In Massachusetts, 2.6 percent of children are raised by grandparents. But on the Cape and Islands, the rate is almost four times higher, at 10 percent.
That's according to the Provincetown Independent.
CAI's Gilda Geist spoke with news editor Paul Benson to learn more.
Gilda Geist Why are so many more Cape and Islands kids raised by grandparents compared to their counterparts across the rest of the state?
Paul Benson A lot of the difference has to do with just the underlying housing situation, right? The population of Cape Cod is older. Families in their 30s and 40s have not been able to buy real estate here in some places for 10 or 15 years. So you do just have fewer people in the age bracket that are raising kids. But obviously this is connected, in many cases, to the opioid epidemic, which was really big, especially 10 years ago. You had a lot of parents who either died in overdoses or sort of lost their capacity to raise their kids and were losing custody of their children at six months, eight months—really early in their lives. These were people who were really struggling in a variety of ways. So you have parents who are giving up custody to their kids when the grandparents raising them are in their late 50s, early 60s—sometimes in their late 60s or early 70s—and just finding themselves totally starting over and raising a new generation of toddlers. [It's] really a difficult situation for these grandparents to suddenly encounter.
GG What are some of the unique challenges that grandparents face when raising their grandchildren?
PB There were several that they talked about. One, of course, is financial. You've been planning for your retirement, but you haven't been planning—especially for the cost of college—but all of the other many, many costs of raising a kid. That's something that came up over and over again in these interviews, that it's just difficult to find yourself in that position of suddenly [having] these expenditures. Another was social. Your peer group is retiring or retired, enjoying hobbies, inviting each other to craft days or cocktail parties, and you're just not in a position to join the friend group that you had been aging with when you're suddenly at soccer games and hockey games or scrambling for a babysitter to even go out and see your friends for a birthday party. So people talked about being at a real significant and increasing distance from their normal support network, the people that they'd been close to for decades, because the paths of their lives just suddenly took this left turn. There's a third challenge, which is a lot of times the parents are surviving. They may be in and out of rehab, or they may be going through a recovery program. So you're navigating the relationship between this grandchild you're raising and their surviving parent who has a lot of instability. And that can just be a really ongoing struggle and source of emotional difficulty and tension and trying to communicate to the grandchild why mommy is here this weekend but she can't come see you next weekend. People talked about how draining and how that can actually be the most difficult part. The ordinary child rearing can be a real joy, but navigating the treacherous waters of this relationship that has instability in it is concerning.
GG The headline for this story was "The Trials and Joys of Raising One's Grandchildren." So let's take a minute to talk about the joys. What did the reporter, Sonya Carson, find?
PB Every family that she spoke to—and she spoke to six—were all also emphasizing the completely unexpected, late-in-life joy and real sense of meaning that came from raising these children who are beautiful and perfect and special and deserving of love. And everyone wanted to talk about [how] as difficult as all this is, it's confusing because you also wouldn't trade it for anything because it's so profoundly meaningful to be making a difference in this grandchild's life. So there's just a lot of bittersweet complexity to the experience these families are having because as difficult and as hard as it is for people to relate to them and as hard as it can be to find friends out on the soccer field where all the other parents are 25 years younger, it also is a beautiful struggle that they're going through and they wanted to emphasize the beauty as well.
