Grandmother Deborah St. Antoine of Gurnee, Ill., was so consumed with getting immediate medical care for the seizures, fevers, and vomiting experienced by the three children dropped in her lap that she never stopped to think about the questions they would ask when she arrived at the acute care facility.

Where are the parents? Are you the legal guardian? Where are your medical consent forms giving you decision-making authority? Are the children insured? Where did these bruises come from, anyway?

Nearly a thousand grandparents, grandkids, and supporters converged on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol for a GrandRally to raise the visibility of the challenges that beset intergenerational families. According to the 2000 Census, 4 million American children are being raised by their grandparents, many of whom struggle to afford legal fees, respite care, medical bills, and adequate housing.

St. Antoine thinks back on the day her son and his girlfriend were evicted from their living quarters in a haze of drugs, weapons possession, and domestic violence allegations—and the day her two grandchildren and their half-sister (now 2, 3, and 8 years old) suddenly became her responsibility. The medical and legal problems quickly mounted: The kids weren’t healthy, the grandparents weren’t their legal guardians, and the state wouldn’t consider even a dollop of help until a formal legal relationship could be established. Every step of the process cost money that she and her husband, Bob, simply did not have.

“When these children land on your doorstep, you are in a whirlpool,” says Deborah, 48. “You feel the world for these children. You open the door, and you don’t know what to do, but you want to get them taken care of. I can’t tell you all the things we’ve had to do. You’re stripped 
of everything you’ve worked for.”

Deborah soon left her job as a manager of a health food store to care for her grandchildren. Relying on Bob’s salary as an employee of a state developmental disability program, they bought the kids bedding, clothing, food, prescriptions, supplies and sought doctors, medical specialists, and counselors to help them get well. Out-of-pocket legal fees posed an even bigger financial strain. To authorize educational and medical decisions and provide the kids some stability, they needed to petition for guardianship, involving a complex set of documents, filings, and legal notices. For all of the needs of their new charges, they spent their savings and retirement funds, took out a home equity loan, maxed out their credit cards, sold their family heirlooms, borrowed from friends, and watched their credit rating nosedive.

One day, before a critical hearing, Deborah’s lawyer approached her with an unpaid legal bill of more than $8,000. She and her husband had already scraped together thousands, but the attorney wanted to know how they planned to pay the balance. “He said, ‘This is costing me. How are you going to pay for this?’” remembers Deborah, who then explains why she did what she did next. “Your nerves are frazzled. We had nothing. I had a few coins for the parking meter in my pocket. I thought, ‘What have I got? What have I got?’ I looked down and saw my wedding rings.” She pulled off the two gold bands—one with an emerald-and-diamond setting—held them out, and watched the lawyer slip them into his jacket pocket. “They mean a lot to me, spiritually, but they are nothing compared to the children,” Deborah says. “It was ‘do or die’ for the kids.”

Sadly, the St. Antoines are not alone. About half of the more than 2.3 million grandparents serving as primary caregivers to grandchildren fall within 200 percent of the federal poverty threshold. For them, legally sanctioning their role in raising their grandkids often costs money that is beyond their means or strips away their only financial security. Even those with a lawyer encounter myriad legal obstacles in trying to become legal guardians or adoptive parents. Too often, the law treats them as second-class citizens with no more rights than a stranger when it comes to their grandchildren.

A majority of grandparents raising grandchildren do so informally without any legal authority, says Mary Bissell, a staff attorney with the Children’s Defense Fund. This is due, in part, to a lack of flexibility in the law for these new family configurations, which sometimes requires grandparents to make painful complaints against their own children. For many others, however, legal assistance is simply unavailable. Without legal representation, grandparents can find themselves sinking in a bureaucratic mire, unable to secure services for their grandchildren and unable to protect them from inappropriate intrusions by social services agencies or dysfunctional parents.

“I have spoken to hundreds of grandparents, and everybody says, ‘What about the legal services?’” Bissell says. “Legal authority offers the keys to the kingdom. Without it, grandparents [raising grandchildren] don’t have access to the same services as parents.”

Many grandparents say their fierce determination to inject stability into the often traumatic and chaotic lives of grandchildren-at-risk is underappreciated. The GrandRally was their plea for help. The first step for many is securing legal representation, without which grandparents can find themselves unable to protect their grandchildren and unable to access crucial government services.

According to 2000 U.S. Census figures, four million children 18 and under are in the primary care of grandparents, while another two million children live with other relatives. From 1990 to 1998, the number of children raised solely by grandparents or other family members grew by more than fifty percent. The biological parents exit the picture for a number of reasons, including illness, incarceration, unemployment, immaturity, mental disability, HIV-AIDS, neglect, drug and alcohol addiction, and death.

To draw attention to the need for better laws to protect these grand families, nearly a thousand grandparents (and supporters) trekked to Washington, D.C., this fall for the first-ever GrandRally. Many grandparents say their fierce determination to inject stability into the often traumatic and chaotic lives of grandchildren-at-risk is underappreciated by the system. The GrandRally was their plea for help.

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