Deborah Doucette - Raising Our Childrens Children: Room in the Heart

raising our

childrens

children

raising our

childrens

children

Room in the Heart

Second Edition

Deborah Doucette

with Dr. Jeffrey R. LaCure

Taylor Trade Publishing

Lanham Boulder New York Toronto Plymouth, UK

Published by Taylor Trade Publishing

An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowman.com

10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom

Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright 2014 by Taylor Trade Publishing

Epigraphs: Chapter 1, excerpt of poem The Bad Mother, from Unremembered Country by Susan Griffin, copyright 1987 by Susan Griffin, is reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org; chapter 5, excerpt of poem Crazy Quilt, in Quilt Pieces by Jane Wilson Joyce is reprinted by permission of Gnomon Press; chapter 9, excerpt of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou is reprinted by permission of Random House.

All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Doucette-Dudman, Deborah, 1948

Raising our childrens children : room in the heart / Deborah Doucette, with Dr. Jeffrey R. LaCure. Second edition.

pages cm

Revised edition of the authors Raising our childrens children, published in 1996.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-58979-926-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-58979-927-1 (electronic) 1. Grandparenting. 2. Grandparent and child. I. LaCure, Jeffrey R., 1964 II. Title.

HQ759.9.D68 2014

306.874'5dc23

2014004543

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For my Nana

Contents

Preface

There are 2.7 million grandparents raising 5.4 million grandchildren in the United States alone. Other countries such as Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa are also struggling with this growing trend. Situations in which grandparents have informal custody of grandchildren remain grossly underreported. Some grandparents conceal the fact that they have children in their care, fearing the loss of their elderly housing. Some dread interference by social service agencies that may take their grandchildren from them. Some fear reprisals from drug-involved children and keep a low profile while doing their best to keep their grandchildren out of harms way. Grandparents who dont want to rock the boat dont tell.

Grandparents stepping in to help take care of grandchildren when parents cannot is nothing new. However, the exploding epidemic of drug and alcohol abuse in our society has forced more and more grandparents to rescue their grandchildren from the devastation of a life poisoned by addicted parents. Factors emanating from a home ruled by addicts such as poverty, chaos, neglect, abuse, and incarceration add to the problems the grandchildren bring with them. Other factors include divorce, illness, the economic downturn, mental or emotional issues, irresponsibility, teen pregnancy, and death of one or more birth parents. In the case of African grandmothers, With almost no support, they have stepped forward to care for millions of children orphaned by AIDS.

Many grandchildren coming into the care of our elders are hurt, deprived, and needy. They may be affected by attention deficit disorder, fetal alcohol syndrome, attachment disorders, learning disabilities, or hyperactivity. They have suffered the mind-numbing wounds of neglect and a terrifying array of abusesphysical, sexual, and emotional.

Frequently grandparents are forced to struggle with birth parents, the court system, and/or social service departments in costly and protracted custody battles. Too often social service systems under the mandate of family unification squander the childhoods of the children involved, condemning them to years of being jerked from foster care to failed birth parents and back into foster care again. All this shuffling is done for the sake of parental rights and a narrowly defined policy of reunification of the family.

Sometimes a family is not a family when birth parents cannot, do not, or will not parent. Obviously the function of giving birth does not automatically lead to healthy child rearing; many obstacles may stand in the way. Meanwhile the concept of family reunification, so strictly adhered to, may prevent children from living with loving members of that same extended family.

Social service agencies need to redirect their prime directive to read, in the best interests of the child. The mandate toward family reunification must be secondary to what is best for the child, always. That mandate should be altered to fall under the broader heading of family preservation, while expanded to include extended family such as grandparents and the strengthening of those preexisting bonds. It takes work to preserve a family in the larger sense, to strengthen families. And it will take a more encompassing outlook by society at large as well as social service agencies and the judiciary in particular. It takes a village to raise a child is an old proverb that rings especially true today.

I heard about a boy whom I will call Jimmy who had been bounced around between foster care and group homes. When he was thirteen, Jimmy was finally placed with his grandmother, whom he loved. But her poverty, and the rough neighborhood she was consigned to live in because of it, made their situation unworkable. Jimmy was taken from his grandmother and placed in a group home for teens. Group homes and similar institutional care for kids like Jimmy can cost over sixty thousand dollars a year. It would have taken a lot less to allow Jimmy and his grandmother to stay together as a family in a safe environment with an appropriate support system.

The fact is grandparents do not receive the same services or the same financial assistance as foster care providers. Although kinship care is a concept that is beginning to be considered today, for the most part the prevailing attitude seems to be that extended families should care for their related children solely out of the goodness of their hearts. But one cant eat goodness, or buy clothes with it, or use it to obtain counseling, better housing, medications, or specialized services. Grandparents willing to relinquish hard-won custody to the local departments of social services may qualify as foster parents or they may not . But these grandparents do not want to relinquish control of their grandchildren back to the social service/foster care systems from which they fought to free them!

What are the answers? Raising awareness of this escalating trend and the special challenges grandparents and their grandchildren face, defining families to include kin, providing loving family members with the means to care for damaged and needy children, and recognizing grandparents as a resource gold mine!

Grandparents raising their grandchildren, contrary to what most people believe, is not only an urban problem, a minority problem, or a problem restricted to the poor. This is an exploding sociological phenomenon with far-reaching implications for our future. It spans every segment of societyrich and poor, black and white, Asian and Hispanic, urban and suburban. Whenever and wherever drug or alcohol addiction, domestic violence, or child abuse and neglect touch a family, the specter of hurt and abandoned children haunts us all. The measure of a culture is how well it treats its most vulnerableits children. The strength of a culture is determined by what those children become. How are we measuring up?