When Grandma Becomes Mom

While friends are planning for retirement, Stella Kessler is managing appointments for her special-needs grandson. She is raising the 16-year-old by herself, balancing doctors' visits with her own business meetings.

"You do what you have to do," says Kessler, 64, a senior sales director with Mary Kay. "The energy is not like I had before, but I'm not a slacker either. I can get things done."

More and more grandparents are raising grandchildren, an encore performance requiring stamina, patience and financial resources that test the promise of the golden years. In 1970, about 3 percent of all children under 18 lived in households headed by a grandparent; by 2007, 6.5 percent -- 4.7 million kids -- were doing so, according to the Census Bureau. In Florida, the share is larger: 7.1 percent, or nearly 260,000 children.

At last count, 2.4 million grandparents across the country -- 148,000 in Florida alone -- had stepped in when their own children couldn't do the job.

Death, divorce, illness, even financial difficulties, have traditionally sent grandchildren into their grandparents' homes. Substance abuse problems have fueled the recent upward trend across socioeconomic lines.

"A lot of this has to do with drug issues," says Deborah Whitley, director of the National Center on Grandparents Raising Grandkids at Georgia State University. "Parents are users or dealers or they're incarcerated, and the children are left to relatives, usually grandmothers, to raise."

High-profile figures like President Obama, who was largely raised by his maternal grandparents, and Michael Jackson, who left custody of his three children to his mother, have focused attention on "grandfamilies" -- a term coined to describe these arrangements. It's a spotlight advocates welcome.

"They are trying their best under difficult circumstances to do what they can for their grandchildren," says Barbara Stoler, a retired psychotherapist who runs a Grandparents Raising Grandkids support group at the Alper Jewish Community Center in South Miami-Dade. "The love and concern they have really comes through."