Grandparents as Carers of Children with Disabilities

Facing the Challenges

Older adults caring for developmentally disabled children have special needs. Are you and your agency doing all you can to help?

Grandparents as Carers of Children with Disabilities: Facing the Challenges provides the first comprehensive picture of grandparents caring for children with developmental disabilities and their related requirements. Here you'll find information on the mental and physical health of these caregivers, highlighting their unique needs and the roles that agencies and advocates need to play in order to meet them. This unique volume will assist practitioners, administrators, and policymakers in including the needs of this group into planning and service delivery efforts.

Grandparents as Carers of Children with Disabilities: Facing the Challenges takes an incisive look at:

• characteristics of these carers and the children they care for

• children in kinship care and their special needs

• the effect of kinship foster care on caregiving grandmothers

• the approach of Latino grandparents to bringing up children with special needs

• the service needs and provision issues of grandparent carers

  In this book, here is some of what you'll find:

• data from a school-based comprehensive multigenerational program in East Harlem, New York City, which explores environmental stressors associated with children coming into kinship care, discussing the impact on grandparent caregivers, with a focus on health status and access to care

• correlates of self-reported depressive symptoms among urban Latino grandparent caregivers

• a survey of grandparents (mostly African American, mostly female) caring for children with developmental disabilities in New York City that focuses on health status, emotional state, use of formal and informal services, and general life situation

• helpful charts and tables that put the facts at your fingertips

• a demonstration project that used an intervention model to determine how a three-pronged approach using outreach, support groups, and case management could be used to aid grandparents caring for children with developmental delay or disabilities ... and much more!

  As editors McCallion and Janicki point out, ”Primary childcare is rapidly becoming a normative experience of grandparenting. Grandparent primary care is found among all ethnic groups, and across all socioeconomic levels of society. Concern over preserving the family often causes grandparents to assume responsibility in spite of their limited financial means or own health conditions.” Grandparents as Carers of Children with Disabilities will enable you to provide these courageous, loving people with the help they need to do this extraordinarily difficult and often thankless job.