Older adults caring for developmentally disabled children have special needs. Are you and your agency doing all you can to help? Grandparents as Carers of Children with Disabilities: Facing the Challenges provides the first comprehensive picture of grandparents caring for children with developmental disabilities and their related requirements. Here you'll find information on the mental and physical health of these caregivers, highlighting their unique needs and the roles that agencies and advocates need to play in order to meet them. This unique volume will assist practitioners, administrators, and policymakers in including the needs of this group into planning and service delivery efforts. Grandparents as Carers of Children with Disabilities: Facing the Challenges takes an incisive look at: characteristics of these carers and the children they care for children in kinship care and their special needs the effect of kinship foster care on caregiving grandmothers the approach of Latino grandparents to bringing up children with special needs the service needs and provision issues of grandparent carers In this book, here is some of what you'll find: data from a school-based comprehensive multigenerational program in East Harlem, New York City, which explores environmental stressors associated with children coming into kinship care, discussing the impact on grandparent caregivers, with a focus on health status and access to care correlates of self-reported depressive symptoms among urban Latino grandparent caregivers a survey of grandparents (mostly African American, mostly female) caring for children with developmental disabilities in New York City that focuses on health status, emotional state, use of formal and informal services, and general life situation helpful charts and tables that put the facts at your fingertips a demonstration project that used an intervention model to determine how a three-pronged approach using outreach, support groups, and case management could be used to aid grandparents caring for children with developmental delay or disabilities ... and much more! As editors McCallion and Janicki point out, ”Primary childcare is rapidly becoming a normative experience of grandparenting. Grandparent primary care is found among all ethnic groups, and across all socioeconomic levels of society. Concern over preserving the family often causes grandparents to assume responsibility in spite of their limited financial means or own health conditions.” Grandparents as Carers of Children with Disabilities will enable you to provide these courageous, loving people with the help they need to do this extraordinarily difficult and often thankless job.

This briefs offers a comprehensive view of the journey of grandparents of children with disabilities by employing a wide range of theoretical approaches such as intergenerational relationships, positive psychology, psychoanalytic views and models of stress. It presents a multidimensional view of grandparents, which begins with the general role of grandparents in the family and the transition to grandparenthood, as a major life event. The briefs moves on to discuss grandparents’ roles under unique circumstances such as illness or disability in the family and then deals with perspectives of parents of children with disabilities on the role of grandparents. Finally, it reviews attitudes of professionals toward grandparents and concludes with suggested intervention strategies for working with families on intergenerational relationships.

This book provides easy-to-access, reliable, up-to-date information on the numerous advances in research, assessment, treatment, and service delivery for clinicians, academics, administrators and other mental health professionals. It examines issues surrounding intellectual and developmental disabilities in a real-world sociopolitical framework. In addition, the book summarizes the major domains and emerging subspecialties of this vast area into one useful reference and so offers a wide range of assessment and diagnostic tools and tactics, including cognitive and adaptive behavior assessments.

The study of grandparents raising grandchildren, now almost two decades old, has tended to have a negative bias, emphasizing the difficulties such people face and the negative impact that grandparent caregiving has on them physically, socially, and emotionally. This edited book seeks to reverse this trend by taking a positive approach to understanding grandparent caregivers, focusing on their resilience and resourcefulness. This method reflects a strengths-based approach and the importance of benefit-finding and positive coping. Chapters feature information from both qualitative and quantitative studies and are written by a diverse range of professionals, such as counselors, psychologists, geriatric social workers, and nurse practitioners, to provide multidisciplinary persepctives for practitioners working with grandparent caregivers. Part one discusses the positive qualities that custodial grandparents possess - resilience, resourcefulness, and benefit finding. The second part considers the sociocultural aspects of resilience and resourcefulness in grandparent caregivers. Finally, part three presents strengths-based interventions for working with custodial grandparents. Practitioners will find this to be a valuable resource in their work and the field as a whole, stimulating positive changes in attitudes toward and practices with grandparent caregivers.

Childhood disabilities, particularly cognitive disabilities, are on the rise yet social programs and services to help US families respond to disabilities are not. Many families turn to grandparents for assistance juggling work, family responsibilities, and specialized therapies. This book is based on in-depth interviews with grandparents who are providing at least some care to grandchildren with disabilities. The analyses will help to better understand (1) under what conditions grandparents provide care and support, (2) what types and intensities of care and support grandparents provide, and (3) the impact of that care and support on grandparents’ social, emotional, physical, and financial wellbeing. In this fascinating and provocative book, Madonna Harrington Meyer and Ynesse Abdul-Malak take readers on a deep dive into the complex lives of grandparents who care for their disabled grandchildren. In Grandparenting Children with Disabilities, their interviews reveal the joy, meaning, and purpose grandparents find in caregiving, the challenges and frustrations they encounter, and the many ways they compromise their own health and well-being for the sake of their grandchildren. Drawing from theories of cumulative inequality and from their deep knowledge of the US policy context, the authors lay bare the systemic failures that leave families of children with disabilities without adequate support and that place the most vulnerable among them at grave physical, emotional, and financial risk... Jane McLeod, Provost Professor, Indiana University Grandparents in the U.S. already take on far more parenting responsibilities as compared to their peers in other countries. Grandparenting Children with Disabilities demonstrates that the intensity of these responsibilities is compounded for those whose grandchildren have disabilities given limited policy supports and a society still largely unaccommodating to those with disabilities. This book beautifully navigates the tension between the love these grandparents have for their grandchildren and the challenges they face caring for them. Pamela Herd, Professor, Georgetown University Grandparenting Children with Disabilities offers important insights about the lived experience of older adults who care for and care about their grandchildren...The authors skillfully integrate the stories they tell with consideration of macro social structural influences and life course perspectives... I recommend it highly! Eva Kahana, Distinguished University Professor, Case Western Reserve

Older adults caring for developmentally disabled children have special needs. Are you and your agency doing all you can to help?Grandparents as Carers of Children with Disabilities: Facing the Challenges provides the first comprehensive picture of grandparents caring for children with developmental disabilities and their related requirements. Here you'll find information on the mental and physical health of these caregivers, highlighting their unique needs and the roles that agencies and advocates need to play in order to meet them. This unique volume will assist practitioners, administrators, and policymakers in including the needs of this group into planning and service delivery efforts.Grandparents as Carers of Children with Disabilities: Facing the Challenges takes an incisive look at: characteristics of these carers and the children they care for children in kinship care and their special needs the effect of kinship foster care on caregiving grandmothers the approach of Latino grandparents to bringing up children with special needs the service needs and provision issues of grandparent carers In this book, here is some of what you'll find: data from a school-based comprehensive multigenerational program in East Harlem, New York City, which explores environmental stressors associated with children coming into kinship care, discussing the impact on grandparent caregivers, with a focus on health status and access to care correlates of self-reported depressive symptoms among urban Latino grandparent caregivers a survey of grandparents (mostly African American, mostly female) caring for children with developmental disabilities in New York City that focuses on health status, emotional state, use of formal and informal services, and general life situation helpful charts and tables that put the facts at your fingertips a demonstration project that used an intervention model to determine how a three-pronged approach using outreach, support groups, and case management could be used to aid grandparents caring for children with developmental delay or disabilities ... and much more!As editors McCallion and Janicki point out, ”Primary childcare is rapidly becoming a normative experience of grandparenting. Grandparent primary care is found among all ethnic groups, and across all socioeconomic levels of society. Concern over preserving the family often causes grandparents to assume responsibility in spite of their limited financial means or own health conditions.” Grandparents as Carers of Children with Disabilities will enable you to provide these courageous, loving people with the help they need to do this extraordinarily difficult and often thankless job.

The 18 papers of this collection on grandparents who raise their grandchildren are grouped into the broad categories of theory, practical applications, and empirical studies. Individual topics include case studies, intervention research, support groups, cross-discipline approaches to establishing caregiving guidelines, the psychological adaptation of grandchildren, building parenting skills, and grandparent caregivers of children with developmental disabilities. The contributors teach psychology, social work, child development, and gerontology at universities in the US.