Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Coronavirus Threatens Not Only W.Va.'s Elderly, But The Children They Care For

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that older adults and people with underlying chronic health conditions are at increased risk for serious illness from the coronavirus.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, West Virginia has the highest percentage of at-risk adults of any state in the country.

This is one of the reasons Gov. Jim Justice gave at a press conference on March 13, when he announced that schools would close.

“We’re in an older state, and the elderly is where this monster attacks,” Governor Justice warned.

Some grandparents found relief in the Governor’s message because they feared that their grandchildren might unknowingly bring the virus home to them. This is especially meaningful in West Virginia where 29,000 children are being cared for by their grandparents, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation Kids Count data for 2018. For many of West Virginia’s kids, grandparents are the only caregivers they have.

St. Albans grandmother, Gigi Bays, is raising three young grandchildren. She is busy these days making sure her older two grandsons are doing their schoolwork and that her house is staying clean. As a former pharmacy technician at a hospital, she says she knows how to disinfect.

“Let’s go back to like I’m working in the IV-room mode,” said Bays. “You know where every single thing we touch has to be sterilized.”

Bays, who is 60 years old, is on the cusp of the population that’s most at risk of serious illness from the coronavirus.

This includes people 65 years or older, those living in nursing homes, and those with certain chronic diseases, including lung disease, moderate to severe asthma, and serious heart conditions, among others.

Becoming seriously ill is a common fear among grandparents who are raising their grandchildren, according to Bonnie Dunn, statewide director of Healthy Grandfamilies. Dunn said this is one of the biggest fears grandparents have told her they have.

“If it’s a great-great grandparent, and we had four great-greats in the program over the age of 80 who were raising great-greats under the age of 10, you have to be real about it,” Dunn said. “Life is short at that point.”

The Healthy Grandfamlies program offers support for grandparents, from making contingency plans to dealing with school and technology, and especially at this time, Dunn wants grandparents to know about the program’s resources. She said it’s fortunate the program recently launched statewide.

“There is a structure in place to get help to these families,” Dunn said.

The structure includes a Healthy Grandfamilies program coordinator in every county. Julia Hamilton serves in this role for Monongalia County. She’s ready to answer the call of grandparents who need help.

“The idea of facing the next who knows how long as being the only one who is interacting with your grandkids, I would imagine we might get a phone call or two about that,” Hamilton said.

West Virginia is in its third week with schools and daycares closed. Hamilton said calls last week to the grandparents she’s worked with in Monongalia County found all in good spirits. Hamilton said school personnel are also using at-home meal deliveries as an opportunity to check on families.

Some grandparents continue to work, though, including Anita Dewitt, of Monongalia County, who is caring for three grandchildren. Dewitt works in billing at a hospital. She’s not worried about her own health. But she is worried for her 73-year-old mother-in-law who also lives with them and takes care of the grandchildren while Dewitt and her husband work. They’re taking precautions.

“Showering as soon as we walk in the door, making sure we’re washing our hands as much as we can at work,” Dewitt said. “Not letting anybody out of the house, keeping my mother-in-law in.”

For information on Healthy Grandfamilies visit the program’s website where information about each county’s coordinator is listed. Grandparents seeking resources from the program may also call 211 and tell the operator they are a grandparent who’s raising their grandchildren. The operator will use the caller’s zip code to connect them to the Healthy Grandfamilies coordinator in their county.

Living With Grandparents May Increase Obesity Risk In Children

A new study has found that when grandparents were either the main caregiver or lived in the home with children, the children had a 30 percent increased risk in being overweight or obese.

The authors reviewed 23 studies across the globe and found the risk seemed to be present no matter where in the world the child lived.

The authors said grandparents can have a big influence on both daily diet — for instance giving sweets and fried foods as a token of love or through physical activity — being more likely to excuse a child from chores.

In West Virginia, about 21,000 grandparents are raising grandchildren.

The study was published online in the journal Childhood Obesity.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from Marshall Health and Charleston Area Medical Center.

Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Part 5 – School

In 2016, 40 percent of Lakewood Elementary School students were being raised by a grandparent. That’s a stunning statistic considering that kids being raised by grandparents sometimes struggle with behavioral issues, and behavioral issues can cause problems with academics.

This year, that number dropped to 15 percent, but Lakewood principal Kelly Hayes thinks that’s a temporary dip, with more in the pipeline.

“What we’ve also noticed at Lakewood is our low [socioeconomic] status has grown over the course of these six years by 12 percent, which is huge,” Hayes said.

This low SES status correlates with the rise of grandparents as primary caregivers, since older adults tend to have fixed incomes that aren’t high.

Sara Anderson is a developmental psychologist at West Virginia University. She said research shows poverty is associated with low academic achievement and less access to all kinds of resources.

“So the potential [isn’t there] to put them in private school, for example, save for college, and continually provide those resources,” said Anderson

Despite lack of resources, more than one teacher told me that students being raised by grandparents seem to be doing pretty well.

“Most of the ones with grandparents – I guess it’s like 50-50 – the majority of them actually do better,” said Suzanne Lucas, a second-grade teacher at Lakewood and a grandmother raising two grandchildren. There’s not a whole lot of data on whether the anecdotal evidence Lucas gives is true broadly speaking. Studies looking at the academic impact of grandparents raising grandchildren are more than a decade old. Meanwhile, the sheer number of grandparents raising grandchildren has grown to what WVU’s Anderson calls “unprecedented.”

At Lakewood Elementary, fifth-grade teacher Jessica Blake said sometimes the grandparents are MORE involved than parents because they really want to do right by the kids in their care. And that involvement helps.

“Academically, I mean my grandparents are absolutely wonderful, they want to do everything they can for them,” said Blake. “They want to come to meetings, they show up, they say ‘what can I do to help,’ they want their grandchild to succeed.”

But grandparents do seem to struggle when it comes to behavioral issues that cause a child to act out or to be less attentive.

“Behavioral [issues] seems to be, I think, the biggest thing where I’m seeing it more. Because sometimes the grandparents don’t know how to discipline them,” said Blake.

And when kids act out, their academics suffer.

“Typically, because behavior is linked to academic achievement in most cases, where they aren’t able to pay attention in class, they miss a lot of the curriculum,” said Kelly Hayes.

Hayes said while grandparents are more involved, they are also harder to communicate with through modern means.

“Now we serve all our midterms and reports online, and so oftentimes we have to teach a grandparent how to link into that to see the report online or even communicate with the teacher,” she said.

No matter how technology savvy the grandparents are, though, just navigating the system can be overwhelming. Throughout this series, the chorus I heard over and over again, is “we need more support.”

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from Marshall Health, Charleston Area Medical Center and WVU Medicine.

Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Part 4 – Behavioral Health

Grandchildren being raised by grandparents often spend months or even years of their lives bouncing from one home or situation to another. Inconsistency and a constant sense of the unknown can fuel anxiety, anger and aggression in them.

Take the Grishabers.

Jane Ann Grishaber is 83. She recently adopted her five-year-old great-grandson Caydn. Grishaber said she hopes she can make it to her mid-90s when Cayden is 15 or 16, so he gets a good start in life.

“The biggest challenge is looking forward and getting the proper guidance,” she said. “Because when I raised my six children it was a whole lot different than it is now.”

Jane Ann Grishaber and her adopted great-grandson Caydn outside of Kenna Elementary School in Charleston.

Grishaber met me at Kenna Elementary School in a preschool classroom. His teacher last year (Caydn is a kindergartener) was Deborah Hall. Hall said kids like Caydn need structure and consistency.

“Children thrive in structure because it helps them then organize,” Hall said. “If you’re in an organized setting, your thoughts become organized, you can retrieve information much easier than something that is completely unstructured.”

Grishaber said Hall helped her implement structure in her home and develop a continuity of expectations for Caydn. That was incredibly valuable to her, because in addition to being rusty on her parenting skills, Caydn had some anger issues when Grishaber first got custody of him.

“Well, when he first came he would hit himself a lot and he would get moody,” she said. “And he didn’t cry a lot, but he didn’t smile a lot either, he wasn’t real happy.”

Experts said it is not unusual for kids coming from backgrounds like Caydn’s to exhibit behavioral issues in the beginning. Tracy LeGrow, a psychologist at Marshall University, said one of the most common problems children in these situations face is anxiety.

“So, separation anxiety: these may be kids that have bounced around with their parents and other relatives or bounced back and forth between their parents and grandparents, so sometimes they’re really worried about where they’ll be next,” said LeGrow.

LeGrow said she also sees a lot of kids struggling with aggression, but thinks this is closely connected with their anxiety.

“If you don’t know what’s expected or you don’t feel secure – it’s kind of fight or flight…. You get that side of things where kids are acting out,” she said. “It’s maybe based in anxiety, but it comes out in aggression or anger.”

Experiences like Grishaber’s are not unusual. About one in 14 children in West Virginia are being raised by someone other than a parent.

Kim Lawrence, the psychologist for Kanawha County preschools, said that in addition to teaching, teachers often have to be behaviorists.

“If I look at last year’s data, we have more than 50% that I’ve worked with, that I’ve done referrals for community mental health support, that are being raised by grandparents,” she said.

Community mental health support is usually a psychiatrist or behaviorist who can work more intensively with a child if he or she needs it. Lawrence said the kids who most need that help are the ones who were exposed to drugs in the womb.

“Most commonly, we have found that the IQ is intact with these children that we work with, [but] social, emotionally, they are at a 2 1/2-year-old versus a 4-year-old level,” she said. “So we are [seeing] toddler behaviors for children who know their ABCs and can count.”

But Lawrence said wait times for community mental health services can be upwards of eight months, which is a long time to wait for families that are already struggling to cope.

Grishaber did end up taking Caydn to a child psychologist when she first got custody of him, but said the visit was more for her reassurance that she could actually take on a 3-year-old at the age of 80, rather than due to his struggles – which mostly resolved after structure and consistency were introduced into his life.

For her, it’s clear she is able to handle it. Now, two years later, Caydn is a precocious, bubbly 5-year-old, who, as she says, keeps her feeling young.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from Charleston Area Medical Center and WVU Medicine.

Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Part 3 – Adoption

At the Kanawha County circuit court, the Roberts family is celebrating. Today, Andy and Debbie have adopted their grandchildren, Preston, age 6, and Tesla,19 months.

Grandfamilies, or grandparents raising grandchildren, are one of the fastest-growing family units in West Virginia. The rise is mostly due to the opioid crisis. These families are faced with tough choices – such as whether to adopt the children, or to simply go through the steps to become legal guardians. Adoption brings permanence and stability, but it can also mean the loss of much-needed funds, provided to foster parents by the government.

The Roberts are one of the few grandfamilies that chose to pursue adoption.

“They got on drugs the way everyone else does,” said grandpa Andy Roberts. “They go to the doctor and they give them some medications and then give them more medications and then more medications and then when pills became too expensive on the street to buy, they went to alternative drug sources. And when things got bad we ended up with the kids.”

Tesla, the youngest, has been with the Roberts since she was released from the hospital at six weeks. She was born with drugs in her system and had to go through detox.

“I think we didn’t want to realize and believe that our children would be on drugs because we come from a pretty well-rounded household,” said Roberts. “We’ve always been good community-minded people. I’ve worked my whole life and my wife’s worked and, like I said, we go to church every day. We’ve been in the same church for 30 years. Our neighbors have been the same for 30 years, and our kids are grown up and gone through school and never had any serious issues. And then when all of a sudden you have a drug problem, it kind of shocks you. You’re in an unbelief system – this shouldn’t happen to us. It’s traumatic when you finally realize what’s going on.”

Roberts said he and his wife pursued adoption because Preston, the 6-year-old, needed stability about his future.

“For the permanency of having them live someplace and not knowing where they belong,” he explained. “Preston has concerns about what happens to him now…and the fact that he needed that permanency in his life – I think that’s more important than any of it.”

Stability is one reason often cited for going through with the adoption process, but it can be an emotional juggernaut. Some grandparents worry they won’t be around long enough to make legal adoption a responsible choice; others remain hopeful that their kids will get involved. Some worry that their kids will get involved. Adoption ensures that biological parents can’t contest guardianship of the children at a later date. It’s also an agreement, with the state acknowledging, that the adoptive parents have the resources to care for the children for the scope of their childhood.

Although 69, Andy Roberts still works. Additionally, the Roberts family qualified for a “subsidized adoption” through the state – an option only available for specific cases, usually involving kids who were taken away from their parents by the state, or children with ongoing health issues. But for many other families, adoption could mean losing financial help from the government.

In Ravenswood, Israel, age 10, and Jason, age 8, are playing in their grandmother’s living room. Their younger brother is still at school participating in an after-school program.

Their grandmother, Katherine Stanley, is on disability due to a broken back she sustained while working as a geriatric nurse 10 years ago. As their legal guardian, she receives a monthly maintenance subsidy of around $350 for the kids as well as medical cards. Altogether, she says she gets about $1,200 a month, which she has to stretch to cover four people.

“I pinch pennies – I mean, for my grandchildren, I’ll do anything,” said Stanley.

Stanley might qualify for a subsidized adoption – her grandchildren have health issues too – but she went out of state to get all three kids and there’s some uncertainty about how that would play out.

“I was told that if a grandparent is going to adopt a grandchild, certain resources stop that the children need,” she said.

Regardless, Stanley doesn’t expect the children’s mother to come back into the picture and said she’s committed to caring for them until they graduate.

“You know if stuff’s out there, let the grandparents know. Don’t take the grandparents for granted just because they have custody of their grandchildren,” said Stanley. “They are giving up their golden years and their retirement. I mean, I wouldn’t trade it for the world, but don’t take us for granted. I mean, we need help.”

Stanley currently participates in the West Virginia State University Healthy Grandfamilies program – a pilot program designed to help connect families to resources they need.

Early data from that program shows about 7 percent of participants pursue adoption.

In addition to all the financial considerations and questions about stability, whether to pursue adoption can be a wrenching emotional decision.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from Charleston Area Medical Center and WVU Medicine.

Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Part 2 – Mental Health

At the Epsworth United Methodist Church in Ripley, West Virginia, five grandparents sit around a table listening to a speaker tell them, “You are not alone.”

Although prayer is mentioned frequently at the meeting, religion is not the subject of today’s conversation – rather, how to communicate with grandchildren after grandparents are thrust into the role of primary caregivers.

“I want you to know that if you feel like no one’s listening, they are now,” said Bonnie Dunn, the the West Virginia State University Healthy Grandfamilies program facilitator.

The program is a pilot funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It is designed to help the growing number of grandfamilies cope with their situation by offering discussion sessions on topics such as communication, nutrition and stress.

“There are different things that grandparents experience when they find themselves with their grandchildren,” said Beth Frampton.

She’s a therapist at Family Care and a guest speaker in the program who focuses on mental health. Many of the families involved in the program have loved ones who struggle with addiction to opioids or illegal drugs.

“One of them is guilt,” she said. “‘What did I do wrong, that I’m having to raise my grandchildren that my children aren’t capable or willing to raise my grandchildren?’”

Frampton said they often also experience anger.

“There’s a strong sense of family and obligation. So you can have anger, depression, guilt,” she explained.

Not only that, she says grandparents are struggling with both their own health, and grandchildren who might have a variety of behavioral and academic challenges. So part of what the program does is teach grandparents how to navigate school and medical systems in today’s time.

“No matter the age of a grandparent, no matter the health issue of a grandparent, that grandparent is going to take that child, or take them children, not looking at the health issues they’ve gotten and not looking at are they really going to raise these children into the areas they need to do,” said Debbie Ball, who participated in the pilot program.

We sit at her kitchen table while her grandchildren are in school. Their mother is incarcerated with a 30 year sentence on drug charges.

“My biggest thought is Lord, just let me – keep me in good health and a sound mind to be able to maintain on their own,” she said.

Debbie found the program too short. It’s the first program of its kind in West Virginia, and was only designed as a three year pilot of six month interventions for each group of grandparents. But now that Debbie has graduated, she said what she craves is long-term support.

“We don’t have a support group,” she said. “We don’t get together two or three times a week or two or three times a month to sit and talk about how we could make things better or how we could do this or what do you think about that. Well let me tell you about how I’m working on my end with stress…we don’t have that.”

There are a couple other grandparents in Debbie’s apartment complex who are also raising grandchildren with whom she communicates on a regular basis. But she doesn’t drive, doesn’t walk well due to a bad hip and doesn’t use a computer. Which means that even if there was such a group, she’d be dependent on other people to get there.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from Charleston Area Medical Center and WVU Medicine.