Martha Evans Sparks - Raising Your Childrens Children: Help for Grandparents Raising Grandkids

Copyright 2011
by Martha Evans Sparks and Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City

2014 eISBN 978-0-8341-3329-7

Printed in the
United States of America

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Cover Design: Arthur Cherry
Internal Design: Sharon Page

All Scripture quotations not otherwise designated are from the Holy Bible, New International Version (NIV). Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sparks, Martha Evans, 1927

Raising your childrens children : help for grandparents raising grandkids / Martha Evans Sparks.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8341-2563-6 (pbk.)

1. Grandparents as parents. 2. Grandparent and child. 3. Grandparent and childReligious aspectsChristianity. 4. Child rearingReligious aspectsChristianity. I. Title.

HQ759.9.S69 2011

248.8'45dc22

2010041752

CONTENTS

Feeling guilty, cheated of your retirement, like a failure as a parent, maybe even embarrassed? Or maybe youre reeling from grief over the loss of your own child. Whatever your particular situation, you find yourself cartwheeled into a situation with little warning and needing answers to a lot of questions you never thought you would be asking.

Some grandparents hire lawyers to go to the authorities to try to gain custody of their grandchildren because, as they see it, the parents arent doing a good job. Maybe they dont like the in-law, or the parents arent taking the kids to church or allowing the children to stay all night at Grandmas house as often as she would like. These kids are not being abused or exploited. They are being raised responsibly and are as safe as possible. Nevertheless, a jealous or unreasonable grandparent wants custody because things are not being done his or her way. David Godfrey, former managing attorney for the Access to Justice Foundation in Lexington, Kentucky, says that eighty percent of the calls he received from grandparents were of this kind.

This book is for the other twenty percent. For whatever reason, youre raising your grandchild. Your own child may be an addict, in jail, mentally ill, or may have died as a result of disease or accident. Regardless, youre suddenly parenting again.

If youre such a grandparent and you feel overwhelmed physically, emotionally, and financially, read on. Let this book get you headed in the right direction with brief but accurate answers to the most common quandaries grandparents raising grandchildren face.

If youre a pastor or counselor ministering to seniors or a social worker whose job it is to deal with grandparents who are second-time-around parents, you, too, will find basic, accurate, short answers to frequently voiced questions. The answers in this book to legal, physical, and behavioral problems are general in nature, because each of the fifty United States has its own court system and laws. What you will find here is practical advice and information from a Christian viewpoint.

Life may be different than you planned, but it can be good, and youre not alone.

Alice first met Jacob at 3:00 oclock one Saturday morning when a woman she had never seen before pounded on her front door. The woman said her name was Mary and that the father of the child standing next to her was Alices son. Alice hadnt even known of the childs existence.

Jacob looked as if he might be around four years old; he was dirty, silent, and too thin. He had nothing with him but the worn out clothes he had on. Alice could see her son sitting in the drivers seat of the old car, door open, motor running. He waved halfheartedly. Lewis is out of jail again, she thought. Mary asked Alice if she would watch Jacob for a while, and Alice said she supposed so. Mary pushed Jacob through the door, ran back to the car, and Mary and Lewis rattled off into the dark.

What Alice had just experienced is called a drop-off. She became one of the six and a half million grandparents in the United States who find themselves with full parental responsibility for their grandchildren. Instead of cuddling them and spoiling them and returning them to their parents, these grandparents must become parents again.

In the United States, seventy-one percent of these grandparents are under the age of sixty. Some of them, though, are older and have retired. With the unexpected mouths to feed and clothing to buy, they must reenter the workforce. In this country, nineteen percent of second-time-around parents and their grandchildren live below the poverty level.

One of the common routes for grandparents to become parents again is when a social worker from an agency such as the Department of Social Services or the Cabinet for Health and Family Serviceswhatever its called in a particular statecomes calling. He or she tells the grandparents that the state has removed the child or children from the parental home. The most common reason for this course of action is that the parents have been charged with various crimes connected to alcohol and drugs in addition to neglect, abuse, or abandonment. State agencies prefer to place children with a relative. If they have the name of the grandparents of the child, they will make contact with them and ask if theyre willing to take the child and raise him or her, taking full parental responsibility. They are told that if no relative is willing to take the child, he or she will be placed in a foster home.

The second common route for grandparents becoming parents again is family intervention. Perhaps they discover their teenage daughter is pregnant, and they know shes not ready to be a parent. Maybe the dad is a teenager or an older guy who is long gone. Out of concern for the baby and love for their child, they take on the responsibility of bringing the baby into their home. The authorities are never involved, and at the time the grandparents think thats the best idea.

A third common way grandparents become parents is some version of what happened to Alice. Somebody drops the child or children on the doorstep without warning. A typical circumstance is that the persons son or daughter stops by the house with the child and asks the grandparent to watch the baby for a few hoursbut the childs biological parent simply never returns.

The situation of grandparents raising grandchildren is approaching epidemic levels in the United States. Eight percent of children under the age of eighteen live with grandparents, a thirty-percent increase between 1990 and 2000. Between eighty and ninety percent of these cases occur because the childrens parents are addicted to drugs and/or alcohol.

All socioeconomic levels suffer from abuse and addiction. The impression that its more prevalent in lower-income groups may grow from the inability of lower-income people to get needed services as quickly as persons with more social and financial resources. Persons with higher incomes are more likely to have support systems in place to help them before the situation becomes uncontrollable. They can hire lawyers or other professionals to rescue the grandchildren before emotional and perhaps physical damage is done by the chaotic lifestyle of drug-addicted parents.