TRIB TOTAL MEDIA SATURDAY, AUGUST 25, 2018 · 7
RAISING CHILDREN: TAKE 2
STOCK.ADOBE.COM
There can be many concerns that stretch beyond the financial for grandparents raising their grandkids. How will they help with homework? How will they keep children safe in a
technologically advanced world? How will they find the energy required to keep up with young children who are always on the go?
for kids, including summer camps and
enrichment programs for teens, and other
services.
ASCI is also committed to helping fami-lies
reunite, and works with not only the
grandparents and children but also the
birth parents.
Jenkins’ grandchildren are now back
with their birth mother, although Jenkins
continues to play an active role in their
support and care and is still involved
with the grandparents’ support group she
joined through ASCI.
Although her church family and friends
were supportive, she said, she didn’t have
any contemporaries in the same situation
until she joined the group.
“It was like, OK, now you have to resur-face
your children skills, you pull them
back out from wherever they were laying
dormant and start to refocus on things like
watching Sesame Street,” she said.
“There were some other children’s pro-grams
I’d never heard of so I had to watch
them religiously. I was cut off from the
adult world for a season because my focus
was on the children and what their inter-ests
were and keeping them not only safe
but also healthy mentally because this can
be very traumatic for them.”
And for the grandparents … along with
the new responsibility of raising grand-children,
they might be grieving for their
own child or worrying for the adult child’s
safety and well-being.
Some might feel a sense of shame or
worry that they did something wrong as
parents.
Grandparents, like many caregivers, can
feel shame in the need to ask for help, said
Kurt Emmerling, DHS deputy director of
the Area Agency on Aging.
“All of us have about six months to a
year of applied effort and after that, your
emotional resources diminish and you
can start to experience frustration, which
sometimes can change to depression, sad-ness
and feelings of inadequacy,” he said.
“Some of those get channeled unfavorably.
“Sometimes the person isn’t as connect-ed
with discipline, or short of temper, or
something along those lines. Our program
does allow for talking about some of those
things, or at least linking them up with
resources who can help.”
Gamble-Petit said one of the first steps
a grandparent new to a full-time caregiv-ing
situation should do is get information
on the resources available to them, even if
they believe the child or children will soon
be back with their birth parents.
“We all want to believe the best, that the
child will go home if not immediately,
then in the near future, but people don’t
always take advantage of the resources
available to them and miss out on some
things,” she said.
“It’s important to take advantage and
utilize the resources available because it
helps the child have everything they need
in order to be successful. Families need to
know we’re there to help and that there’s
someone to help get them through these
processes.”
Jenkins also stressed the need for pa-tience,
especially at the beginning of the
process, among the advice she’d offer.
“One of the things I would say is they
need to pray, pray, pray, pray, pray, because
you feel like you’re in a desert storm is
a good way to describe it,” she said. “I
would say you have to have a lot of pa-tience
because things don’t happen over-night.
You just have to know there is light
at the end of the tunnel.
“If you can tap into a support group or
something like that, that’s extremely help-ful
because even if you don’t have re-sources
available to you, at least you have
someone to walk you through the process
and say, ‘It’s going to be OK; I’ve been
through this.’”