Raising grandchildren takes its toll
CHICAGO — Two years ago, Ruth Maxey was raising six children, including twin granddaughters, a niece and the girl's three siblings.
She was also in her 60s.
It got to be too much, and in January 2011 Maxey had a stroke, not long after she retired from a demanding job as a hospital administrator. She has high blood pressure, which is a risk factor, but “I'm sure the job and raising the kids and the rippin' and runnin' had something to do with it,” she said.
After her stroke, the three oldest children moved in with their grandmother in Rockford, Ill., and Maxey focused on raising the other three, including her two grandchildren, whose mother had died of complications from childbirth.
“I guess all would be good if I was 35 and I had the energy to keep up with them,” said Maxey, 64, who decided to retire to focus on the kids. “I don't have the energy, but I love them.”
Some research has found that grandparent-caregivers experience depression, high blood pressure and other health problems at higher rates than their peers who are not raising children.
Most people assume that their full-time child-rearing responsibilities will end once their children are grown and out of the house, but millions of grandparents across the country find themselves nurturing another generation.
Their numbers have risen steadily over the years. Among the reasons: an illness, death, addiction, mental illness, incarceration or military deployment on the part of one or both of the child's parents. The prolonged economic downturn also has taken a toll on some families.
Not all grandparents wind up caring for children under such difficult circumstances.
“With some families, what you see is shared parenting across the generations and a family adapting in a very positive way, such as helping a young parent going to school care for the child until the parent can assume more of the responsibilities,” said James Gleeson, an associate professor at the Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
And some grandparents say their grandkids help them stay active.Grandparent caregiving crosses income, racial and other demographic categories, Gleeson said, though African-Americans are two to three times as likely to be raised by a relative other than a parent, compared with other racial and ethnic groups.Nationwide in 2011, about 7 million grandparents lived with a grandchild younger than 18, and about 39 percent of them were primarily responsible for meeting their grandkids' basic needs.In Illinois, grandparents were living with their minor grandchildren in more than 270,000 households. In 99,000 of them, an older adult had taken on responsibility for meeting the basic needs of at least one grandchild.Suzanne Kowalski of Mount Prospect, Ill., was so absorbed with taking care of two of her grandchildren that she ignored a dimple on her breast that turned out to be a sign of cancer. By the time she sought medical care a year later, it had spread to her lymph nodes.“Had I not been raising the grandkids, I would have gone to the doctor at least a year earlier because I wouldn't have been so financially strapped,” she said. “My energy level would not have been so low ... I was giving all my attention to them.”Kowalski said she doesn't regret taking the children in.“Every choice I made was my choice and I would do it again,” said Kowalski. “I believed they didn't deserve any less than my full attention. In hindsight, I could have taken better care of myself so I could be better for them. But you live and you learn and sometimes you learn when it's too late.”
