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Increasingly, drug abuse, AIDS and other social factors are causing “parentless” children to be raised by their grandparents

throughout 70 years of living a relentlessly difficult life, the most important philosophy for Evelyn Reliford has been if there’s something that needs to be done, she just has to set her mind and go ahead and do it. Fifty years ago, she moved from Charlotte, N.C., to New York City with her husband, a long-distance truck driver. He died when the youngest of their seven children was 6 years old, leaving her to raise the family in Bronx housing projects. A retired home health aide, she’s lived to see the births of 14 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Family is everything to her, so when she learned two great-grandson were being neglected by their mother, a granddaughter now 31 years old, Reliford went to court to get custody. She never had legal custody of their mother, but raised her because it had to be done.

Initially, the judge gave the children’s grandmother, Reliford’s daughter, custody of them. Thier mother came to stay as well. For a brief time, everyone was living under Reliford’s roof, and she didn’t have to worry as much. But things didn’t stay calm. Her daughter began talking drugs again and her granddaughter started hanging out on the streets. New York’s Administration for Children’s Services interceded, and so did Reliford.

“Their mother, my granddaughter, wasn’t taking care of them, feeding them, so I had to go to court,” she explains while sitting in a chair in a living room teeming with framed photographs and knicknacks. Her “boys” are downstairs in the apartment building where the three live, participating in an after-school program.

“My other daughters, they wouldn’t take the children because ‘they weren’t theirs,’” she continues. “Their grandmother, my daughter, was on drugs, so that left me. I just couldn’t see them end up in foster care.”

Now ages 12 and 14, the boys, Derrick and Daron, have spent virtually all their young lives being parented by their great-grandmother Every few months, their mother will call or they see her, but Reliford is the one who is always there for them. She is the one at home in the mornings and in the evenings after school. They call her “Nana,” and occasionally go down South with her, back “home” to Charlotte. Eventually, Reliford wants to move back to North Carolina where much of her family remains.

“Every generation of raising kids, it gets harder,” she observes wistfully.

Evelyn Reliford and her family are part of a growing phenomenon among African Americans and the larger society as well. The growing population of children being raised by their grandparents is forcing the need for greater medical, educational, legal and housing services for millions of children. As the saying goes, “it takes a village to raise a child,” but lately that village has consisted of fewer and fewer biological parents.

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, the number of children living with grandparents as their primary caregivers increased 31 percent between 1990 and 1997. The rise of children with grandparents was not tied to growth in the population of children, but rather other social factors.

“There are a number of different reasons for the increase in the number of grandparents raising grandkids, such as increases in extreme poverty, which occurred in [the ’80s and ’90s], the impact of crack cocaine, the challenges of mental health problems and the incarceration of women, which also grew,” observes MaryLee Allen, director of the child welfare and mental health division at the Children’s Defense Fund, in Washington, D.C. Other reasons can include military service, child abuse and neglect, as well as domestic violence.

“Kids usually come to live with their grandparents with special health and mental needs that the grandparents don’t always know how to address, such as dealing with a new educational system from when they raised their children,” she adds.

More than 6 million children younger than 18 years old are living in grandparent-headed households, 2.5 million of them in homes without a mother or father present. The greatest portion of the 2.4 million grandparents raising their grandchildren are White, 47 percent, closely followed by African Americans, 28 percent, and Latinos, 18 percent. Seventy-one percent are younger than 60, and 19 percent live in poverty.

Experts describe people in these situations as “kinship care families,” or “Grandfamilies.” Children can end up with grandparents formally through the foster care system and other legal avenues, or informally at the discretion of the biological parents or other family members.

“Grandparents have helped raise children for years, but parents would stay more involved,” says Angela Burda, a coordinator at the Kinship Care Resource Center in Jonesboro, Ga., a division of the Clayton County Aging Program. grandparents are raising a generation of ‘throw away kids,’ abandoned by their parents. There is a selfishness among parents that I don’t feel was there in times past. There is not the connection to their child.”

Black Children represent a highly disproportionate number of those in the foster care system. Only 15 percent of children in the United States, Black children constitute 35 percent of those in the foster care system and they remain in the system longer than their counterparts from other racial groups. In general, a high number of kids remain in the system even after the possibility of family reunification has been eliminated. Between 20 percent and 40 percent of kids put into foster care end up with family members. These kinship foster families, according to family research studies, receive less information and services from caseworkers than non-kin foster families.

“There are several hundred thousand relatives caring for children through the foster care system, but a child has to be formally placed in that system to be eligible for ‘foster kinship care,’” says Allen of the Children’s Defense Fund, referring to the financial and medical resources offered by the foster care system. One of the biggest challenges which grandparents and other family members may face when taking in children is the legal hurdle, even when the transfer of custody is consensual.

Legally there are several categories of grandparent or extended family-households. For example, a “legal guardianship” puts a child in another relative’s care, but allows the parent to maintain rights and allows eligibility for some state benefits. A judge could end such an arrangement at a mother or father’s request, as well. When children are under the “legal custody” of a grandparent or other adult relative, similar guidelines apply as with legal guardianship, but the specific rules for control over decision-making ing vary. To enroll a child in school or seek medical insurance cov- erage, grandparents are normally required to obtain consent from a parent.

While the majority of kinship caregivers do not obtain court approval, those who do have a much easier time getting medical, educational and housing benefits for the children.

In 1990, when she was nearing the age of 40, Jacqueline Shields’ three grandchildren came to Uve with her and her husband. Her youngest child, a daughter, got married, then divorced and couldn’t hold an apartment or job to support her children, two boys now 16 and 18 years old, and a girl, now 15. Shields stayed home and raised three of her eight grandchildren until last January. Now 55, she works as an assistant at a chiropractic clinic in St. Petersburg, Fla.

“I had [the boys] for two years before the girl was born, and then my daughter went back to court asking for custody of all of them,” says Shields, explaining the turbulent legal journey she’s undertaken to gain recognition of her caregiver status. “It’s been a back-and-forth thing for years. Finally, the kids said they didn’t want to go back with their mother and that they wanted to stay with me. When I first got custody of the kids, it wasn’t difficult because [their mother] was a willing party. Originally, the judge had it written up where we both had legal custody of the kids. The police came to the house to intervene on one occasion and ended up giving [my daughter] the kids.”

Shields has had her grandchildren full time for the last six years. Her daughter, now working a steady job and renting an apartment, has rebuilt and maintains a relationship with her children. She visits and phones regularly to check on their academic progress.

“The whole thing is very hard and emotional on the kids, because naturally they love their mother,” Shields says. “It was hard to explain. ‘Mommy can’t afford to take care of you, feed you or house you. Grandmommy has a house and a little more money.’” It wasn’t the burden of the children that motivated her to return to the work- place, but the de-funding of a help group she facilitates, the St. Petersburg Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Support Group. She learned of the organization when she first took in her daughter’s children, through a posted advertisement. A woman facilitating the organization died and the executive director asked Shields to assume the position. It was started 17 years ago with two grandmothers commiserating in a health clinic about caring for their grandchildren.

“I really try to get the kids back to their parents,” says Shields, explaining her primary goal in the unpaid position. “We have parents who are incarcerated, some out there on the street, some who are dead because of different diseases. It’s open to anyone who’s raising someone else’s child. There are grandmothers, grandfathers and even great-grands. In the support group, we’re trying to help one another and not be isolated, to get through this situation.”

Last October, the U.S. Congress reauthorized the “Older Americans Act,” which was first signed into law by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965. The new provisions will bolster federal support for kinship caregivers. First reauthorized in 2000, the latest version also lowers the age limit from 60 to 55 for grandparents heading households to have access to the National Family Caregiver Support Program, increasing the number of eligible families by 47 percent.

“This legislation could literally save lives,” says Donna M. Butts, executive director of Generations United, a Washington, D.C-based advocacy and support organization for kinship care families, in a statement about the reauthorization of the act. “For example, we know that grandparents often neglect their own health because the lack of affordable child care can make something as routine as a visit to the doctor’s office impossible. [These] funds will make the difference between canceling the appointment and being able to keep it.”

In situations such as Evelyn Reliford’s, where the grandchildren come to stay from the very beginning for the long term, housing can be a factor. With public housing, in particular, there are limits on the number of individuals allowed to stay in one place. Further, if someone in the house or apartment is convicted of a felony, the space must be vacated by everyone living there. If forced to move, the children’s provider may not be able to afford a safe place large enough to accommodate the family.