Celebrating Grandparents as Caregivers
Religion & Liberty Online

Celebrating Grandparents as Caregivers

anthem_grandparents_20For the first three years of my life, I lived with and was primarily raised by my grandparents. While I was always grateful for the experience, I never realized until I was a parent myself of the depths of their sacrifice, and the burden and stress raising an infant put on them.

Like many other seniors, they didn’t get the credit or recognition they deserved for being caregivers. This role of grandparents is often overlooked, despite the fact that in 2013 10 percent of children in the U.S. (7.1 million) lived with a grandparent.

According to the Census Bureau, in 2012 2.7 million grandparents were responsible for the basic needs of one or more grandchildren under age 18 living with them. Of these caregivers, 1.7 million were grandmothers and 1.0 million were grandfathers. Out of that caregiver group, 603,118 grandparents had incomes below the poverty line, 674,936 had a disability, and 1.6 million were still in the labor force.

On Sunday, Americans will celebrate National Grandparents Day, an annual holiday established by presidential proclamation in 1978 to celebrate and honor of our nation’s grandparents. Let’s take the opportunity this weekend to let all grandparents — whether our own or others — know that we recognize and appreciate the vital role they play in sustaining our families.

Joe Carter

Joe Carter is a Senior Editor at the Acton Institute. Joe also serves as an editor at the The Gospel Coalition, a communications specialist for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and as an adjunct professor of journalism at Patrick Henry College. He is the editor of the NIV Lifehacks Bible and co-author of How to Argue like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History's Greatest Communicator (Crossway).