This yearlong program for grandparents raising children strengthens communities for decades

Caption

Julia Melton hugs her grandaughter Janiah-Joy.

Credit: Contributed family photo

Julia Melton unofficially adopted her 2-month-old granddaughter Janiah-Joy Melton in 2010 because her son and his girlfriend couldn’t effectively care for their baby.

"I got legal guardianship when she was getting ready to go to kindergarten, because that was the only way I could register her in school," Melton said. 

In Georgia, 93,000 grandparents are raising almost 125,000 grandchildren, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2023 American Community Survey. In Clayton, Fulton and DeKalb counties alone, almost 16,000 grandparents are raising 26,000 grandchildren.

Susan Kelley founded Project Healthy Grandparents in 1995 as a community service and research study that has served nearly 3,800 grandparents and grandchildren in those metro Atlanta counties.

The PHG program is now housed in the Mark Chaffin Centers for Healthy Development at Georgia State University’s School of Public Health and its Center for Leadership in Disability, and serves about 35 to 40 families every year.

To be eligible, the parents must be absent from the home.

The intensive program supports grandparents living at or below the poverty level includes wraparound services that strengthen family ties to the community, PHG director and assistant professor Patricia Lawrence said.

Melton found out about the program a few years ago from a neighbor.

"I signed up with them around October of that year, and Christmas was coming, so the first big help I got was the Christmas gifts," she said. "That Christmas was like one of the best Christmases my granddaughter had, because just about everything she had on her list was provided — and a lot of what I had on my list was provided as well."

In addition to charity, both Meltons gained access to health care.

"I had a nurse to come out to see about me, because I had COVID that year and I was still kind of recuperating when I joined Project Healthy Grandparents," Melton said.  

Many of the grandparents served in the program have chronic problems with hypertension, diabetes, obesity and mental health, Lawrence said.

Janiah-Joy Melton is now 15 and doing well in school, but that might not have been the case without help.

Melton’s granddaughter processed academic information slowly, so she entered an Individual Education Program in elementary school, where she worked in smaller groups and had extra time on assignments and tests.

With funding to address mental health challenges, PHG paid a provider specifically for grandparents without health insurance coverage who are raising their grandchildren. 

"A lot of these families experience a lot of intergenerational trauma," Lawrence said.

Lawrence interviewed grandparents who were served by the one-year intervention between five and 10 years ago about long-term benefits to having been in this program.

"They all said, 'I learned so much in that one year that carried me through, and the developmental screening that you did on my grandchild really made a big difference in their educational success,'" Lawrence said.

Chris Fulton was one of the first grandchildren to participate in the project back in 1996.

His 24-year-old mother struggled with addiction and moved him and his two younger siblings from Chicago to Stone Mountain.

"My mom was just in the streets, you know what I mean?" Fulton said. "My grandmother was like, 'OK well, I'm not going to let them go to DFACS custody; bring them over here.'"

Fulton was the oldest at 6, with a 5-year-old brother and 2-year-old sister who had never spoken, and no one knew why.

Grandma was in her mid-40s, but chronic fatigue syndrome and multiple sclerosis forced her into early retirement and onto disability that paid about $2,000 a month. 

The access to community support and therapy for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder changed the trajectory of Fulton’s life.

Now 36, Fulton earned a degree at Georgia State University and is the director of a health care company in New York. 

He joined PHG’s advisory board about three years ago.

"The project gave me was a sense of who I could, who I had the potential to be, you know, and showed me a different world," Fulton said.

Though the population of grandparents acting as primary caregivers to their grandchildren is shrinking in size overall, the number of grandparent caregivers age 60 and older is increasing, according to a University of Pittsburg study that data from the 2009-2021 U.S. Census American Community Survey.

The so-called "sandwich generation" is juggling caregiving responsibilities for aging parents and children. In Georgia, 1 in 5 adults are caregivers, 60% of whom are women, and 20% are over age 65, according to the state Department of Public Health. 

A third of caregivers have provided at least 20 hours of care per week and 80% manage household tasks. The care they provide is around the clock to maintain quality of life, independence, and physical and social well-being for their loved ones.  

So, projects like this one still need funding, Lawrence said.

In the beginning, Georgia State University provided a significant amount of funding, but as those funds dwindle, and state and federal funds are cut, foundation and individual donor support is keeping PHG going.

In the past year, one of their state contracts was cut by 40%, which is a significant amount of money, Lawrence said, noting that she is applying for a research grant to see if a shorter program is as effective and would allow them to support more families.

This story was written with the support of a journalism fellowship from The Gerontological Society of America, The Journalists Network on Generations and The Silver Century Foundation.