They say it takes a village to raise a child. More and more, it takes a grandma.
“We grandparents who are raising grandchildren, we are the protection for that next generation,” said Charlotte Stephenson in a panel discussion Tuesday with U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, D-Scranton.
And it’s true. In Pennsylvania alone, 100,000 children are being raised by grandparents or other nonparental relatives. Many of those situations stem from the opioid epidemic that is killing addicts, seeing them in jail or in rehab or just not allowing them to be stable enough to raise their kids.
But after raising their own kids, how do people in or approaching retirement take on the challenge of raising a new family from scratch — sometimes while still being asked to help their own children with the fallout of addiction?
That’s what Casey was in Greensburg to discuss.
“That act of love is very expensive sometimes,” he said.
Casey introduced legislation in May that would make it easier for grandparents and older caregivers to get the help taking care of the families they weren’t supposed to have as they aged.
It’s a good plan, and not only for the children and the grandparents.
Some is financial, like rewriting rules around benefit programs to take into consideration the different family structures. Some is protective, like making sure that grandparents who take in the grandchildren who have nowhere else to go don’t suddenly lose a place to live. And some is legal, like creating easier pathways to get grandparents the guardianship authority they need to assume more complicated roles.
But there are other pros, too.
If a grandparent can’t afford to take in a child because she would have no place to live and no way to feed another mouth and can’t pay the legal costs of establishing the new family in court, the child could end up in foster care where everything comes out of the public purse.
Helping families — and they are already families — stay together with as little strain as possible is good for the kids, good for the people who love them and better for Pennsylvania than putting 100,000 more kids into foster homes.
“It’s a challenge, the likes of which I don’t think our country has ever seen before,” Casey said.
And sometimes it takes more than a grandma to rise to a challenge. Sometimes it takes a village — or a law.
