Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Seen As Strenuous But Not Unhealthy

Something that caught my eye in the hard copy of the U of C Magazine is news of an encouraging study by our own Professor Linda Waite, suggesting that grandparents raising grandchildren face a strenuous but not intrinsically unhealthy task. Grandparents raising grandchildren are the most common form of kinship foster care, and it is encouraging to see the data so carefully parsed. Waite found that grandparents who were in ill health while raising their grandchildren were often already experiencing health deficits prior to becoming kinship carers, and that there were a fairly wide variety of potentially contravening variables that should be controlled for in researching the grandparents raising grandchildren phenomenon. This is not to dismiss the real problems that many such grandparents face, but it is an encouraging finding that may help prevent hasty assumptions about older parents.