Parental Grandparents

David and Carolyn Wells raised their children, sent them to college and saved up for retirement. But this hardworking Knoxville couple never imagined having to raise their grandchildren. They knew their son and daughter-in-law were struggling. And they worried that their granddaughters weren't getting proper care. When the child welfare agency threatened to step in, however, there was only one choice. At 51, they became parents once again.

"It was a nightmare at first," explains Carolyn, now 62. "Both children had special needs that hadn't received appropriate attention." Their older granddaughter was profoundly deaf. Doctors predicted that the baby, diagnosed with failure to thrive, would someday be institutionalized. Between the constant care, endless doctor visits and two full-time jobs, there was "just sheer exhaustion," recalls Wells. Worse yet, there was nowhere to turn for help.

Help came later in the form of the Grandparents as Parents Program, a comprehensive support program at the Knoxville Community Action Committee's Office on Aging. One of the first efforts in the state specifically designed to address the needs of grandparents and other relative caregivers, GAPP's model program provides support groups, recreational activities and a variety of other vital outreach services to help kinship care for families across Knox County.

But additional supports are still needed to help GAPP and similar programs reach out to grandparents and other relatives raising children whose parents are battling substance abuse, incarceration, mental illness, domestic violence and other serious problems. More than 61,000 Tennessee grandparents currently report that they are responsible for the grandchildren living with them -- 1,289 in Knoxville alone.

In 42 percent of these households, there are no parents present to help with child-rearing responsibilities or to contribute to the family's income -- a particularly serious problem for those disabled and retired grandparents living on a fixed income and the one-fifth of Tennessee grandparent caregivers who live under the poverty line.

While the majority of families served by GAPP are not formally connected to the child welfare system -- often grandparents intervene before the state becomes involved -- the lack of comprehensive services for Tennessee kinship families is due, in large part, to the chronically inflexible national foster care financing system, which provides Tennessee with more than $155 million per year in federal aid but places significant restrictions on how the money can be used.

For example, the state can use Title IV-E dollars, the main source of federal child welfare support, mainly to fund room and board for children in foster care. Under current law, however, it cannot use the funds to prevent children from coming into care in the first place by providing preventive services: affordable child care, legal counsel or the other programs that GAPP provides.

"The truth is that grandparents who step in before the state has to are saving taxpayers millions of dollars," says Harry Rehagen, 66, pastor of St. Andrew's United Methodist Church in Knoxville. While Rehagen and his wife, Joyce, have since adopted their two young grandsons, the start-up costs of taking them in were high. In addition to $2,500 in legal fees just to get temporary guardianship of the boys, the working couple spent down much of their retirement savings just to cover the cost of child care and mental-health counseling.

"We love these children so much that we couldn't conceive of putting them in state care," Rehagen explains, "but at the same time we were struggling to do what was needed to keep them with us."

Despite current federal funding incentives, there is new hope for grandparent caregivers.

Recently, the Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care, a national panel of child welfare experts, laid out a series of promising reforms to improve the way the federal government funds child welfare and related prevention services. In particular, the commission recommended that states be permitted to use the federal money they don't spend on foster care to reinvest in other programs that help keep children out of foster care.

Such services could support child-care stipends, pay for mental-health counseling or even help to establish a kinship navigator program, a statewide resource and referral system that would help families find accurate information on a range of available government resources and local support groups.

In addition to aiding grandparent caregivers raising children outside of the child welfare system, the proposed reforms would also help the more than 1,600 Tennessee children who have been formally placed with grandparents and other relatives through foster care. In many of these cases, licensed foster relatives may be willing to assume permanent responsibility for the children in their care but are hesitant to adopt because it requires the termination of parental rights. Under the Pew proposal, the state would be able to use federal funding to pay for subsidized guardianship, an arrangement in which relatives obtain legal guardianship of the children in their care and receive ongoing financial assistance.

Until additional federal and state support is available to help these caregivers, Tennessee's grandparents and other relatives must continue to choose between keeping their families together and accessing essential services.

"You gotta do what you gotta do to get help for your grandchildren," says Mechanicsville's Roslind White, who is raising two grandchildren. "But it's a shame these kids have to suffer just because their parents couldn't take care of them."