Recycled Parents

By Deborah Edler Brown

Vickie and Joe Corbett don't have the luxury of spoiling their granddaughter Tiana and then just sending her back to Mom. These North Carolina grandparents tuck Tiana into bed at night and make her breakfast every morning; they pay for her school and her doctors. Instead of traveling and seeing friends, as they expected to do in their autumn years, they are back in the business of going to birthday parties and pta meetings. For the past seven years, since Tiana's mother left the baby with a sitter and never picked her up (her father moved out two years later), parenting has been their life. "I cried for three days when we knew that this was going to happen," recalls Vickie, 49. "I had just got to the point where I wanted to do things for me and Joe. I raised my three sons, and we did without. Now I'm doing without for my granddaughter."

For the Corbetts--and millions like them--the grand has been taken out of grandparenting, leaving them with all the responsibilities of raising a child. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 3.7 million grandparents had grandchildren living with them in 1997, about 35% without a parent present. Some are as young as 35; others are in their 80s. They cross social, economic and religious lines, and their numbers are rising.

There are many reasons grandparents parent again: child abuse, abandonment and neglect, divorce, teen pregnancy and parental incarceration, as well as death of a parent from illness, accident, suicide or murder. By far the most common reasons are parental abuse of drugs and alcohol--and, increasingly, aids. Factor into that the rising numbers of single-parent families and, says Herbert Stupp, commissioner of the New York City department for the aging, "the chances for any one child of being raised by someone other than [his or her] parent are higher than they used to be."

Grandparents are often the safety net that catches children whom parents, fate and society fail--but not without strain to the net. If raising a child changes your life, raising a grandchild turns it upside down. Isolation is a common complaint among second-time parents. Social lives dwindle, as grandparents don't fit in with younger parents yet can't bring children to senior events. Late-life dreams get put on hold, while the expenses of child rearing create new financial challenges. "We should be thinking about retirement," says the grandmother of a 19-month-old. "Instead we're thinking about investment so we can see her through college." One grandfather came out of retirement when he acquired three new mouths to feed. Now 75, he works nights and sleeps during the day, with a 30-mile commute.

There is also emotional fallout: fear of losing a child to dysfunctional parents, grief at losing the grandparent role, and anger at the adult child who won't parent. And there is the simple reality of age. "I'm not 25 anymore," says a 51-year-old grandmother. "Physically, I can't do the things that a mom and a dad can do.We have the love, but we don't have the youth."

Likely as not, the children themselves are victims of emotional trauma. "These children are suffering profound loss," says Sylvie de Toledo, founder of Grandparents as Parents (GAP), a California support network. "They come with everything from emotional, behavioral, academic and medical problems to physical disabilities from prenatal substance abuse."

Finally, these recycled parents are often forced to negotiate an unfamiliar bureaucracy, seeking welfare assistance or legal custody, enrolling kids in school or getting medical care. "The underlying problem is that they don't understand what their rights are and nobody can tell them," says Gerard Wallace, director of the Grandparent Caregiver Law Center at the Brookdale Center on Aging in New York. There is little in law books to help; attorneys and social workers are often unsure how existing laws apply.

What helps? Social workers and attorneys who strive to understand. Lawmakers who consider the needs of this population. And support groups, like GAP and those run by New York's department for the aging, that offer resources and reduce isolation. Vickie Corbett started her own group in Rocky Mountain, N.C., for that reason. "Honest to goodness, it saved my life," she says.

But Corbett also admits that her unexpected job has its rewards. The best part, she says, is when Tiana says after a bad day, "'You know I love you and Grandpa more than anything in the world,' and that makes it O.K." Some parts of being a parent are worth repeating.

Deborah Edler Brown is the co-author of GRANDPARENTS AS PARENTS: A SURVIVAL GUIDE TO RAISING A SECOND FAMILY