Taking Care of Yourself While Raising Your Grandchildren

Grandparents can easily become overwhelmed when they first take on the responsibility of raising their grandchildren full time. The situations can be emotional and stressful for everyone in the family.

Legal and financial issues may increase that stress. Most grandparents are at a time of life when their own health is beginning to diminish.

But there are resources, financial assistance and other help available that can ease the stress, shore up health care and ease the money crunch for grandparents raising their grandkids.

The secret can be understanding your situation and knowing where to turn for help.

If you suddenly find yourself raising your grandkids, you are not alone.

There are 70 million grandparents living in the United States. More than 1 in 10 grandparents have a grandchild living with them, according to AARP’s 2018 Grandparents Today National Survey.

In about one-third of those living situations, a grandparent is the primary caregiver.

Of the 70 million grandparents in the United States in 2018, about 10 percent lived with grandchildren, up from just 7 percent in 1992, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

While hard numbers for the increase are difficult to come by, experts who deal daily with grandparents raising grandkids believe that drug abuse plays an outsized role in the creation of grandfamilies.

“The opioid epidemic, like other drug epidemics before it, definitely impacted our population,” Ana Beltran of Generations United told RetireGuide. “We believe, anecdotally at least, that substance abuse is the primary reason that grandfamilies come together.”

But there are other reasons that have contributed to more grandparents raising grandchildren as well.

It’s easy to be overwhelmed when faced with having to raise your grandchildren. Even though you’ve raised children, your life has changed over the years. And the sudden stress of having a new family to care for can feel like an impossible challenge.

Kinship Navigator programs — run by federal, state, territorial and tribal governments — link families to services in states and communities that can help ease the stress and connect them with information, services and other resources to make their challenges more manageable.

“Grandparents have to navigate all these different service systems — education, health care, welfare — so these kinship navigator programs help them navigate these options,” Beltran said. “Kinship Navigator programs don’t offer services of their own, but they link families to services and resources.”

“Kinship Navigator programs can be a wealth of information,” Heidi Redlich Epstein, director of Kinship Policy and director of State Projects at the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law, told RetireGuide. “They can provide referrals for legal representation, support groups, respite care resources, grandparents can talk to them about benefits that they might be able to apply for.”

Nearly 96 percent of Americans become grandparents by the time they’re 65, according to AARP’s Grandparents Today National Survey. If you’re just signing up for Medicare services, take advantage of the free “Welcome to Medicare” physical exam.

Even if you don’t have Medicare, it’s a smart idea to get a physical as you take on the new role of raising your grandkids. It will give you an idea of your health challenges and lifestyle changes you may need to make.

In either case, stick with annual wellness visits to your doctor and any preventative screenings he or she recommends.

Keeping healthy will help you keep up with the challenges of being thrust back into the role of raising a family. But it will also let you set a good example for your grandchildren to live healthy lives.

Make sure you make and keep medical appointments for routine checkups. These can alert you to any health conditions before they become serious. Keep open and honest conversations going with your doctor and other health care providers.

But affording health care can be difficult when almost 20 percent of grandparents raising grandchildren live in poverty.

If you’re 65 or older, you are likely eligible for Medicare. But even if you are not yet 65, you and your grandchildren may qualify for Medicaid if you fall below certain financial income and resource levels.

The COVID-19 pandemic has complicated life for grandparents raising grandchildren.

“These families may have additional challenges because relatives are older, meaning they have different challenges and different precautions they need to take,” John Sciamanna, vice president of public policy for the Child Welfare League of America, told RetireGuide.

Age and underlying conditions put grandparents at higher risk of serious COVID-19 complications than typical parents.

“One of the biggest concerns is that your grandchildren could be carriers without showing symptoms,” Sciamanna said. “And that applies even beyond kinship caregivers to grandparents who are simply babysitting a few hours a day.”

Many grandparents have socially distanced from their grandkids since the pandemic began. But that advice doesn’t fit grandparents raising grandchildren.

It’s impossible to socially distance from children when you’re raising them. And there’s been little advice from health professionals on what grandparents raising grandchildren should do.

“The advice is not clear from a health perspective,” Beltran said. “Grandparents are getting on with the job at hand and being as careful as they can be, but there is a lot of fear there because they don’t have the luxury of distancing themselves.”

Grandparents raising grandchildren frequently experience stress. They are caring for children at a point in their lives when they never expected. And their new role as caregivers isolates them from friends and others their own age.

While there are concrete steps you can take to eliminate some of the underlying causes of your stress, you should still focus on self-care.

Having a stable home life and routine can go a long way toward reducing the day-to-day stress for all members of your new grandfamily.

Legal and financial issues may be the two biggest causes of stress for grandparents who suddenly find themselves raising their grandchildren.

“They didn’t plan or expect to raise these children,” Beltran said. “So, it’s all been very sudden, and they didn’t have the luxury of financial planning for the situation.”

Grandparents also may be in a precarious legal situation.

“There are resources out there, but it’s not easy,” Beltran said. “There are a lot of challenges to accessing the services, so these families have to be proactive and reach out on their own and contact these local programs.”

More than 40 percent of grandparents raising grandchildren have unmet economic or social-service needs — either for them or their grandchildren — according to a 2015 study in the journal GrandFamilies: The Contemporary Journal of Research, Practice and Policy.

Most grandparents also don’t qualify for the financial support the government pays to foster parents raising nonrelative children.

Beltran said almost 109,000 grandchildren in the United States do not get foster care maintenance payments, despite being in the legal custody of the foster care system because the grandparents or other relatives raising them are not licensed as foster parents.

“The foster care system relies on grandparents and other relatives without supporting them,” Beltran said. “There’s very limited ongoing financial support for them and it’s a real challenge.

Instead, grandparents need to be proactive and look for other types of financial support available to them.

You should also check with the IRS website about childcare credits for which you may be eligible. These can change from year-to-year or because of special circumstances such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Make sure you if you were caring for a child last year, you should be able to go to the IRS website and make sure you get the $500 tax rebate you’re entitled to,” Sciamanna said.

Sciamanna also says simply writing a letter to your members of Congress can help you control your stress.

“I think it’s one of the first steps grandparents should take — to reach out to their Representatives’ and Senators’ offices to ask about services and let them know about the challenges you’re still facing,” Sciamanna said. “I think that is really critical.”

He says reaching out to their constituent services offices in your state or congressional district can result in staffers helping you find the resources you’re looking for and passing your concerns on to their boss.

Parents have legal rights and relationships with their children. But in many cases, grandparents don’t have an inherent legal relationship to grandchildren even if they are raising them. That can cause serious stress on grandparents — to the point they may not try to create a legal relationship.

“There’s a caution that if grandparents ask for help, that someone will come and say either they’re too old, or they don’t have enough finances to care for the child and remove the child,” Redlich Epstein said. “So there’s real hesitancy on the part of the grandparent to ask for help sometimes.”

Grandparents may also fear if they go to court to seek legal custody, the parent may simply take the child back. But without that legal relationship, the parent is legally allowed to do that at any time.

And without a legal relationship, it can be difficult for a grandparent to do some of the most routine activities in raising a child.

“If grandma takes on grandchild overnight, grandma can have a really hard time enrolling that child in school, getting them health care, getting them health insurance, all these kinds of things,” Beltran said.

Resources are available to help grandparents create a legal bond and relieve that stress. But the methods vary from state to state.

“Some states have a very nice structure where it’s all clearly laid out as to what’s required of the grandparent and/or relative, what’s required of the court, meaning what has to be done in order to establish that legal relationship,” Redlich Epstein said. “But other states are just not as clear or there are some overlapping or complicated statutes.”