COVER STORY : The Grandparent Trap : More Find Themselves Raising a Second Family

It was finally Madeline Trice’s time to kick back and enjoy her retirement years.

For eight years, she had cared for her ailing mother, who died in 1989. A few months later, she had leg surgery. After a three-month recovery, Trice could finally plan those Caribbean cruises and trips to Canada and Alaska with her husband, Tom.

But now, three years later, the Athens resident is raising her 5-year-old great-grandson because his mother is a drug addict. The farthest the 72-year-old retired nurse has gone is to the Circus Circus Hotel in Las Vegas with the youngster in tow.

With heartbreaking frequency, growing numbers of grandparents--and great-grandparents--are being thrust back into parenthood, left to care for youngsters because of a parent’s substance abuse, incarceration, poverty, death or abandonment of a child.

Although these problems hit all ethnic and racial communities, their effects are perhaps felt most strongly among African-American grandmothers.

Nationwide, 12% of African-American children live with their grandparents, compared to 6% of Latino children and 3% of Anglo children, according to 1990 U.S. Census figures. Less than 1% of Asian-American children live with grandparents, although social service workers suspect that figure may be artificially low because of underreporting.

The numbers are more extreme in Los Angeles County, where 58% of the children placed with relatives--in most cases, grandparents--are African-American, 24% are Latino and 17% are Anglo, according to the county Department of Children’s Services. (No breakdown is available for Asian-Americans.)

In Central Los Angeles, the burden has fallen especially hard on African-American grandmothers. According to county officials, about 85% of the grandparents involved in support groups for relatives raising children or receiving assistance from the Department of Children’s Services are African-American.

They are women like Mary Davison, 57, who has been a surrogate parent to three children since 1989 because of their mother’s drug addiction. Although Davison’s son fathered only one of the children, Davison agreed to raise all three.

There is also Lois Freeman, who at 49 is raising two of her daughter’s five children while the 26-year-old mother is in alcoholism-recovery treatment. The other two children live with Freeman’s 69-year-old mother, Sally Howlett, of Watts. The youngest child is with his mother at a rehabilitation center.

Many African-American grandmothers who have taken on the burden of caring for their grandchildren feel obliged to preserve their families and save the children from being placed with non-relatives and entangled in the foster-care system.

“Maybe it’s the black family culture from the South,” said Ann Miller, 68, a grandmother and member of the Assn. of African-American Grandmothers. “You step in and you try to keep your child within the family instead of being placed (in a foster home). This is customary and something we do willingly.”

In the African-American community, grandparents caring for grandchildren in extended families is not new or unusual--they have been doing so for centuries, as far back as the early days of slavery.

What has changed in the last 10 years is the absenteeism of parents stemming from increased substance abuse and a rise in teen-age pregnancies, said Lenora Poe of Oakland, a psychologist and author of “Black Grandparents As Parents.”

Most of the black grandparents who rear the children are women, most of whom are widows or had been single mothers, said Poe. Even in two-grandparent households, the women generally are the primary caretakers, she said.

Charlotte Martin willingly cared for her daughter Gail’s first child in 1973 to relieve the teen-age mother of the burden. A single mother who raised nine children in Jordan Downs in the 1950s and ‘60s, Martin hoped her daughter would finish high school and find a job.

Instead, by 1984, Gail had five children and a cocaine addiction. Two years later, all five children had ended up in Martin’s home, where two of her sons also lived.

Several of Martin’s other children chide her for what she is doing.

“They suggest I put (the grandchildren) in a foster home, but I don’t want to do that. Maybe they might be better off there, but I can’t do that,” said Martin, who has indefinitely postponed her retirement from the Watts YWCA, where she has worked for 18 years.

Asked why she wouldn’t place the children in foster care, a scowl transformed Martin’s face as if the answer was all too obvious. “Because they’re family.”

That commitment led Martin to take money she inherited from her mother to buy a house in 1988 so that her grandchildren--particularly her two grandsons--would not have to live in the projects. “I did that because of them. I didn’t want to buy the house,” she said.

What Martin wanted to do was take the money, move into a senior citizen apartment, buy a new car and some new clothes. It has been nearly a decade since she has bought herself a new dress or a pair of shoes.

“There’s a certain way I’d like to dress and I can’t, and that bugs me,” Martin said, patting down her graying hair with her hand. “And it’s not like clothes are important, but whenever I get some extra money it goes to buy them clothes or shoes.

“I had to deny myself that and you get angry. You get very angry at being put in this situation by your children, and then guilty that you feel that way because they’re your children.”

Between her job, volunteering in the community, PTA meetings at her grandchildren’s schools, support-group meetings with other grandmothers and trying to make ends meet to raise the children, Martin is worn out. The years of caring for all her grandchildren have taken their toll on Martin who suffered a mild stroke in 1990 and looks older than her 61 years.

Her daughter has been in and out of jail three times in the past few years. Now she lives on the streets, occasionally coming to visit for months at a time, confusing and upsetting her children when she leaves. In April, Gail’s 17-year-old daughter had a baby, so Martin now has a great-grandchild to look after.

“I just feel like I’m in a situation I cannot get out of,” Martin said. “I feel like I’m in a dark hole. I love them, but it just becomes too much.”

Anger and guilt are common among grandparents raising second and third families, said Charlotte Herzfeld, administrator of the West Coast Children’s Center in Oakland.

So is the embarrassment. Somehow they feel they have messed up in raising their own children and are ashamed that these problems exist, said Herzfeld, whose organization has run a grandparent training and support program since 1990.

Martin turned to a similar group to cope with her burdens and relearn some parenting skills. She joined the Assn. of African-American Grandmothers and its grandparent training group, both established by Lois Walters, a program specialist at the county Department of Health Services’ TB Control Unit.

There is a small but growing number of support groups and programs for grandparents to share their experiences and frustrations, as well as learn new parenting skills.

Trice joined Grandparents As Parents in Long Beach two years ago and attends meetings weekly. Martin, Freeman, Davison and Miller are among a group of women who graduated from Walters’ training program and have formed their own chapter of the national grandmothers association.

Freeman also has attended information sessions started in January by the Department of Children’s Services as part of its new Grandparent/Kinship Care program.

“They feel lost. They have these children to care for, they look around and they feel like there’s nothing there. And the things that are available are hard to find sometimes,” said Luvirda Carter, director of the Grandparent/Kinship Care Program.

In a small room at the children’s services office in Vernon, about 80 grandparents recently listened to Carter explain various services available to them. Afterward, the grandparents shared their experiences.

Some talked about saving their grandchildren from abusive parents or from parents who spent federal aid intended for the children on drugs. Others recounted incidents of emotionally disturbed children in need of counseling, and several grandparents bashfully asked about counseling for themselves.

All the while, Freeman sat in the front row with her mother and nodded at all the comments. Then she had her chance to speak.

“With all of its services, the county should have something to help grandmothers, but we’re at the bottom rung,” she snapped at Carter.

Then Freeman turned to the grandparents. “We will persevere,” she called out to them, asking them to repeat after her. “We will persevere.”

Later, in an interview, she said it is always a struggle.

“You give up part of your life and hope that someday you’ll get it back,” Freeman said. “But I look at the children and I see my daughter trying and I have to believe that things will get better.”

The discussions at such support groups reveal the common problems facing grandparents raising grandchildren: rearing children on fixed budgets, interference from biological parents, limited assistance from the child welfare system, relearning parenting skills and feeling deprived of their own lives.

Said Trice: “This is different than when I was raising my son. The times are different; the problems are different. From one thing to another I’ve just been trying to cope and understand.”

A neighbor of Trice’s granddaughter called her from Tacoma, Wash., in 1990 to tell Trice she should come get her great-grandson, Miguel Pimentel. It was the second time Trice had to take a child from her granddaughter, Willetta Pimentel, 26, who has had drug problems since the early 1980s. In 1985, Trice and Willetta’s mother gained joint custody of Miguel’s older sister, Amber Pimentel, now 7.

Trice’s husband, who is in poor health, can only offer limited help with the child-rearing. Trice says her biggest hardship is trying to maintain the physical and emotional stamina to deal with Miguel, who still worries about being abandoned. For the first year after Miguel arrived, he slept with Trice. He would often ask her if she went away at night when he was asleep. At his day-care center, he would fall asleep by the door waiting for her to pick him up.

“It’s hard for me to even imagine what he went through when his mother would leave him for days at a time,” Trice said softly through tears. “It’s really heartbreaking to think you have a relative out there who’s controlled by these drugs and those are more important than caring for their babies.”

Money looms as a constant worry for most of those raising their children’s children. Many go it alone, forgoing retirement or using money from their pensions or Social Security checks. Others, like Davison, rely on government assistance that, because of a federal law, is about 5% less than money given to non-relative foster parents.

Davison receives $464 a month to help care for her 13-year-old granddaughter, Stephanie. She also works as a cafeteria worker with the Compton Unified School District.

Davison and others believe the county should provide more help for grandparents raising second and third families. “I’m not asking for a handout, but this is an extra burden that I wasn’t prepared for, and I’m asking for help,” Davison said.

In the meantime, most grandmothers find their strength in leaning on each other.

“I don’t want to despair even though it’s rough sometimes,” said Freeman. “I just want these children to be whole individuals and good people. But I want this chain of raising children like this to end with me.”

On the Cover

Madeline Trice dries off her great-grandson, Miguel, after giving him a bath before dinner. The 72-year-old Athens resident is raising the boy because his mother is a drug addict.

Trice says her biggest hardship is trying to maintain the physical and emotional stamina to deal with Miguel. “It’s hard for me to even imagine what he went through when his mother would leave him for days at a time,” she says.