Grandfamilies: America's Changing Home Life

As more parents become physically or financially unable to care for their kids, the responsibility of caregiving is falling on unsuspecting grandparents.

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Grandma is being forced back into the role of mom. As more parents can’t care for their kids, retirees are being called back into action. These grandfamilies—multigenerational homes headed by grandparents—are becoming mainstream. Reconfiguring the American family, grandfamilies demand that we reevaluate a welfare system not designed with them in mind and confront the broader deterioration of the family structure.

The rise of grandfamilies dates back to the 1990s. Today, about one in twelve kids lives with a grandparent, and roughly 2.6 million children live in a grandfamily. Despite the staying power of these non-traditional families, policy still fails to see them.

Gigi held a full-time job before taking in her grandkids. She had a car, too. But when her daughter began battling addiction, Gigi had to give up her job and return the car. In need of cash, she hesitated to apply for SNAP because it might trigger a home inspection—one her place, built for a single retiree rather than three children, might not pass. This is representative of how most grandparents become primary care givers. 

If parents could, they’d stay in the home. In Grandparents Raising Grandchildren in the United States: Changing Family Forms, Stagnant Social Policies, the authors write: 

“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.”

The abrupt reshuffling is compounded by legal blindness. Legally, grandfamilies aren’t recognized as families. Gigi’s daughter won’t sign over guardianship because she hopes to return. In the meantime, the children will be denied support. Employer-sponsored healthcare leaves retired caregivers unable to provide benefits, and even employed grandparents can’t claim grandchildren as dependents without legal standing. This isn’t the only misalignment.

Take welfare. Until retirement age, recipients generally must work or look for work to qualify. That can sound cold-hearted, but conditional payments are often associated with better outcomes. Grandparents, however, may not have the time, capacity, or flexibility to work. Lifetime benefit limits pose another barrier: some grandparents already used their allotment the first time they raised children and are now denied. Exemptions for grandfamilies are warranted in both cases.

To understand what predicts grandfamilies, I built a tree-based machine-learning model using county-level Census data. I tested 18 potential predictors—education, race, poverty, health, and more. Tree models rank variables by their relative importance; in my XGBoost model, poverty and race emerged as the strongest predictors. Research backs this up.

Poor, Black grandmothers continue to raise America. Almost 12% of Black children live in grandparent-headed homes, compared with about 7% of Hispanic children and 4% of non-Hispanic white children.These grandparents act as a safety net before kids fall into foster care. Though they’re simply doing what’s right, the economic value of their care has been estimated at $23–$39 billion annually (Bass & Caro, 1996)—savings that would otherwise fall to child services. Yet we don’t do right by them. When relatives take over care, they’re often paid less than non-family foster providers. Kinship care still isn’t compensated on equal terms.

Native communities are also disproportionately affected. Generations United, a nonprofit at the forefront of grandfamily advocacy, documents how American Indian and Alaska Native families fare worse on many measures. Native adults have the highest rates of serious psychological distress and major depressive episodes in the U.S.; 8% more Native people need treatment for alcohol or drug use than the national average. Unemployment is higher, too. 49% of Native households with children lack year-round parental employment, compared with 25% of white households.

Housing complexes designed specifically for grandfamilies have been a saving grace. Parenting has changed so much since their first go-round that a built-in community is invaluable. Generations United has helped spearhead the development of nineteen such complexes across the U.S. On their podcast, Anna, a resident of one complex in D.C., describes the experience: “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.”

The expansion of housing units is top of mind for Generations United. In their publication, A Place to Call Home, they call for seven policy proposals to expand access, investment, and education for grandfamilies. These policies are needed and we still need policies that will address why parents aren’t in the home. 

Grandfamilies reveal how we normalize problems and busy ourselves treating symptoms. Instead of making tuition affordable, we celebrate philanthropists who pay a class’s way. Instead of holding Purdue Pharma fully accountable, we applaud the expansion of methadone clinics. If we want fewer grandfamilies formed by crisis, we have to fix the upstream forces—poverty, addiction, unstable work—not just retrofit systems around the aftermath.