April 15, 2019
U.S. Senator Maggie Hassan met with grandparents raising their grandchildren and support providers in Peterborough on Monday, to gain a sense of the areas of highest priority for them.
March 24, 2019
American grandparents have long raised their grandkids when their children are unfit or unable to do so. They took over child care during the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, especially among African-American families. Now grandparents are stepping up again, Census Bureau data show. This time, the burden is largely shifting to low-income white families…
January 18, 2018
As kids born dependent on opioids age, researchers are only beginning to understand the potential long-term impacts, including developmental delays, impaired hearing and vision, and behavior problems…
November 2, 2018
I was a teenager in the care of loving fictive kin when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1979 that kinship care is an appropriate child welfare response, and that relatives could not be discriminated against when they meet the same licensing standards as non-kin foster parents. Nearly four decades later, there have been significant steps toward providing needed support for kinship caregivers. But more is needed to ensure that they have adequate finances and other resources to raise children who are not their own — in some cases, from birth to 18…
May 13, 2018
The growing opioid crisis has been declared a public health emergency. It's sparked a parallel crisis you rarely hear about: the impact on children neglected by addicted parents. More than one million American children now live with grandparents, primarily because of their parent's addiction to opioids and other drugs: heroin, crack, meth and alcohol. Grandparents are putting off retirement and plowing through savings to rescue their grandchildren from dangerous situations...
Spring, 2018
Hidden in the shadows of New Hampshire’s opioid epidemic are the children who live with their parents’ addiction every day. They fall behind in school as the trouble at home starts to dominate their lives, they make the 911 calls, they are shuttled about to live with relatives or in foster care, and they face an uncertain future when their parents can no longer care for them...
June, 2017
Pamela Livengood was happily embracing her status as a new grandmother when suddenly she became the primary caregiver for her daughter's 2-year-old son. "It was quite an adjustment," said Livengood, 55, of Keene, N.H. "I wasn't ready to go back to changing diapers and getting up in the middle of the night. I thought all that was behind me. But my daughter and the baby's father got caught up in using opioids right after Francis was born. He needed me."...
"For my fiftieth birthday, I got a 2-year-old. My story isn’t unique. This opioid epidemic has devastated communities all over the country. It doesn’t discriminate against age, race, gender or income. It affects all of us. But sometimes it feels like folks in Washington don’t hear these stories,” said Pamela Livengood, a grandparent caregiver quoted in an article in the Washington Post, on July 26, 2016...
