Mercedes Bristol was 57, divorced and planning a trip to Alaska with a friend of 40 years when she became the primary caregiver for her five grandchildren, who at the time ranged from 3 months to 9 years in age.
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Alone, with no help, “I had a decision to make,” Bristol said.
She navigated a gauntlet of lawyers, Child Protective Services and the courts to formally adopt all five grandchildren and get them away from their parents’ substance use and neglect.
At first, the five kids slept on her floor, because she had no extra beds. She charged everything she needed to buy for them on her credit cards. She cried in church, surrounded by her grandchildren.
“I said, ‘I need all hands on deck. I don’t need prayers. We need people to be the hands and feet of Jesus,’” Bristol said.
But then, Bristol said, God told her to stop being a victim. She hunkered down and got to work raising her grandkids.
That trip to Alaska never happened.
About 2.4 million children in the United States are being raised by a relative or close family friend and do not have a parent living in the household. These family units are known as grandfamilies or kinship families, according to Donna Butts, executive director of Generations United, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that works to connect generations.
As of 2021, there were 2.1 million grandparents with primary responsibility for their grandchildren. While that number was down from 2.7 million in 2012, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, those caregivers had gotten older: In 2012, 46.8% were 60 and over, but by 2021 that share had jumped to 60.1%. A higher share of older grandparents also ended up being long-term caregivers, for five years or more.
“Anytime there’s a crisis, grandparents are the fallback. We had an opioid epidemic and then got hit with a pandemic, and the issue got intensified,” Butts said.
“It’s been part of our country since the beginning. George and Martha Washington raised her grandchildren at Mount Vernon,” Butts said. “It can be more common in families of color, but families of all kinds, of all socioeconomic groups across the country, are raising their grandchildren.”
She added: “It’s an issue that’s out of the closet. There used to be so much stigma about it. There was shame.”
There are many reasons that parents might not be able to care for their children, including substance use, incarceration, military deployment, severe disability, deportation, teenage pregnancy or death, according to Generations United.
For every child in foster care, there are 19 other children being raised by family members. That saves taxpayers more than $4 billion a year by keeping the children out of the foster-care system, Butts said.
“Children do better when placed with family. Research shows that children have a stronger sense of roots [and] family culture and are more likely to have brothers and sisters stay together as a unit, and more likely to report that they feel loved. It’s better for the children’s health and mental health. Grandparents are less likely to give up on them,” she said.
For the grandparents themselves, their physical health often benefits from raising the grandchildren, but their mental health can be negatively affected, according to Jeremy Yorgason, a professor and associate director in the school of family life at Brigham Young University and a member of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy.
There’s a financial toll as well, especially for grandparents who are already living on a limited income or who must shift their focus from planning for their own retirement. In 2021, 18.3% of grandparents responsible for their grandchildren lived in poverty, according to census data.
There is some recognition of the burdens this situation places on families. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently announced $115 million in grant funding to support the development and improvement of affordable rental housing for low-income seniors. Of that funding, $35 million is earmarked to create intergenerational housing for households headed by seniors who are raising children under 18 years of age.
‘I’m so tired’
Now 69 years old, Bristol said she’s exhausted, but she fights on for her grandchildren.
“I am so tired. I’ll be 70 years old soon. The years went by so fast and so slow, in a way,” she said. “It has been tough. They know there’s nobody else but me. But I pray I can get them to adulthood.”
Four of her five grandchildren have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, two have oppositional defiant disorder and one has post-traumatic stress disorder.
As many as 61% of children in kinship or foster care have clinically significant mental-health issues, Yorgason said.
Bristol, who said she herself has suffered from depression while raising her grandkids, started a nonprofit called Texas Grandparents Raising Grandchildren, which has 26 support groups around the state. It has raised funds to help grandfamilies and provides other resources as well.
“I thrive with more to do. It pushes me. But I am so tired and want to give up. The needs are so many in our state that I just can’t,” said Bristol, who retired at 60 from a career in social work. “I could be tired, but there’s somewhere out there some family sleeping in a shelter who I can help.”
‘It totally changed our plans’
Kris Magstadt, 64, has been raising her two grandchildren for 10 years. Because of neglect on the part of their parents, she took them them in when they were 1 and 2 years old. The 2-year-old was already a year behind in developmental milestones, she said.
“We did [physical therapy, occupational therapy], speech training, everything,” she said.
Magstadt, who was herself raised by her grandparents, retired from her job in marketing and public relations to be a full-time caregiver for the kids. The children both have ADHD, and the younger one has oppositional defiant disorder and is in therapy.
She and her husband had originally planned to retire at 65. Instead, she retired at 62 and her husband will work until he’s 70.
“It totally changed our plans,” said Magstadt, who formally adopted the children with her husband. “It would be the rare person who didn’t have some feelings about all of this. It’s hard. It’s also financially hard. But I’m all in.”
Something that makes it even harder is age.
“We can’t get down on the floor and play with them as easily as we could once. We’re tired. At night we fall into bed,” Magstadt said.
“You also lose friends. Other people our age are traveling, retiring. We have kids. We’re back in the 30-year-old time frame of life. Our village is much smaller now,” she said. In North Dakota, where they live, there are few services to help families like hers, but she’s trying to start a support group.
Jan Wagner, 73, has been raising her granddaughter since the child was 2 years old, also due to parental addiction and neglect. Her granddaughter will turn 18 in a few weeks, at which point she’ll no longer be eligible for the Social Security income she gets under her grandfather’s benefits or for state medical aid for minors.
“That will be $14,000 [per year] she’s no longer getting. The three of us will be living in borderline poverty,” said Wagner, who lives in Michigan.
Wagner’s granddaughter had learning delays, speech delays and severe anxiety. At age 2, she was still drinking from a bottle and had never eaten solid food.
“The financial part is really difficult — and simply learning to parent a child with that much trauma,” Wagner said. “From day one, we found we couldn’t parent in the same way. We’re raising another generation. We had to learn how to do this all over again.”
Wagner had been looking forward to retirement and the freedom that comes with it, but that never happened. The Wagners have already raided their 401(k) funds to survive. And now her biggest fear is that her granddaughter may not be ready to thrive on her own.
“We’re not going to be here for the long haul to pick up the pieces, to navigate for her. She’s just not there yet. All of her baggage is still following her,” Wagner said.
“I know at our age, financially, it’s hard for anyone to live in retirement. Everything we had we used to raise the child. We don’t have resources left,” Wagner said. “If I have to be a greeter at Walmart, then I’ll be a greeter at Walmart.”
Still, she said: “This has given us more than it could ever take away. The life we’re living is a life of purpose. We still have aches and pains, but we have to get up. We have to stay current. She’s our purpose.”
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