Headline, December30, 2013

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SILVER-HAI​RED SAFETY NET'''

President Barack Obama was raised by his grandparents for part of his childhood. He remembers his grandmother as being ''tough as nails''.

Clarence Thomas, a Supreme Court Judge, was raised by his grandparents because his mother could not make ends meet. He called his grandfather  ''the greatest man I have ever known''.

Grandparents have always reared children when need arose. Most have done it well. A few have done it badly  -the late comedian Richard Pryor was raised by his grandmother in a brothel she owned, was constantly beaten.

What is new is that, as the nuclear family frays, grandparents are taking more and more of the strain. Of the 75m children in America, 5.5m live in households headed by grandparents, a number that has risen by almost a million since 2005, according to the Census bureau.

Beware stereotypes, Child-rearing grandparents are disproportionately black, but in absolute terms most are white, live above the poverty line and own their own homes.

When a parent loses a job or cannot pay the mortgage, many families move in with grandma. Sometimes , however, the parents have disappeared : an estimated 900,000 children are being raised solely by grandparents.

 Pemberton Park, an apartment complex in Kansas city, Missouri, caters to such families. The hush of the retirement home hangs over its brightly lit corridors and snail-slow lifts. Yet there are signs of youth everywhere.

Girl Scout notices in the activity room, pop-star posters on apartment walls. Local donors have dropped off food to feed growing bodies: sacks of apples, pallets of yogurts, gallons of fruit juice.

There is a computer lab, a children's library and, outside, a playground, regularly patrolled to keep drug-dealers away. The complex has a part-time social worker, charged with everything from mediating school disputes to overseeing a sexual-abstinence programme for teenagers.

Pemberton Park is purpose-built for grandparents, raising youngsters in so called  ''skipped generation'' families. Its publicly subsidised apartments are reserved for those over 55 or under 21.

Like most retirement homes it is a matriarchy : of its 36 households, all but three are headed by women. The complex opened in 2011, joining about a dozen similar projects across America, from the Bronx to Arizona. More are expected.

Some of the observed rise in grandparent-headed families is simply down to their becoming more visible, as informal arrangements of the past clash with modern red tape, notably when registering children at school or seeking medical treatment.

But something is happening, and on a scale that is drawing policy responses. It is not just that public-housing authorities are building playgrounds outside retirement homes. 

To avoid long custody cases, more states are creating guardianship laws, allowing grandparents to register children with schools or doctors, without formally severing ties with missing or hostile parents.  

This Great and Honour Post continues:

With most respectful dedication to all the grandparents of the world. See Ya all on !WOW! the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

''' Taking The Great Road '''

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless