The Grandmothers Who Held It Together — And What We Owe Them Now

She is fifty-four years old. She has been working since she was seventeen. She raised her own children — three of them — mostly alone, because their father left before the youngest could walk, and she did not have the luxury of collapsing, because three small people needed to eat and be clothed and be sent to school every morning whether their mother had slept the night before or not. She worked double shifts. She prayed on Sundays. She held it together with a ferocity that no one called heroic at the time because it was simply expected — expected of her by her family, her church, her community, and a society that had decided long ago that Black women were built for endurance and did not require the same tenderness it extended to others. And now, at fifty-four, when she should be thinking about her retirement, about her health, about the things she deferred for thirty years so that her children could survive, she is raising her grandchildren. Because her daughter had a baby at nineteen and another at twenty-one, and the father — the fathers — are gone, and her daughter is gone too, not dead but absent, lost to addiction or incarceration or simply the inability to carry a weight she was never prepared to bear. And so the grandmother picks it up. Again. Because someone has to.

This is not a hypothetical. This is a demographic reality, and the numbers behind it are as relentless as the women they describe.

The Data on Grandmothers Raising Grandchildren

The United States Census Bureau reports that approximately 2.7 million grandparents are the primary caregivers for their grandchildren in the United States. Black grandparents are disproportionately represented in this number: Black children are significantly more likely than white or Hispanic children to be living in grandparent-headed households. The American Community Survey data shows that in some Black-majority counties, the rate of grandparent-headed households exceeds 15% of all households with children — a figure so far outside the historical norm that it represents not an adjustment but a structural collapse of the expected generational order.

And these grandparents are not elderly, not in the way the word suggests. The Census data shows that 47% of Black grandparent caregivers are under the age of 60. They are not retirees who have completed their careers and have the leisure to enjoy a second round of parenting. They are mid-career women — and they are overwhelmingly women — who are being pulled out of the workforce, or forced to reduce their hours, or compelled to decline promotions and professional opportunities, because their own children have failed to raise the next generation and there is no one else.

The Financial Devastation

AARP’s research on grandparent caregivers has documented the financial toll with precision that should provoke outrage. Grandparent caregivers spend an average of $12,000 per year out of pocket on their grandchildren — on food, clothing, school supplies, medical expenses, childcare, and the hundred other costs that accompany raising a child. For grandparents who are already on fixed incomes or approaching retirement with inadequate savings, this expenditure is not merely a hardship. It is a financial catastrophe. It diverts money from their own retirement accounts, from their own medical care, from the modest financial security they spent decades building.

The Brookings Institution has documented what happens to retirement savings when a grandparent assumes primary caregiving responsibility: they spend down their assets at rates that leave them economically vulnerable in their seventies and eighties. A woman who had $80,000 saved for retirement at age 55 and then assumed custody of two grandchildren will, on average, have less than half that amount by the time the children are grown. She will enter her own old age with inadequate resources, having spent her savings not on her own needs but on the needs of children who should have been supported by their own parents. She will depend on Social Security, Medicaid, and the charity of whatever family members remain — if they remain — because she gave everything she had to a generation that did not give back.

“She is not elderly. She is fifty-four. She should be thinking about retirement. Instead she is raising her grandchildren because their parents simply… left. And she does it because someone has to, and she always has, and no one has ever thought to ask whether she can.”

The Health Cost

The research on the health consequences of custodial grandparenting is unambiguous and devastating. Bert Hayslip Jr. and Christine Kaminski, in their comprehensive review of the literature, documented that custodial grandparents experience significantly higher rates of depression, anxiety, insomnia, chronic pain, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease compared to non-custodial grandparents of the same age and socioeconomic status. The stress of raising grandchildren — a stress compounded by the grief of watching one’s own child fail, by the financial strain, by the physical demands of caring for young children at an age when the body is already beginning its decline — is not merely an emotional burden. It is a physiological one, and it is measured in cortisol levels, in inflammatory markers, in blood pressure readings, and ultimately in years of life lost.

Carol Musil and her colleagues at Case Western Reserve University conducted longitudinal research tracking the health trajectories of custodial grandmothers and found that the physical and mental health declines associated with assuming primary caregiving responsibility were measurable within the first year and progressive over time. These women were not just tired. They were being made sick by the act of holding together what their children had broken. Their sacrifice was literal: they were giving years off their own lives so that their grandchildren would not be swallowed by the foster care system or the streets.

The Role That Was Never Meant for One Person

In the absence of fathers — and often mothers — the grandmother becomes everything. She is parent, provider, disciplinarian, counselor, homework helper, school advocate, medical decision-maker, and spiritual foundation. She navigates the foster care system, the school system, the healthcare system, and the legal system — often simultaneously, often without a lawyer, often without anyone explaining her rights or the rights of the children in her care. She manages behavioral problems rooted in the trauma of parental abandonment. She manages her own grief — the grief of watching her child become the kind of parent who leaves — while presenting a stable face to grandchildren who cannot afford to see her break.

This is a role that was never designed for one person. The two-parent household distributes the labor of raising children across two adults, with the support of extended family, community institutions, and social networks. The grandmother raising grandchildren alone is performing a task that was designed for an entire system, and she is performing it without the resources, the energy, or the years that the task demands. She is doing it because the system failed, because the parents failed, because the community failed, and because she is the last line of defense between those children and an outcome that everyone knows but no one wants to name: the foster care system, the juvenile justice system, or the street.

The Historical Precedent — and Why This Time Is Different

The Black grandmother as structural foundation is not new. During slavery, grandmothers raised children whose parents had been sold to other plantations — a forced separation that was one of slavery’s most calculated cruelties. During the Great Migration, grandmothers in the South raised children while their parents established themselves in Northern cities, sending money home until they could send for the children. During the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, grandmothers raised the children of addicted parents, stepping into a breach that the government and the community could not or would not fill.

But there is a critical distinction between the historical precedent and the current crisis, and the failure to make this distinction is a failure of honesty that this conversation cannot afford. When enslaved grandmothers raised children whose parents had been sold, the parents did not choose to leave. When Great Migration grandmothers raised children while parents established themselves up North, the arrangement was temporary, intentional, and part of a plan for family reunification. The forced separations of slavery and the strategic separations of migration were both responses to circumstances beyond the family’s control.

The modern grandmother raising grandchildren is, in the majority of documented cases, raising children whose parents chose to leave. The father is not incarcerated or deployed or working in another city to send money home. He is simply absent — present at conception and gone before the first birthday. The mother is not enslaved or migrating to build a better life for her children. She is absent by choice, by addiction, by incapacity, or by the accumulated weight of an upbringing that never taught her how to parent because her own parents never demonstrated it. This is not the same. The historical grandmother was a hero responding to imposed tragedy. The modern grandmother is a hero responding to voluntary abandonment, and the distinction matters because the solution to imposed tragedy is to fight the imposer, while the solution to voluntary abandonment is to hold the absent accountable.

The Debt That Is Owed

Let me name the debt plainly, because the euphemisms have cost too much and the sentimentality has allowed too many people to avoid what they owe. Every adult who has deposited a child with a grandmother and walked away owes that grandmother a debt that cannot be measured in money alone — though the money would be a start. You owe her the $12,000 a year she spends on your child. You owe her the career advancement she sacrificed. You owe her the retirement savings she spent down. You owe her the health she lost — the years shaved off her life by the stress and the labor and the grief of watching you fail to do what every animal on earth does instinctively, which is to care for its young.

You owe her the sleep she lost. The social life she surrendered. The trips she will never take, the hobbies she will never pursue, the quiet years she earned and will never receive. You owe her an explanation — not the explanations you have rehearsed, not the litany of circumstances and hardships and reasons why you could not, but the honest explanation, the one that sits at the bottom of every excuse: you left because it was hard, and she stayed because leaving was not something she knew how to do.

Naming this debt is not disrespect. It is the opposite. It is the refusal to allow the admiration we feel for grandmothers to substitute for the accountability we owe the parents who made their sacrifice necessary. We celebrate grandmothers in sermons, in poems, in social media posts that rack up thousands of likes. And the celebration, however sincere, serves a secondary function that we do not acknowledge: it normalizes the arrangement. It makes the grandmother-as-parent seem like a natural feature of Black family life rather than what it actually is — an emergency response to a generational failure of parental responsibility.

“We celebrate grandmothers in sermons and on social media. And the celebration, however sincere, normalizes the arrangement. It makes the grandmother-as-parent seem natural rather than what it is: an emergency response to a generational failure.”

What Grandmothers Need — and What They Deserve

The policy infrastructure for supporting grandparent caregivers exists, but it is fragmented, underfunded, and poorly publicized. The Supporting Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Act, signed into law in 2018, established a federal advisory council to identify and disseminate resources for grandparent caregivers. Kinship care policies in some states provide financial assistance to grandparents who take in grandchildren — though the payments are typically a fraction of what foster parents receive for non-related children, an inequity so absurd that it seems designed to punish family loyalty. Respite care programs, which give custodial grandparents temporary relief from caregiving duties, exist in some communities and are oversubscribed in all of them.

These programs should be expanded. Kinship care payments should be equalized with foster care payments. Respite care should be available in every community. Legal aid for grandparents navigating custody proceedings should be funded at levels that match the need. Health insurance and mental health services for custodial grandparents should be treated as a public health priority, because the women who are holding Black families together cannot continue to do so if they are allowed to break down from the weight of it.

But policy is not enough, and it is not the point. The point is the conversation that must happen within Black families — not the conversation about how strong Black grandmothers are, which everyone already agrees on, but the conversation about why they have to be. The conversation that asks the absent father where he is. The conversation that asks the absent mother what happened. The conversation that holds both of them to a standard that Black grandmothers met every single day, at greater cost and with fewer resources, without excuses and without applause.

The Repentance

I end with the word deliberately, because it is the right one. Not gratitude, which we already feel. Not admiration, which we already express. Not even support, which we should provide but which addresses the symptom and not the cause. Repentance. The acknowledgment that something was done wrong, by specific people, with specific consequences, and that the wrong must be named before it can be made right.

The grandmothers of Black America are owed repentance by the children who abandoned their children to them. They are owed repentance by the men who fathered those children and disappeared. They are owed repentance by the culture that made fatherhood optional and motherhood outsourceable. They are owed repentance by the community that celebrates their strength in sermons on Sunday and expects them to deploy it again on Monday morning, as though endurance is a bottomless resource and the women who provide it are not human beings with limited years and failing bodies and dreams of their own that died on the day their grandchild showed up on their doorstep with a garbage bag full of clothes and a look in their eyes that said everything about what had been done to them.

Every grandmother raising a grandchild represents a failure. Not her failure — she is the only person in the story who did not fail. The failure belongs to the parents who left, to the fathers who were never there, to the systems that did not intervene, and to the community that has made a tradition of relying on women who have already given more than anyone should be asked to give. She deserves more than our admiration. She deserves our repentance. She deserves the decision, made by the generation that failed her, that the cycle stops — that the children she raised will raise their own children, that the men who father the next generation’s babies will stay and do the work, and that no more grandmothers will have to sacrifice their old age because their children refused to enter adulthood.

That is what she is owed. And every year that the debt goes unpaid, another grandmother picks up the weight. And another part of her gives way. And we call it strength, because we do not have the courage to call it what it is: the price one generation pays for another generation’s failure to become what it was supposed to be.