Kinship Care Challenges: Looking Back

Remember the book titled “What to Expect When You’re Expecting”?  I wish there was a book like that for kinship caregivers. Raising my grandson is not the same as raising my children. 

As a grandparent raising my grandson, there are more responsibilities.  Many grandparents/relatives inherit a lot of parenting challenges.  The child(ren) may be experiencing depression, anxiety, health problems, behavior problems, school difficulties, aggression, and feelings of anger, rejection, and guilt. 

Parenting any child with emotional or behavior issues is hard enough for any parent, but as a grandparent raising my grandson, it’s more difficult because there are so many other stressors.  There are legal and financial problems, dealing with difficult feelings about the parent(s), handling grief, isolation, emotional stress and possibly health concerns because we are older.

Looking back, I received a crash-course in the following:

• Child protection laws
• Filing an Order for Protection
• Applying for state/government assistance – financial, food stamps, medical assistance
• Finding and paying for daycare so I could keep working
• Determining if I could handle working fulltime plus raise my grandson
• Understanding foster care vs. no foster care and which was best in my situation
• Applying for social security disability for my grandson
• Learning about special education for my grandson’s developmental delays
• Understanding his needs as a child who experienced neglect
• Finding professional counseling
• Locating support groups specifically for kinship caregivers
• Locating an attorney knowledgeable of kinship care
• Shifting from a grandparent role to a parent role
• Handling difficult emotions, such a grieving, anger, and resentment
• Dealing with my daughter who is an addict
• Dealing with my grandson’s father and his unwillingness to do what is necessary to raise his son
• Filing police reports against my daughter when she violated the Order for Protection

When I look at this list, I can see why the first three years were so difficult for me.  There is a lot to work through, and too often we feel as if we are trying to handle all these questions and issues alone.  I felt as if I were climbing a huge mountain, with no end in sight.

What helped me was to remember the reason I am raising my grandson:  I love him. Coming back to that fact helped me to keep going. He is my family, no less important than my own children.  I do not want strangers raising him, or that he would ever think his family did not care enough about him to help him.  He is worth every single challenge.

If you are a kinship caregiver, don’t give up.  Things do settle down with time.

I am a grandma raising my grandson.  It’s all good.