| Donna Butts on Grandfamilies, Blame, and the Long Road to Change

| In her foreword to Donna M. Butts’s Grandfamilies: Stories of Children and the Loving Relatives Who Raise Them, Washington Post personal finance columnist Michelle Singletary identifies herself as “part of a community of children who have been abandoned or removed from parents who are incapable of raising us” and describes the love, wisdom, and devotion that her grandmother provided. The book explores a sizable and under-recognized cohort; U.S. Census data indicates that 2.3 million grandparents are responsible for their grandchildren. We spoke to Butts, who recently stepped down from Generations United, which she led for 27 years.

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You’ve been advocating for these families since the late 1990s. What was the landscape like when you started, and what misconceptions were you up against?

The myth at that time was that it was either “country club grandmothers,” or inner-city single Black grandmothers who were just taking in the kids for a welfare check. The Washington Post actually ran a headline about country club grandmothers taking in their grandkids for the check, which at that time was about $121 a month. I asked a friend who belonged to a country club, and she said that wouldn’t get you on the golf course, it wouldn’t get you lunch, it wouldn’t get you anything at a country club — let alone clothe a child, feed a child, transport a child to school. So we really had to fight against those stereotypes, because in fact it cuts across all socioeconomic groups. It’s not just an inner-city African American issue. It’s one that impacts us all.

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What typically brings these families together?

Anytime there’s a major event in this country, people fall back on relatives to help care for their children — whether it was the crack epidemic, any sort of drug crisis, a war. It could be an economic downturn. There are a lot of reasons why these families are formed. What COVID really brought to light, even more than we’d realized, was how separate and segregated our supports are for children and older adults. There were grandparents who could go to a school to pick up lunch for their grandchild, but not for themselves. And then Meals on Wheels would be delivered to the grandparent, but they couldn’t feed the child. That inflexibility of various systems really became prominent.

There’s a tendency to blame the grandparents in these situations, even though they’re the ones making the sacrifice. How do you push back on that?

We still see it, though less than we used to — this whole thing about “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” that the parenting generation screwed up, so why should we let them harm another generation? But I had a grandmother once who said, “Yeah, they say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but if an apple falls from a tree, we don’t throw it away. We make applesauce, apple juice, apple pie. We save that apple.” 

What’s the most practical way to talk about these families?

One of the messages we used a lot was that it’s never, ever the fault of the child. Stay focused on the child and not on the blame game. And we know that being raised with a relative is much better for children than being in the care of strangers or bouncing from foster home to foster home.

Read more: States shift toward kin-first foster care

What are the biggest threats these families face?

The biggest battles right now are ones we’re all facing — this effort to pull back some of the supports that exist for families in this country. The only source of federal dollars for these families is TANF child-only grants, and there are efforts to cut TANF or impose stricter work requirements. If you’re 70 or 80 years old and raising a couple of kids, you’re not going to be able to work. And then there are the attacks on healthcare and access to Medicaid. These families are struggling right now with the high cost of food and gas because they’re on fixed incomes, and the ability to just go out and make more money is seldom an option. 

They’re not going to do DoorDash at night — they’re older, and now they have little children at home. 

Right, and accessing childcare is difficult and expensive.

What do you hope readers take away from the book?

I wanted to share that building a movement, enacting real change, takes tenacity and stick-with-it-ness — almost 30 years of it. That’s why I included the policy timeline in the book, to show the milestones, but also to encourage people not to be discouraged if everything doesn’t happen overnight. It takes dedication and determination to keep the issue in front of people. And it takes time to build trust with the families. What they deal with — the warts, the wounds — it’s not always pretty. There’s a lot of vulnerability in sharing your story. I hope people come away first aware that these families exist, and second, wanting to do something to support them.