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ABSTRACT
Skipped generation families, consisting of grandparents and grandchildren with parents absent from the home, are frequently served in social work agencies. These families have unique multigenerational patterns and family structures that are important for service providers to recognize. This paper uses a multigenerational systems perspective to highlight the diversity among grandparent-headed households.
Twenty families who were previously part of a larger study of stress, well-being, and life satisfaction among caregiving grandparents constituted a follow-up case study involving videotaped family interviews one year after the first study. Three families representing the range of diversity among the twenty are described with accompanying genograms. Differences in structure, interactional processes, and links with prior generations are identified in each case. These examples reveal the strengths and vulnerabilities, as well as the diversity, of grandparent-headed families.
In recent years, "skipped generation" families, comprised of grandparents raising grandchildren with the parents absent from the home, have sparked the interest of clinicians and scholars in social work and other disciplines (Burnette, 1997; Burton, 1992; Jendrek, 1994b; PinsonMillburn, Fabian, Schlossberg, & Pyle, 1996; Minkler & Roe,1993; Woodworth,1996). The research that they have produced has focused on either grandparents (Burton, 1992; Jendrek, 1993, 1994a; Minkler, Roe, & Price, 1992) or grandchildren (Shore & Hayslip, 1994; Solomon & Marx, 1995). Few writers have viewed these families from a multigenerational systems perspective; nor have they attended to the variation among such families.
The purpose of this paper is to illuminate diverse family structures and multigenerational patterns among skipped generation families. This will be accomplished by closely examining three cases and their genograms from a qualitative study of twenty grandparent-headed families. In order to contextualize these families, literature on caregiving grandparents and variations in internal structure and interactional processes among families caring for children will be reviewed.
Literature Review Grandparents Raising Grandchildren
Although recent literature focuses on grandparents who are rearing grandchildren because their children are addicted to drugs (Burton, 1992; Minkler & Roe, 1993), other factors such as parental illness, child abuse, homelessness, teenage pregnancy, parental death, and incarceration precipitate the formation of these families (Dressel & Barnhill, 1994; Jendrek, 1994a; Woodworth, 1996). Parents with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, for example, often will relinquish child care responsibilities of their children to their own parents...