According to the US Census Bureau in 2012, “Grandparents maintained 67 percent of coresident households. About 1 in 3 grandparent- maintained households had no parent present.” That is 67% of 4.2 MILLION households maintained by grandparents. WHAT?
Those numbers shock me, and it is probably because I just didn’t grow up that way. People raised their own kids when I was growing up. If they WERE raising their grandkids it was for a reason like the parents were dead, gone overseas with the military or there was some debilitating injury to the parent where they were just incapable. And I do realize I was young and didn’t know everything but these are the reasons I observed.
TODAY? WOW! These numbers are devastating, and these are only reported numbers from 5 years ago. What are the REAL facts on this subject? No one knows. They are likely to be more devastating than we can ever imagine. And we wonder why people jump.
God meant for us to be young having small children for sound reasons. I know this to be a rock. fact. I was 27 with a 2-year-old and 45 with a 2-year-old and 12 other ages in between. I’m sort of losing my defenses if you know what I mean. I can’t imagine being 67 with a 2-year-old. DEFENSELESS! These kids have their game on and are loaded for bear.
While there is just nothing I can do with the situation now, I can certainly make a contribution to the way it continues to play out in future generations.
Grandma-moms, here is my advice to you and I only say these things to help. I am not going to maul you about why and how you got into these situations. It is none of my business and frankly, who cares. It is done.
There are so many reasons, most of which don’t include military service deployments and acts of God like the death of a parent or both. We understand it is usually a bad parenting decision/choice and those are the grandparents to whom I speak.
BUT how about this:
- Now that you have them unteach the bad habits they have learned in the past. Discipline them with love and intention to teach love.
- Teach them to respect themselves as well as others beginning with respecting the grandparents that are now caring for them.
- Continue to be diligent in their affairs and if that means keeping them home, then keep them home.
- You cannot be their best friend, the one they go to when they don’t get their way. You have become the parent. Be that parent.
- Now that you have them stop the cycle that got the children in this situation in the first place.
It is a sad day when a mother sees their child fail, isn’t it? The first reaction is to comfort, baby, as they say, to make the person feel better. The situations that get these parents into a spot where they lost the children to the grandparents is not a booboo that can be pacified with a Band-Aid. The cycle has to stop. So, if it means that the child is removed from the parent and put in the care of the grandparent, let’s not let it go any farther. You can’t undo the past or do anything to fix it. It is gone. Start today making these children understand they can’t do whatever they want and put the responsibility on someone else.
Understand, Grandma-moms, things are certainly different than when you were raising your children, and no, you can’t discipline in the manner you did 50 years ago, but you CAN discipline.
- Take away the screens.
- Ask the child to help with the household chores.
- Keep the child home and busy. Interact with them.
- Allow the child to work with you.
- Give the child parameters.
- Stop treating them like grandchildren. You are the parent now.
I don’t address this topic without seeing the experience first-hand. And while I have lived in a multi-generational household for more than thirteen years, it is a grandparent, parent, child dynamic. The children have parents responsible for their upbringing and grandparents to glean from, love, and learn how to care for with respect. Now, back in the day, grandparents were treasures and families felt an obligation, almost, to care for them as they became elderly. Today that doesn’t happen too often. The multi-generational households I have been involved with or at least the grandma-mom situations I have had experience with are not this way at all.
This is what I see:
- Drug abuse/alcoholism by the parent of the child. The child is raised by her grandparents.
- That grandparent-raised child has children out of wedlock, is on drugs, jailed, rehabbed, jailed, on drugs. HER children are now raised by HER grandmother.
- Today, still, these small girls are now following the cycle, being destroyed by the public welfare system and they are playing all ends against the middle.
- The great-grandchild is now in charge of what happens in the household and knows how to get her way because no one is stopping her.
Break the cycle. Be the change you want to see in these children. They don’t need friends. Apparently, they are a dime a dozen. They need people in their lives that care more about the child than themselves ENOUGH to lay down the law and parent, teach, know and love. “The greatest of these is Love.”
The most beautiful flower starts with a seed. So, Grandma-moms, are you going to take these seeds and nourish them into beautiful flowers with the discipline they pine for, inclusion they deserve and love enough to keep the weeds from blocking the sun?