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| Support group designed to help grandparents raising grandchildren |
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6/21/2019
By Tom Marshall
Senior Advocate writer
A support group was created earlier this year in Mt. Sterling to help grandparents raising grandchildren.
The Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Support Group meets monthly at NewSong Counseling Center, 29 N. Maysville St., next to city hall.
The next meeting is 6:30-8 p.m. tonight (Thursday). The topic will be child anxiety. Next month the group will meet Thursday, July 18, at the same time and location.
You can arrange child care for that meeting in advance by calling 497-0594 by July 15. It is too late to arrange childcare for tonight’s meeting, but the public is still welcome to attend.
Cathy Turner, founder, executive director and therapist at NewSong, said the free support group is more important than ever with so many grandparents now raising children.
Nationally, 42 percent of all grandparents living with grandchildren function as the primary caregivers, according to a study by the Center on Trauma and Children at the University of Kentucky called “Grandparents as Parents: Investigating the Health and Well-Being of Trauma-Exposed Families.”
Turner said the support group is designed to educate, support and provide resources to these grandparents.
“It brings us great joy to be able to work with this group of people who are so loving and so generous that they have opened their homes to relatives they want to love and want to help,” Turner said. “We want to come alongside them and support them, thank them and honor them.”
There are numerous reasons grandparents find themselves raising children.
Among them are children with a parent in jail, death of a parent, substance abuse, financial problems, military deployment, parent mental health issues, abandonment and parent illness.
A survey conducted as part of the UK study found that in eastern Kentucky 31.1 percent had a parent in jail and more than half, 57.3 percent, involved substance abuse issues.
The study identified a high rate of trauma among the Kentucky children receiving primary care from a grandparent. It also found that almost half of survey respondents identified caring for a grandchild with more than one trauma exposure.
Turner said the facilitators for the support group (therapists at NewSong) try to present grandparents with the parenting skills to help overcome the anxiety and fear that comes along with that trauma.
Through the support group, the grandparents can get the mental and emotional support, as well as the communications skills, to cope with these problems, Turner said.
She said one of the goals of the support group is to allow grandparents to be a nurturing presence for the often sad and angry children who have experienced the trauma of a lost home.
Those facilitators, Lissa Orme, Margaret Johnson and Rick Mattox, all provide varied skill sets and specialities that help the group, Turner said.
Administrative staff members Teresa Long and Keisha Curtis help organize the meetings and provide snacks, she said.
The study noted “a lack of awareness of or a deficit in specialized services to treat child traumatic stress and child abuse in many communities. Confidence in service providers to address the needs of children in care of their custodial caregivers is lacking in some areas.”
That’s why, Turner said, she, her staff and other community leaders felt it important to have a free support group to help these grandparents.
“We were determined to lead the way on this,” she said.
A third of the grandparents in the UK study reported parenting very young children (5 and under), who have had a caregiving disruption at a critical stage of development.
Turner said the support group tries to help grandparents navigate the age gaps and sense of loss that comes with becoming a guardian over children again later in life.
Over half of the respondents in eastern Kentucky are caring for children with special health or mental health needs, according to the study.
The study notes that many of these children had exposure to negligent caregiving, poor supervision and exposure to disinhibited and impulsive adults while in biological homes.
“This impacts current behavior and presents significant care giving challenges,” the study’s authors said. “For example, substance misuse/dependence by adult children is a primary reason for placement in the grandparent’s home.”
Turner said a number of the participants in the support group fit into this category. She estimates substance abuse factors into at least half of the cases of those involved with the support group.
Most importantly, Turner said the support group gives the grandparents a chance to network with people like themselves.
Together, she said, they gain the awareness, knowledge and skills to be better caregivers.
Each participant receives a Grandparent and Relative Caregiver Resource Guide that provides information on where to turn with questions about subjects like health resources, financial resources, nutrition, identification, legal assistance, education, child protection, emotional needs and advocacy.
For more information on the support group or related issues, you can call NewSong at 497-0594. You can learn more about NewSong at newsongcounseling.org.
NewSong also offers parenting programs for parents, grandparents and adoptive parents of infants, children and teens. Sessions are led by Mattox, a licensed marriage and family therapist.
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