Doing What’s Right for the Baby: Parental Responses and Custodial Grandmothers’ Institutional Decision Making

Abstract

Recent changes in kinship care policy produce a range of care-types for grandparents raising their grandchildren, from informal kinship care to adoption. The unprecedented formalization of kinship care, expedited termination of parental rights, and conflict between parents and grandparents over the best interests of children require custodial grandparents to make determinations about care-type, termed "institutional decision making." Interview data collected from 50 black custodial grandmothers from Chicago are used to reveal how and why parental responses help explain variation in care-types. This article argues that institutional decisions enable custodial grandmothers to achieve family stability by offering them an opportunity to be a safety net of protection to grandchildren, to respond to a range of parental responses that emerge as they work to eradicate child welfare threats, and to navigate institutions. The present study shows that, as parental responses increase in uncertainty and noncompliance, care-types become more formalized.

Family Policy and Complex Contemporary Families: A Decade in Review and Implications for the Next Decade of Research and Policy Practice

“…To the extent that there is growing diversity in parental roles, especially for fathers, amidst high levels of family instability and complexity among low‐income families (Tach et al, ), current policies are largely inconsistent with the realities of complex contemporary American families. Similarly, in circumstances when grandparents must become custodial parents of their grandchildren, they face a safety net that offers minimal economic security due to both eligibility rules and program implementation (Pittman, , ).…”

Black celebrities, reproductive justice and queering family: an exploration

“…Further, some care arrangements may be required rather than desired. In a study on the role of Black grandmothers, despite limited economic and emotional resources, grandmothers took on the care of their grandchildren, often alongside their own child(ren) still at home, when the grandchildren’s parents were unable or unwilling to care for their children ( Pittman, 2014 ). Still, the attention to extended kin networks and the embracing of non-biological relations as families reflect what Ruha Benjamin argues has always been a necessity: ‘Running against the penchant towards social abandonment, black people have always had to construct their own afterlives through alternative family formations in the midst of crisis’ ( Benjamin, 2018: 49 ).…”

When Mamaw Becomes Mom: Social Capital and Kinship Family Formation amid the Rural Opioid Crisis

“…More recently, scholars have turned to consider such challenges in the context of the opioid crisis (Davis et al 2020;Dolbin-Macnab and O'Connell 2021). Much less is known about how caregivers understand and navigate the legal processes that formalize and regulate kinship care (Pittman 2014). I extend this line of research to consider how rural relatives are navigating the assumption of a primary caregiving role of a relative child-what I call kinship family formation-amid the opioid crisis.…”