn to their parents for support. As a result, more than 2.5 million U.S. children today are living in households maintained by grandparents with single parents present (U.S. Census).
When single-parent military members or couples that are both in the military are deployed what happens to children? According Rod Powers, a retired Air Force first sergeant, about 7.8 percent of all military members are single parents -- 10.7 percent for the Army, 7.6 percent for the Navy, 5.8 percent for the Air Force, and 4.7 percent for the Marine Corps.
Additionally, there are about 84,000 military-married-to-military couples. About 36,000 of those couples have children. The military services have always had regulations which required single-parents and military-married-to-military couples with children to have plans concerning the care of their dependents in the event they were ever deployed. Of these, many reside with the parents of military personnel. However parents in the military are less than 1% of the total U.S. parent population.
World War II (WWII) is said to have been one of the defining events of the 20th century– for our country and for the nearly 400,000 military women who served in her defense. Entry qualifications for women joining the US Armed Forces stipulated everything from age to education, health to citizenship, and pregnancy to parenthood–and not surprisingly, marital status. A woman would not be accepted in the military if she had children, and if she became pregnant it was an immediate discharge.
Prior to WWII, grandparents, family members, and neighbors were the care givers for mothers who had to work. During WW II, the Federal Government sponsored day care for 400,000 preschool children. Again, this was not done because Congress perceived day care to be beneficial for children, but because the mothers of these children were needed to work in
industries manufacturing war provisions. Ironically, after the war, the Federal government
GRAND PARENTING… AGAIN 3 relinquished all funding for day care and instructed women to quit working, go home, and take care of their children. The Kaiser shipyards opened a child care center at the entrance of each of their two shipyards. In building the centers, they hoped to reduce the rate of absenteeism among their working mothers. After the war these centers closed. In 1940, only 8.6% of mothers with children younger than 18 were in the work force. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 50% of women with children younger than three years of age were working in 1985. This represents a 33% increase over 1975 figures and a 47% increase over 1965 figures.
According to the 1996 Yearbook on “The State of America's Children,” 57% of the women with children younger than three are now in the workforce and 60% of women with children younger than six. According to the NNCC statistical data, 32 % of children ages 0–4 with employed mothers, were primarily cared for by a relative while she worked.
In recent years, families have gone through many disconcerting and disruptive changes. But if family life today seems unsettled, so, too, was family life in the past. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States had the highest divorce rate in the western world, and one child in ten lived in a single-parent home. Hundreds of thousands of children spent part of their childhood in orphanages, not because their parents were dead, but because their mother and father could not support them.
Consider the following: in 1900, the life expectancy of a woman in the United States was 47 years; today it is 80. Today, grandparents can expect to enjoy several more years with their grandchildren than could grandparents of the 1960s. The term multi-generational family, also known as the 'vertical family', is a term first coined by sociologist Michael Young. It refers to the fact that because of increased longevity, there has been a gradual shift towards there being more generations in a family. Because people live longer and lead healthier lives it is more common now for a family to consist of three, four or even five generations. Supporting this trend is the phenomenon of falling birth rates, which leads to fewer siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles compared to previous generations. Thus, the structure of the family is more vertical and less horizontal than in the past. The implications of this 'stretching' are manifold for family life and for the relationship between generations at a societal level. Longevity means that grandparents are more likely to assume supervisory childcare.
As for the AARP article this reader has concluded that the autor Mr. Morelos article had little more value than filler for AARP’s magazine. Basically the title, “Grandparents Increasingly Fill Need as Caregivers” says everything he has to say, and that is where he begins and ends the article. Although the increased number of children living with grandparents today may have been concurrent with the recent economic downturn, he uses no concrete statistics to back up his theory that the Great Recession was the cause of it.
GRAND PARENTING… AGAIN 4
References:
Bellafaire J.A. (n.d.). The women's army corps: a commemoration of World War II service Boschee, M.A. (n.d.). NNCC http://www.nncc.org/Choose.Quality.Care/ccyesterd.htmlCasper, L.M. & Bryson, K.R. (1998). Co-resident grandparents and their grandchildren:
grandparent maintained families. U.S. Bureau of the Census. Washington, D.C. CDC. NCHS Data Brief. (May, 2009). http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db18.htm Cornell Cares. (n.d.).. Grandparents raising grandchildren Egyptian Area Agency on Aging.
NY: Presbyterian Hospital.
Digital History. (2006). http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/
Livingston, Gretchen & Cohn. (2010). Pew Research Center The New Demography of American Motherhood Morello, C. (2010). Grandparents increasingly fill need as caregivers, AARP.
Pew Research Center http://pewresearch.org/ Powers, R. (n.d.). What About the Children?
http://usmilitary.about.com/cs/genfamily/a/familycare.htm U.S. Census Bureau http://www.census.gov/
