112 Becoming parents again: the challenges of raising grandchildren as main caregiver
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background ‘Skipped generation households’ in which grandparents are the main caregiver to children under 18 years of age, are becoming common in Canada. Reasons for this include teen pregnancy, the death of a parent, mental illness and addictions. These grandparents and the grandchildren they care for are at significantly increased risk of physical and mental illness, yet receive less psychosocial and financial assistance compared to children that enter the foster system. Research on this population in Canada is limited. Objectives Our study aimed to use the lived experiences of skipped generation families to better identify their needs in the healthcare system. Design/Methods We conducted semi-structured interviews of grandparent primary caregivers from ten households in our community to chronicle their lived experiences raising their grandchildren. Participants were identified and recruited by general pediatricians using convenience sampling. Interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, coded using Atlas.ti software and classified into themes by consensus. Results A total of 11 primary caregiver grandparents from 10 households participated in interviews. Nine participants were female. The average age of grandparents was 56 years (range 45 to 64 years) and on average they had been caring for their grandchild for 4 years (range 0.9 to 9 years). Eight households began caring for their grandchild following involvement of the Department of Community Services. Five primary themes emerged from the interviews: Changes in family dynamics, psychosocial impact on grandchild and grandparent, lack of resources for grandparent caregivers, challenges parenting later in life, and resilience inspired by the love of family. Many participants described feeling unsupported, both financially and emotionally, after assuming care of their grandchildren and identified a need for additional counselling services, childcare subsidies and assistance through respite care. All participants involved highlighted that caring for their grandchildren changed their lives in many positive ways. Conclusion While grandparents are frequently prioritized as caregivers of apprehended children, our study suggests that they are also disproportionately under-resourced and poorly supported relative to children that instead enter the foster care system. Based on these findings, we urge for the provision of critical resources to address the emotional, respite and financial needs of these vulnerable children and their grandparents.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".