2.6 Million Black Children Are Raised by Grandparents — A Love Story and a National Crisis

Somewhere in America right now, a sixty-three-year-old woman with arthritis in both knees is helping a seven-year-old with long division. She has already worked eight hours at a job that does not offer retirement benefits. She has already cooked dinner, supervised bath time, laid out school clothes, and signed a permission slip for a field trip she cannot afford to chaperone because she cannot take the day off. She is tired in a way that does not respond to sleep, because the tiredness is not physical — it is existential. She is raising her grandchild because her daughter is in prison, or on drugs, or dead, or simply gone, and the choice that was presented to her was not really a choice at all: take this child or the state will. She took the child. She took the child because that is what Black grandmothers have always done, because the alternative was foster care, because the blood running through that child’s veins runs through hers, and because love, in the Black community, has always been defined not by what you say but by what you carry.

The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey counts approximately 2.6 million children in the United States being raised primarily by grandparents, and Black grandparents are three times more likely than white grandparents to be serving as primary caregivers for their grandchildren. In some urban communities, grandparent-headed households have become so common that they are no longer considered remarkable — they are simply the way things are, the invisible infrastructure holding together families that have been shattered by incarceration, addiction, poverty, and the cascading failures of every system that was supposed to help.

What Drove This Crisis

The rise of grandparent-headed households in Black America has two primary drivers, and both are the products of deliberate policy decisions rather than natural demographic shifts. The first is mass incarceration. Between 1980 and 2020, the number of women in American prisons increased by more than 700 percent, and Black women were incarcerated at roughly twice the rate of white women. When a mother goes to prison, someone must raise her children. In the majority of cases, that someone is the maternal grandmother. The federal government’s own data shows that approximately 62 percent of women in state prisons and 56 percent of women in federal prisons are mothers of minor children. The children of these women do not appear in incarceration statistics. They appear in the Census Bureau’s grandparent caregiver data, silent casualties of a war on drugs that was waged on their families.

The second driver is the opioid and substance abuse crisis, which arrived in Black communities later than in white communities but has hit with devastating force. Crack cocaine in the 1980s and 1990s created the first massive wave of grandparent caregivers. Opioids and fentanyl have created the second. Generations United, a national organization focused on intergenerational issues, reported in 2019 that the opioid epidemic had produced a 10 percent increase in grandparent-headed households in just five years, with the impact concentrated in communities already struggling with poverty and limited social services.

The Health Toll Nobody Measures

Bert Hayslip and Christine Kaminski, in their comprehensive review of the research on custodial grandparents, documented a health profile that reads like a medical emergency: grandparent caregivers report significantly higher rates of depression, anxiety, diabetes, hypertension, and insomnia than non-caregiving grandparents of the same age. They are more likely to have chronic pain. They are more likely to delay or forgo their own medical care because they cannot afford the copays or cannot take time away from the children. They are more likely to die prematurely.

This is the hidden cost of the hidden safety net. The grandmothers who are holding Black families together are being ground down by the effort, and the systems that should be supporting them are instead creating additional barriers. A grandmother who takes in her grandchildren without formal legal custody — which is the majority of cases, because obtaining legal guardianship requires a lawyer, court fees, and time that most grandparents do not have — cannot enroll those children in school without a fight. She cannot authorize medical treatment. She cannot add them to her health insurance. She cannot claim them as dependents on her taxes. She is, in the eyes of the law, a stranger raising someone else’s children, and the legal system treats her accordingly.

Kinship Care vs. Foster Care: A Financial Obscenity

Here is a number that should provoke outrage in every legislative body in the country: the average foster care payment to a non-relative foster parent in the United States is approximately $700 to $1,000 per month per child. The average payment to a kinship caregiver — a grandmother, an aunt, a family member who takes in a child rather than allowing the child to enter the foster system — is often zero. In states that do provide kinship payments, the amount is typically a fraction of the foster care rate, sometimes as low as $200 per month.

This means that the system financially penalizes families for keeping children within the family. A stranger who takes in a child through the foster system receives full payment, full Medicaid coverage for the child, and access to a range of support services. A grandmother who takes in her grandchild to keep the child out of the very same foster system receives, in many cases, nothing. She is saving the state the full cost of a foster care placement — estimated at $25,000 to $40,000 per year per child — and she is doing it for free, using money she had set aside for her own retirement, her own medical care, her own survival.

The AARP, in its surveys of grandparent caregivers, has found that the average custodial grandparent spends more than $10,000 per year on their grandchildren’s needs. Many dip into retirement savings. Many take on additional debt. Many forgo retirement entirely, working into their seventies because the cost of raising young children makes retirement impossible. The financial devastation is total: a grandmother who expected to spend her final decades in modest stability instead spends them in the economic conditions of a young parent, but without a young parent’s earning trajectory, health, or time horizon.

The Legal Labyrinth

The legal barriers facing grandparent caregivers are not merely inconvenient. They are actively dangerous. A grandmother who does not have legal custody or guardianship of her grandchild cannot consent to emergency medical treatment. If that child has an asthma attack at school, the school must call 911 and the grandmother must hope that the emergency room does not refuse treatment while attempting to locate a parent who may be in prison, in another state, or unreachable. If the child needs surgery, the grandmother cannot sign the consent form. If the child needs a prescription filled, the grandmother may be turned away at the pharmacy.

Obtaining legal guardianship requires, in most states, filing a petition with the family court, serving notice on the biological parents (who may be hostile to the proceeding), attending one or more hearings, and demonstrating to a judge that the parents are unfit. The process can take months. It typically requires an attorney, and legal aid services for this type of case are severely underfunded. Many grandparents, faced with this legal gauntlet, simply do not pursue formal custody — and then spend years navigating a system that was not designed for them, presenting notarized letters and school affidavits and hoping that each new bureaucratic gatekeeper will accept the informal authority they have been forced to construct.

The Children’s Experience

The children in grandparent-headed households carry a specific form of grief that the child welfare system has barely begun to understand. They have, in most cases, experienced the loss of a parent — not necessarily to death, but to incarceration, addiction, mental illness, or abandonment, all of which produce a grief that is complicated by the parent’s continued existence. A child whose mother is in prison grieves differently than a child whose mother has died. The prison child grieves a person who chose, or was compelled by circumstance to choose, something other than them. The grief is tangled with confusion, with shame, with anger, and with a hope for reunion that may or may not be realistic.

Research on children in kinship care shows that these children, despite the stability that grandparent caregiving provides, have elevated rates of trauma symptoms, behavioral problems, and academic difficulties compared to children raised by their biological parents. They also have, consistently, better outcomes than children placed in non-relative foster care, which is the critical comparison that should drive policy. Grandparent caregiving is not a perfect solution. It is, however, a dramatically better solution than the alternative, and the failure to support it adequately is a policy choice that harms children in the name of fiscal restraint.

“I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed.”
— Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

What Must Change

The reforms needed to support grandparent caregivers are neither mysterious nor prohibitively expensive. They are, in fact, cost-saving measures that would reduce the burden on the foster care system while improving outcomes for children. The failure to implement them is not a failure of knowledge. It is a failure of political will.

First, legal guardianship reform. Every state should create a simplified, expedited guardianship process for kinship caregivers, with court fees waived and legal representation provided at no cost. The current system, which requires grandparents to navigate the same legal process as any stranger seeking custody of a child, is a bureaucratic absurdity that prioritizes procedural formality over children’s welfare.

Second, kinship payment parity. Kinship caregivers should receive the same per-child payment as non-relative foster parents. This is not generosity. It is basic arithmetic: the state is already willing to pay $25,000 or more per year for a foster care placement. Paying a grandmother half that amount to provide a placement that produces better outcomes for the child is not a cost increase. It is a savings.

Third, kinship navigator programs. These programs, which assign a trained social worker to help grandparent caregivers access the services they are entitled to — Medicaid, TANF, school enrollment, respite care — have been demonstrated to significantly improve outcomes for both grandparents and grandchildren. The Kinship Navigator program model, endorsed by the Family First Prevention Services Act of 2018, should be funded and implemented in every state. The navigators do not create new services. They help grandparents find and use services that already exist, which is necessary because the social service system is a labyrinth that defeats even people with education, time, and internet access — resources that many custodial grandparents do not have.

The Love That Holds Everything Together

Fourth, and perhaps most important, is the need for respite care — structured, funded programs that give grandparent caregivers regular breaks from the demands of raising young children. The physical and emotional toll of full-time caregiving on a person who is sixty, sixty-five, seventy years old is unsustainable without support. Respite care is not a luxury. It is the difference between a grandparent who can continue caregiving and one who is hospitalized, at which point the children enter foster care anyway, at far greater cost and far worse outcomes.

What the 2.6 million children in grandparent-headed households represent is not primarily a crisis, though it is that. It is primarily an act of love so enormous in its scope and so ordinary in its daily expression that it has become invisible. It is a sixty-three-year-old woman helping with long division. It is a sixty-eight-year-old man driving a twelve-year-old to basketball practice with a back that screams at every pothole. It is a seventy-year-old who had planned to rest, who had earned the right to rest, who looked at a grandchild who had no one else and chose, without hesitation, to carry a weight that was never supposed to be hers.

These grandparents are not asking for gratitude. They are not asking for recognition. They are asking for the legal ability to enroll their grandchildren in school without a six-month court battle. They are asking for financial assistance that is even a fraction of what the state would pay a stranger to do the same job. They are asking for a system that treats the keeping of children within families as a value to be supported rather than a convenience to be exploited. They are asking, in other words, for the bare minimum, and they are not receiving it. The love is there. It has always been there. What has not been there is a nation willing to match that love with the resources it requires. That failure is not the grandparents’ burden to carry. It is ours.