Grandma, Inc.

Grandma changed my mind on welfare. Hear me out.

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I used to think welfare should come with strings attached. Look for a job. Take a class. Give people a reason to try and most people will try.

Then I learned about grandfamilies, and it wrecked my tidy little theory.

Grandfamilies are what they sound like: households where grandparents have taken over raising their grandkids. They’re not some fringe case anymore. About one in twelve American kids lives with a grandparent. Roughly 2.6 million kids are being raised this way.¹ And the welfare system — built for able-bodied adults job-hunting their way back to the workforce — has almost nothing to say to a 68-year-old who just inherited three kids overnight.

Take Gigi.²

She had a full-time job. A car. A life that worked. Then her daughter’s addiction took over, and Gigi became the parent again. She gave up the job. Gave back the car. When she got desperate enough to apply for SNAP, she hesitated. She was scared she’d fail an inspection for the crime of having too little space for a child she didn’t plan on having.

This is the part that gets me: if the parents could stay, they would. As the authors of Grandparents Raising Grandchildren in the United States: Changing Family Forms, Stagnant Social Policies put it:

“By almost every available measure, families in which children are being raised by grandparents are among the most vulnerable in the United States, overrepresented by single-mother and low-income families who arrived at their status due to substance abuse, teen pregnancy, AIDS, and incarceration in the middle generation. Declines in the number of jobs that pay a living wage and provide benefits have economically squeezed the working poor and middle-class families, such that they increasingly need to rely on extended family support.”³

Grandparents aren’t stepping in because it’s trendy. They’re the emergency backstop for a family structure that’s failing in the middle.

The system doesn’t even know they exist.

Legally, most grandfamilies aren’t “families” at all. Gigi’s daughter won’t sign over guardianship — she still hopes to come back — so in the meantime, her kid falls through a legal gap. No employer health insurance for her. No claiming her as a dependent without formal standing. It’s a household running on love and improvisation, with none of the paperwork to back it up.

And here’s where my incentives-only theory really started to crack.

Welfare generally requires that recipients be working or actively looking for work. I’m still in favor of this since conditional aid tends to produce better outcomes. But a 68-year-old who just became a full-time parent again doesn’t have the time, the body, or the flexibility to also be job-hunting. Some of these grandparents already used up their lifetime welfare allotment the first time they raised kids, decades ago. Now they’re locked out, raising a second generation on nothing. That’s not an incentive problem. That’s a rulebook that never imagined they’d exist.

So who actually becomes a grandparent-turned-parent?

I got curious enough to run the numbers myself. I trained a XGBoost model on 2022 county-level Census data — about 3,100 counties — testing 18 candidate predictors against the rate of grandparent-headed households: poverty, race, education, health access, and more. Two variables blew past everything else and did most of the predictive work: poverty and race. (Code’s linked below if you want to check my math.)⁴

Black grandmothers are, disproportionately, raising America’s backstop generation. Almost 12% of Black children live in a grandparent-headed home, compared to about 7% of Hispanic children and 4% of white children.⁵ These are the households standing between hundreds of thousands of kids and foster care. Their unpaid labor saves taxpayers at least $10.5 billion a year by keeping kids out of an already overburdened foster care system, according to Generations United’s most recent accounting — money that would otherwise land on child services.⁶ And yet when relatives take in kids, they typically get paid less than non-family foster providers doing the same job. We incentivize the worse outcome and underpay the better one.

Native communities are hit even harder, and for reasons that compound: Native adults have the highest rates of serious psychological distress and major depressive episodes in the country, 8% more Native people need substance-use treatment than the national average, and 49% of Native households with children lack year-round parental employment, compared to 25% of white households.⁷ Grandfamilies aren’t a random side effect. They’re downstream of a much longer list of failures.

We’re building playgrounds with handrails instead of fixing any of this.

There’s now a small but growing wave of housing built specifically for grandfamilies — nineteen complexes across the country and counting, according to Generations United.⁸ Picture a playground bolted to a building with a wheelchair ramp and a handrail by the slide. It’s a strange, oddly moving sight. Anna, a resident of one D.C. complex, put it this way on Generations United’s podcast: “The grandparents themselves organize Bible study every Friday. What I found is a sense of community from the inside and from the outside as well.”²

I want these families to have good places to live. Obviously I do. But we’re also in a housing affordability crisis, and instead of building more general housing, we’re building specialized units that, in a healthier country, wouldn’t need to exist.

That’s a pattern I keep seeing: we get remarkably good at treating the symptom and remarkably bad at stopping the disease. Instead of making tuition affordable, we applaud philanthropists who cover one class’s bill. Instead of holding Purdue Pharma fully accountable for the opioid crisis, we celebrate the expansion of methadone clinics. Instead of asking why Americans can’t raise their own kids, we build better housing for the grandparents who step up to the plate.

Grandma will answer the call anyway. She always does. But she shouldn’t have to.

Notes

1. 2022 Census County Level Data

2. Us & Them: Grandfamilies & The Opioid Crisis, August 26th, 2021 

3. Grandparents Raising Grandchildren in the United States: Changing Family Forms, Stagnant Social Policies

4. 2022 Census County Level Data — code on my GitHub

5. 2022 Census County Level Data

6. Generations United: The Costs of Caregiving: Why Supporting Grandfamilies and Kinship Care is Good for Children and Our Nation's Economy

7. Generations United: American Indian & Alaska Native Grandfamilies: Helping Children Thrive Through Connection To Family and Cultural Identity 

8. Generations United: A Place to Call Home: Building Affordable Housing for Grandfamilies