GREENSBORO — Pat and Johnny Raines looked forward to retiring in the two-bedroom, fixer-upper they found in the Rockingham County countryside.
But like an increasing number of Triad grandparents, they suddenly found themselves responsible for raising a second generation of children.
In 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that 4,334 grandparents in Guilford were raising their grandchildren. That’s a 22 percent increase from 2006, according to the latest census information available — the American Community Survey.
Increasingly, grandparents step in, trading in their golden years for a second round of dirty diapers and teenage angst.
What didn’t come with raising their first generation: bitter battles over custody, retirements put on hold, and children dealing with abandonment, abuse and the effects of being born to a mother addicted to alcohol or drugs.
Retirement on hold
Pat and Johnny Raines spent a couple of years sprucing up their retirement home.
“It had everything we wanted — a little lake, six acres,” said Pat Raines, 58.
Then in 2003, they took custody of their daughter’s four youngest children: James, now 15; Duncan, 14; and twins Andrea and Stephanie, 11. Their mother had left them with an abusive stepfather. The grandparents drove to Kentucky to take custody of the children.
The couple soon realized they couldn’t raise four young children in the small retirement home. So they moved to Greensboro and eventually bought a bigger, three-bedroom house. Still smaller than what they needed, it was all they could afford.
Pat Raines, a supervisor and surgical technician at High Point Regional Hospital, had to quit work to stay home with the children. Johnny Raines, 64, gave up his salaried position as a manager at Piedmont Triad International Airport so he could qualify for overtime pay as an electronics technician.
“You’re no longer a grandparent,” he said. “Now you’re a parent. We can’t just be grandparents. We can’t spoil them and send them home. We don’t get to do any of that.
“That’s a loss to the kids as much as to us.”
The children call them Nana and Papa.
“We live together as a family,” Pat Raines said. “It seems to work most of the time.”
The number of Triad grandparents who found themselves raising a second generation of children grew more quickly than in both the state and nation from 2006 to 2008.
Why the region saw such growth is unclear.
Worsening economic conditions likely played a role, said Kevin Kelley of the state Division of Social Services, which oversees child welfare services.
Nationally, the rising number of women imprisoned affects how many grandparents are called to step in. The ACLU reported in 2007 that two-thirds of women in state prisons were mothers of a minor child.
A tough job
Grandparents raising grandchildren struggle financially and emotionally, have difficulty obtaining school and medical information, and run into problems getting legal guardianship, said Debra Stokes, foster grandparent program director with Senior Resources of Guilford.
“I’ve been reduced to standing in line at food banks because the state of North Carolina would not listen to my problems,” said Sara Harper, 59, a High Point resident raising three young children of a niece in addition to two adopted children.
Harper said she tried to go through the foster care system, which provides subsidies to help families who take in related or unrelated children. But they weren’t approved.
Sara and Curtis Harper, 62, became parents again by choice and necessity. They had just adopted two children from the Pennsylvania foster care system when they took what they thought was temporary custody of three more — the children of a niece.
All five children were under 5 years old at the time.
“I got them because they were my relatives,” Sara Harper said. “I felt compelled to do it.”
Grandparents find themselves fighting their own children over what’s best for the grandchildren, and sometimes have to turn their own children in to social services agencies, said Deborah Maryland of Caregivers of Rockingham County.
“A lot of them don’t want to do it,” she said.
When they do fight for custody, the case can drag on for years.
Last month, the Harpers won two pivotal rulings in court that paved the way for them to adopt the three children of the niece.
“It’s been seven years of uncertainty,” Sara Harper said. “So that’s been pretty challenging.”
Children in need
Grandparents, who often live on fixed incomes and struggle to pay for their own medication, find themselves raising children who need therapy, medication and special schooling. Many children carry physical and emotional scars from living in abusive homes.
Lala Headen took custody of her twin granddaughters when they were very young. Their father — her son — was involved with drugs, she said. He was in prison when Headen took responsibility for the girls.
“I didn’t want two little baby girls to go through that,” she said. “I didn’t want them to go through the system.”
She never adopted the girls. But that led to other obstacles, such as trying to enroll the girls in school when they moved to Greensboro in July 2008. At the time, she’d had custody of them for more than a decade.
“I had to prove that I was the legal guardian,” said Headen, 64, who retired early from her job with the post office to raise the girls. “Everywhere I went I had to carry a thick folder of papers to prove who I was and what they were to me.”
She has full custody of the twins, Shannon and Sandra, now 17. Their mother died in prison. Headen doesn’t know where their father is today.
“I’m the only one to fight for them,” she said.
Getting help
Some states are taking steps to help grandparents raising grandchildren.
In 2005, New York built the first condominium community geared toward such families, with features such as wide hallways and handrails to help the elderly caregivers and after-school programs for the children.
Georgia recently created programs to help with the costs of raising grandchildren. One provides a monthly subsidy that does not require the child to be part of the foster care system, which is the case for such subsidies offered by most states, including North Carolina.
Like most states, North Carolina lags behind when it comes to grandparents’ rights, grandparents and advocates in the Triad say.
Sen. Don Vaughan, a Greensboro Democrat and attorney, would like to change that. He co-sponsored a bill last year to study the issue of grandparents’ visitation rights in North Carolina. He has seen more grandparents come to his practice with legal questions in the past 10 years, he said.
“I think it’s something that needs to be addressed,” he said. “And I think it needs to be addressed sooner (rather) than later.”
He hopes the bill, which remains in committee, will jump-start the state’s approach to grandparents’ issues.
Support groups offer connections to the resources that are available. Caregivers of Rockingham County started a support group three years ago for grandparents raising grandchildren.
Once a month, members meet for “lunch and learn” sessions that cover such subjects as legal aid and financial support. They also tackle fun family projects, such as baking, with grandparent and child.
The group will expand this year to the western part of the county so grandparents there don’t have to travel to Reidsville for meetings, Maryland said.
Guilford has long offered a grandparents support group, with meetings in both Greensboro and High Point.
Carole Achilles, 51, continues to attend the High Point sessions after moving to Davidson County.
She and her husband Allan Parker, 55, have been raising their granddaughter for about five years. They have legal custody of the child, Jocelyn Scoggins, 9.
“It wasn’t something that we took lightly. But it wasn’t something we felt we had a choice in,” Achilles said. “There was never a question of 'Are we gonna do it?’ Of course we were gonna do it.
“Did we envision ourselves five years prior to that raising a child? No. And if you’d’ve said that to me I’d’ve said, 'You’re crazy.’ ”
Contact Jennifer Fernandez at 373-7064 or jennifer.fernandez@news-record.com
