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Can Fathering Be Taught?


Samuel Maldonado with his wife Margarita and three of his ten children - Melvin, 8, Celine, 7, and Alyssa, 3.

A little over a year ago, 32-year-old Samuel Maldonado was sitting in a jail cell. Today, he sits on the bed of his apartment in Crown Heights, stroking the hair of his three-year-old daughter Alyssa and proudly pointing to the nine framed certificates for completing various life-skills classes at the Fortune Society, an organization that works with ex-offenders.

There is a certificate for a course in anger management, for a nutrition class, and one showing that he works as a peer counselor for the organization. But Maldonado is especially proud of a certificate for a course in fathering.

“There is a difference between telling your children what do to – saying, `do this now!’ – and asking them to do something,” says Maldonado, who was estranged from his own father and for a time was on a course to repeat the pattern with his kids. “Children respond to respect.”

When he talks about parenting, Maldonado speaks not just from what he learned in the class, but also from years of experience.

Maldonado is the father of ten children, ages 17 to 3. Six are his biological offspring from four different mothers, and four are his stepchildren. Of the ten children, four live with Maldonado and his wife Margarita, but all of them cycle through the house from time to time.

“These certificates are reminders that things could be worse,” he says. “They are reminders of why I need to be here [with my children].”

For decades, low-income men who have little or no connection with their children have been seen as one of the daunting problems of poverty that policymakers have been unable to address.

But today, government is increasingly looking to the same men as part of the solution to society's most difficult problems.

In 2003, following the lead of other cities across the nation, New York City launched its “fatherhood initiative,” programs to encourage poor men to be more actively involved in the lives of their children.

But can government really teach men how to be better fathers?

WHY FOCUS ON FATHERS?

There are 175,000 single-mother households with children living below the federal poverty level in New York City - or about 30 percent of all families, according to the Community Service Society.

These children are the ones that would ideally benefit if their fathers provided more financial - as well as emotional - support. And they are a segment of society that policy makers are struggling to help.

Across the nation, fatherless children are five times more likely to be poor and ten times more likely to be extremely poor, according to the National Commission on Children. Their risks are also greater for dropping out of school, and for alcohol and drug use, adolescent pregnancy and child bearing, juvenile delinquency, mental illness, and suicide.

Over the last half century, all levels of government have responded to these statistics with a series of programs aimed at helping single mothers and their children - food stamps, after-school programs, earned income tax credits, and welfare to work programs - but has largely ignored fathers.

“[The government] has invested $50 billion in efforts for poor women,” says Ronald Mincy, a professor of social work at Columbia University and editor of the book “Black Males Left Behind.” “There has been little done for men.”

But by the early 1990s, researchers and lawmakers began pointing to some of the critical issues associated with children who grow up without their fathers – and looking for ways to get men to reconnect with their families.

Following this trend, New York City currently allocates $3 million in federal Community Service Block Grants to 12 community organizations working with local dads. The goals of the program are modest: help 1,400 men living in the city’s low-income neighborhoods establish some kind of relationship with their children, and move the fathers toward providing some kind of financial assistance for their families.

Each social service organization that receives a grant already has a track record in the neighborhood and has some freedom in how it reaches these goals. Depending on the agency, men have access to a range of services, including assistance with family court and custody issues, job training, supervised visitations, and even “Me and Dad” field trips to the aquarium and the Queens Hall of Science.

“More broadly, we hope for an improvement in the child’s life,” says Cindy Colter, assistant commissioner for the Department of Youth and Community Development, the agency that administers the programs. “And of course, we hope that it improves the lives of the men as well.”

While fatherhood programs are new and receive a relatively small amount of government funding, they represent a growing movement.

In 2001, President George W. Bush named Wade Horn of the National Fatherhood Initiative to a high ranking position in the Health and Human Services agency to help create such programs. And when Congress reauthorized welfare reform legislation in February 2006, they earmarked an additional $50 million a year for fatherhood initiatives across the nation over the next five years.

“Hopefully, we are now are coming to a place of more concern for men, and we are including them in the solutions to address poverty,” says Mincy.

TEACHING PARENTING SKILLS

On a Monday evening in Brooklyn, five men sit at school desks in the upstairs room of a building on Wyckoff Avenue discussing what it means to be a dad in New York City in the 21st century. The group is known as the “Papas de Bushwick.”

“Now, as fathers you can do 99 good things, and then there is the one time when you lose it,” says Julio Diaz, who leads the discussion group. “What do you think your kids will remember?”

“The one time you lose it,” answers one man, shaking his head. “That’s all they remember.”

“Now what if we were able to hold back for just a few moments between that time when you feel an emotion and you act?” asks Diaz, pointing to chart entitled “Cycles of Reaction.” “How would that help us to stay out of trouble?”

For the men, it is not a rhetorical question.

Most attend the class because a family court judge has either required or strongly recommended that they do so. For 13 weeks, the men work through a support group curriculum of weekly sessions with titles like “The Roots of Fathering,” “The World of Feelings,” and “Healing the Father Wound.”

“By the third week of the class, for most men, it is no longer about the courts, but about their children,” says Franc Villalobos, who runs Papas de Bushwick, a program of the non-profit group Coalition of Hispanic Family Services and the Medical and Health Research Association of New York.

The men who have graduated from the program say they have learned tangible lessons: financial support is only a part of being a dad; discipline and punishment are not the same thing; and it only hurts the children to say negative things about their mother.

“Most men need a little coaching when it comes to parenting skills,” says Anthony Alexander, one of the veterans of the group.

The facilitators admit they face a great challenge.

“What we are really talking about is re-socializing men,” says Villalobos.

OBSTACLES FATHERS FACE

Men find that connecting with their children after a separation or divorce is not as simple as just wanting to be involved. They face a series of legal and financial barriers to being responsible dads – and poor fathers who are the focus of the fatherhood initiatives are particularly hard hit, because they often do not have the education or cannot afford the legal expertise needed to overcome them. In addition to teaching parenting skills, fatherhood initiatives also try to help address these problems for their clients.

Custody Issues

New York is one of only 13 states in the nation that does not have a joint custody statute. In New York State family courts, judges traditionally begin with the presumption that the primary caregiver - the person most directly responsible for the day-to-day care of the child - should be awarded custody, not that both parents should have an equal role in parenting. That is most often the mother.

The standard custody arrangement for many men is two weekend visitations a month.

“You have good fathers and bad fathers, and you have good mothers and bad mothers,” says Anthony Alexander, who endured years of legal battles to win custody of his children. “They should be judged equally.”

(Read an article about divorce and custody issues in New York).

Child Support

In New York, if a man named in a child support case denies being the father, he may have to go to court and take a DNA test. If it shows he’s the father, he will be ordered to pay the child support until the child is 21 years of age.

The amount of child support is based on the non-custodial parent's income and how many children are involved. (See a detailed chart of child support obligations by income level). And while child support is often a financial lifeline for single mothers and their children, it can leave many men feeling overwhelmed with debt, and even deter some from working because a significant portion of their pay can be seized.

Fathers are responsible for child support while they are in school, are unemployed, doing time in prison, or even if the mother marries someone else. As a penalty for owing child support, the government can suspend a driver’s license, refuse to grant a passport, or even sentence a man to jail for up to six months.

“The system beats us down,” says David Cortez, a father in the Papas de Bushwick program. “It sees us as a cash cow.”

(Read an article about child support issues in New York).

Employment

Over the last two decades as the national and local economy have grown, almost every demographic group – even low-skilled women with children – have seen some improvements in employment rates. One notable exception is young African-American men.

A recent New York Times article highlighted the plight of African-American men in America:
- 65 percent of black males in their 20s who drop out of high school are jobless
- 50 percent of black males in their 20s who graduate from high school are unemployed
- And 60 percent of black males in their 30s who did not finish high school have spent time in prison.

Some experts draw strong connections between low employment rates and the 70 percent fatherlessness rate in the African American community.

"One of the reasons why black males have higher incarceration rates than other populations is because they are more likely to grow up without their fathers," says Mincy.

(Read an article about employment and job training in New York).

QUESTIONING THE MOVEMENT

While there is growing support for the idea of government programs encouraging fathers to be financially and emotionally invested in their children’s lives, there are also skeptics.

The National Organization for Women has raised concerns that fatherhood initiatives may divert money and efforts away from helping single mothers, who most often bear the responsibility for raising and supporting their children. And the organization is particularly suspicious of the federal policy that aims to promote the institution of marriage as part of its fatherhood efforts, arguing that it discriminates against nontraditional families.

“We should care about supporting the well-being of all families, regardless of how they are constituted,” Jacqueline Payne, policy attorney for the NOW Legal Defense Fund testified before Congress.

While some organizations like the non-profit group National Fatherhood Initiative have been instrumental in promoting men’s programs, other fathers’ rights advocates say the money and effort would be better spent reforming custody and child support laws, which they argue are rooted in a 1950s idea of family.

“We send these guys to all of these classes so they can learn to be involved with their children,” said Jim Hayes, president of the Fathers and Families in New York. “And many find that there is a whole system that prevents them from doing that.”

Even some advocates for the poor argue that the focus on fathers may be too narrow and question the notion that, if fathers just pay their child support or visit more often with their children, the problems of poverty will be addressed.

CAN GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS GIVE DADS AND KIDS WHAT THEY REALLY NEED?

In an ideal world, men would learn how to be effective fathers from their fathers or from the other male role models in their lives. But the majority of men in the city’s fatherhood programs did not have supportive male figures in their lives growing up.

“I grew up with a single mom because my dad died at an early age, but there was a network of black men in my community,” Walter Fields of the Community Service Society said in a recent interview on WNYC radio. “Part of it is two-parent households, but we also have to rebuild the social fabric that has been destroyed.”

Can these types of programs do that?

Fatherhood initiatives are still too new – and have such modest goals – that is difficult to demonstrate their overall success, but some initial studies of similar programs across the nation have produced mixed results. (An evaluation of a program in Connecticut, for example, found that many fathers were actually deterred from establishing a relationship with their children because the program was also seeking child support compliance.)

But some experts argue that the initiatives can be useful in providing peer groups where men can talk about the challenges they face and in helping some men get jobs to support their families.

From an economic standpoint, the amount of money being spent on these programs is small, and so a few successes can add up. “If you can change one out of 30 or 40 guys, then it’s a worthwhile investment,” says Robert Lerman, economist at American University and the Urban Institute, who has done research on the issue.

The more difficult challenge, others say, is helping fathers who do not live with their children to become the kind of parent that a kid really needs.

When most non-custodial fathers get together with their kids for the few days a month, their main objective is to have fun. They go to the park, a ballgame, or the circus, and their goal is to repair – or just to maintain - a relationship with the child.

But these may not be the activities that the child needs most.

In just a few hours a week, it is difficult to discipline, follow a student’s progress in school, and know if a child is hanging out with the wrong crowd. In other words, the fathers have to figure out how to both have fun and hold a child accountable.

“I don’t think there is any father that doesn’t have trouble negotiating that tension,” says Mincy. “A guy who is a non-custodial parent is even more reluctant to go into that space.”

Still Carlos Rivera, who helps lead parenting classes at Papas de Bushwick, says he has seen first hand that fathering skills can be taught, but not always in the ways the curriculum suggests. “The younger men learn from the older ones and that can help fill that missing role,” says Rivera. “But that is also when the book goes out the window and the real work begins.”

BEGINNING WITH THE BASICS

On a Thursday morning, half a dozen men in aprons, most in the early 20s, buzz around a kitchen preparing a lunch of macaroni and cheese, chicken and egg salad, French bread, and fruit salad dessert.

The men, all with criminal records and all fathers, are participants in a weekly ritual known as “Miss Betty’s Practical Cooking Class” at the Fortune Society, a Chelsea organization that works with people who have criminal records.

Miss Betty is Betty Wilson, an instructor who teaches the men nutrition, cooking skills, as well as table etiquette.

“Sit, sit,” says Miss Betty, instructing the men to sit down at a table and taking the baseball cap off of one young father.

“I never used to eat at the table before,” says Mike Davis, the 25-year-old father of a five-year-old son and 19-month old daughter. “I always ate in my bedroom or in front of the T.V.”

“I’d be lying if I said I ate at the table,” says another man. “But I do cook for my kids.”

The goals of the cooking class are to give men practical kitchen skills, educate them about how to prepare nutritious meals, create an activity they can do with their kids, and encourage them to get in the habit of sitting and talking with their families.

“After eight weeks, the guys can’t wait to show off their skills,” said Sophia Strong, who heads up the family programs at the Fortune Society. “Before this, the best they could offer was buying their kid sneakers.”

Samuel Maldonado says that the fathering class he took has made him calmer with his children, more conscious of what he says and does, and more of a “people person.” As a peer counselor, he now helps other men who are new to the program.

But the most practical impact is that he is even around his children at all.

“If it wasn’t for this, I’d probably be in jail right now,” he says.

RELATED LINKS:

National Fatherhood Initiative
New York City Fatherhood Initiative
NYC Fatherhood Initiative Providers
Father’s Rights Association of New York State
New York Father’s Resources
Fathers and Families New York
Fathering Magazine
New York State Child Support Services
Interactive Tour of Child Support Services

 

Homeless Prevention Programs A Year Later


Last year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg made reducing the number of homeless people in the city a top priority, launching an action plan long in the making.

Looking at three relevant programs, we can see some progress and some significant challenges.

Two of the programs are initiatives of the city. New Department of Homeless Services Commissioner Robert Hess, who arrives from Philadelphia, has reasons to be both excited and apprehensive because of these programs. The promising one is the HomeBase program, a group of centers run by community-based organizations in areas of the city that send the most people to city shelters. But the city’s rent subsidy program, Housing Stability Plus, is widely viewed as a mess.

It also has been about 15 months since a third initiative, led by Administrative Judge Fern Fisher of the Civil Court of New York City, the Housing Help Program, was launched in the Bronx. That program shows some promise, too.

Programs to prevent homelessness are viewed as both cost-effective and compassionate. But some question whether their cost-effectiveness also translates into any kind of real effectiveness.

“There are some major over-arching problems in the housing market and government policy that prevention programs do not address,” said Andy Scherer, executive director of Legal Services for New York City. “The most important thing to do would be to have in place an adequate supply of affordable housing that low-income people can have access to.

“I use the analogy of musical chairs,” Scherer continued. “When you have 10 chairs and 11 people, someone can’t be seated. We can spend a lot of time dealing with how to help the 11th person cope with that, but the truth of the matter is [it would be better to have] 11 chairs.”

HomeBase

In the fall of 2004, the city set up six HomeBase programs in partnership with community-based organizations in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. ( See my article from October, 2004 New Programs Aim To Prevent Homelessness)

In the neighborhoods where HomeBase programs are working, their preventative services appear to be having a positive impact: Homelessness has declined more in those areas than in other neighborhoods in the city.

The program has not gone unnoticed: At the end of March, Harvard University cited it as one of the top 50 innovations in government in 2006 (in pdf format).

In a January conference call organized by the National Alliance to End Homelessness (listen here), officials from the city's Department of Homeless Services said a variety of factors explained the success of the program. They lauded the community-based organizations for their grassroots links and local knowledge while also pointing to sophisticated information management technology that allows them to understand better where homeless people are coming from and why they end up at shelters.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that we collect everything – everything – and it’s in that database,” one of the officials said.

The community-based organizations can then use that information to reach out to people most in need of help. They can even target specific buildings if a significant number of people have become homeless from those buildings and then visit the building to offer information and assistance, one official said.

One lesson from HomeBase is that people facing homelessness can avoid it by receiving services before they end up at homeless shelters. It’s an important lesson because using homeless shelters to deal with homelessness has been so expensive.

Another important lesson is that people facing housing problems often do not seek help. HomeBase centers’ caseworkers, who expected a line out of their doors when their programs opened in September 2004, have taken to handing out flyers on the streets to find clients.

The HomeBase program has only served about 3,000 families, according to the city. They receive services specific to their situations – caseworkers help them with everything from getting job training to resolving family problems to navigating the public benefits maze that so often ends up in an eviction because of bureaucratic errors.

The service providers know, too, that financial issues are a common denominator for many of the people facing homelessness. Rents have increased significantly in the city and that trend shows no signs of diminishing. The city tried to address that problem by launching its own rent subsidy program – Housing Stability Plus – a little over a year ago, but it has not turned out nearly as well.

Housing Stability Plus

At a national conference on homelessness last year, then Department of Homeless Services Commissioner Linda Gibbs told housing advocates that the city’s rent subsidy program, Housing Stability Plus, would succeed with the help of friendly landlords.

“Maybe landlords won’t act on evictions – when the rents go down, they’ll let it go,” Gibbs said at the time. The comment was met with some incredulity by advocates in New York City.

A year later, according to a spokesman for the Department of Homeless Services, some 6,000 families have been moved to permanent housing thanks to Housing Stability Plus, and only one percent have ended up back in shelters.

Critics are skeptical. Yes, the subsidy helped the city move people out of city shelters; reducing the number of shelter residents looks good -- from a distance. Up close, though, critics see this as bottom line thinking, and consider Housing Stability Plus to be a mess.

“What we’re hearing is that people in shelters … are very afraid of” Housing Stability Plus, said Councilmember Gail Brewer who has helped develop some of the more innovative housing policies in the city in recent years. “It just doesn’t seem to be working.” The City Council has scheduled a hearing on the program for April 27.

A person at one agency that has dealt with the subsidy program told me that people who look at just the number of homeless people reported in city shelters might consider the city’s rent subsidy successful. The recent street homeless census numbers are not yet available as of this writing, but last year the city said the number of people seeking help at homeless shelters had declined by almost 10 percent.

But what, critics ask, does that really mean? Consider the case of Cynthia Green. She is living with her two children, a one-year-old and a five-year-old, in a South Bronx building that has almost 800 violations of the Housing Maintenance Code. She could not move into her apartment for two months after signing her lease because the apartment was being repaired.

“They haven’t done anything but they still want their rent money,” Green said. Green described a nightmarish apartment, with leaks, cracks, mice and lead paint.

And that's an apartment by a cooperating landlord. Some landlords are already turned off by the program, and have no interest in continuing it -- even before the subsidies go down by 20 percent.

“It’s the worst subsidy program yet,” said Anne Peek, a long-time broker who works across the city. “You can’t really get an answer from anyone, you’re just passed around...Most of the tenants are not really able to pay the 20 percent that’s required of them. And nobody seems to know what’s going to happen at the end of the fifth year."

Advocates said they would not give up on the city’s subsidy even if some landlords have. But they urged the city to fess up to the problems, and fix them.

Led by the Coalition for the Homeless, housing advocates have asked the city to address four fundamental flaws:

  • The 20 percent decrease in rent payments
  • Rules requiring families to stay on welfare in order to receive the subsidy
  • A lax approach to housing quality that has placed families in apartments with serious housing code violations
  • No mechanism to address illegal payments that some tenants are making to landlords in order to convince the landlords to accept the subsidy

"If these flaws were addressed, it would be a very effective program,” said Patrick Markee of the Coalition for the Homeless.

Housing Help Program

When Judge Fern Fisher, who oversees the city’s housing courts as the administrative judge of the Civil Court of New York City , launched the Housing Help Program in collaboration with the United Way of New York City just over a year ago, advocates were hopeful. The program offers legal representation and social services at an infinitely logical place: housing court. Granted, it only covers one zip code, 10451, in the Bronx, but it was seen as an opportunity to make the point that homelessness, which often starts with a formal order of eviction from a housing court judge, can be prevented by providing tenants with legal representation, long a fundamental argument of housing advocates, including the organization I work for.

Simply put, housing court is too confusing and intimidating for tenants who do not obtain legal representation. And it’s made much worse because it is so unfair: Landlords almost always have attorneys representing their interests. Landlords’ attorneys frequently negotiate deals with tenants that are so favorable to landlords that tenants find themselves facing eviction very quickly.

But Judge Fisher downplayed the legal services aspect of the program she initiated.

“It’s not a right-to-counsel project,” she said. “You can’t prevent homelessness without social services. Social workers are needed for these families.”

Of 114 formal evictions that did occur in the 10451 zip code last year, Fisher noted that 42 occurred without any tenant ever responding to the landlord’s petition for eviction at housing court. This high rate of defaults reinforces what the HomeBase programs appear to have learned, too: Many people who end up homeless never get any help of any kind.

“Our approach is to catch them at court, which is the natural place to find them,” Fisher said. “But what can we do about people who don’t come to court? Clearly they got evicted so that’s serious.

“Those are people who either move out or they just sit around and they get evicted,” she continued. “How do you reach them? How do you contact them? How do you get them to come to court?”

While Fisher insists her program is a social services one, it still demonstrated that legal representation is critical to avoiding eviction. None of the 330 families that received help were ultimately evicted and the fact is when tenants are represented they are much less likely to be evicted.

“Clients do in fact come in with not just a housing problem but a large number of associated problems based on the fact that they are poor,” said Steven Telzak of Legal Services for New York-Bronx, which worked on the project at the court. The three-year project will continue without LSNY-Bronx for reasons that were unclear, but all involved said the parting of the ways was amicable.

“We’re helping families – it works,” said Jo Gonsalves, director of affordable housing and homelessness prevention at United Way of New York City. “Families are getting services. They don’t have to advocate for themselves. There are social workers and paralegals advocating for them, in addition to the attorneys.”

Gonsalves said, unsurprisingly, that poverty was the predominant cause of housing crises. But that did not mean other social services were not needed.

“There are also issues of trauma, mental health – social service issues – that are compounded by lack of financial resources,” she said, adding that the United Way hopes to expand the project.

But with economic issues obviously a fundamental factor in homelessness, Andy Scherer’s musical chairs analogy of the New York City housing market in 2006 seems even more potent. A report now 20 years old, “Stemming the tide of displacement: Housing policies for preventing homelessness” might very well have been written last week. It said that to end homelessness efforts were needed to address affordability, gentrification, dispute resolution, abandonment and emergency social services.

“The emphasis of the policy has been too narrowly focused,” Scherer said. “It’s not like they’re doing bad things – they’re doing helpful things. But the problem will continue to persist until there’s some real tackling of the broader reasons that lead to the lack of adequate housing.”

Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations.  

 

Grandparents Raising Grandchildren


When my grandmother was trying to raise my sister and me, she faced many hardships. At times it seemed as if she and I were coming from two completely different worlds. We rarely agreed on anything and ended up in a lot of arguments. But then my grandmother had to go to a hospital, and then my sister and I had to move to a regular foster home. It was very clear to me that, whatever the conflicts and complications, it just feels much better to live with relatives than strangers.

In fact, a number of experts have solid evidence that kids who can’t live with their parents do better in homes with relatives. Studies show they have fewer behavioral problems and less chance of abuse. This is why New York State passed a law in 2004 saying that grandparents must be informed whenever a child is put in foster care, so that they might be able to step forward and look after the child themselves. The law also makes it easier for grandparents to gain legal custody of grandchildren they’re already raising.

Growing Trend, Unique Challenges

Living with a grandparent is becoming an increasingly common experience for kids both nationwide and here in New York City. There are more than 80,000 grandparents responsible for their grandchildren in New York City, according to the 2002 Citizens’ Committee for Children’s “Keeping Track of New York City’s Children.”

Although experts say that this influx of kids into their grandparents’ homes is preferable to traditional foster care, they also note that social services is still playing catch up. Elderly caregivers face a host of unique challenges that too often go unmet, as they did with my grandmother.

Grandparent caregivers are more likely to live in poverty than other grandparents, according to “Forging Connections: Challenges and Opportunities for Older Caregivers Raising Children” (published by New York Council on Adoptable Children, Inc.(COAC)). They also tend to be in poorer health and are less educated than non-relative foster parents.

While grandparents looking after their children through the foster care system have access to more services than do grandparents looking after kin informally, they all have a harder time accessing services and supports, like housing, transportation, and medical care than do traditional foster parents.

But New York City has become a pioneer in addressing the challenges of grandparent caregivers, by opening the nation’s first housing complex specifically for grandparent-headed families,

GrandparentFamily Apartments

GrandparentFamily Apartments, a six-story apartment building on Prospect Avenue in the South Bronx opened a year ago, the nation’s first public development exclusively for grandparents raising grandchildren. The families living in the 51 apartments all get a social worker, support groups and parenting classes. Children receive tutoring and organized activities in the afternoon and evening. Apartments also have special amenities for the elderly—like cords you can tug on if you need help.

Annie Barnes, 62, one of its residents, has lived in the building since it opened. Like many grandparent caregivers, Barnes never expected to be a parent at her age. But 11 years ago she found herself raising her two grandchildren after her son was murdered. “When I turned 50 I wanted to do things for myself and travel places. I had to put my plan on hold to provide for my grandchildren,” she said.

Both Barnes’ grandchildren, Alonzo Poinsett and Shakela, had been born premature and with serious health problems. She needs a lot of help raising them, but living in the trail blazing apartment complex, she says she can swing it.

Dorothy Jenkins, 76, also lives in the GrandparentFamily Apartments. She got custody of her grandchildren when her daughter died. “There was no other alternative,” she said, meaning she refused to let them be put in foster care. So she retired to raise her grandchildren full-time. “I had to start all over again,” she said, adding that she’s a strict parent.

In her old home Jenkins used to worry about safety. Now she says she feels secure. “You know what I’m doing right now?” she said. “I’m in bed, watching TV, while my front door is open—and I’m not worried. It’s a great life for me.”

Although both women said, “These children need to stop running up and down the stairs!” they were more than satisfied with their new apartments.

Talking to them made me wish my own family had gotten that much support. But it also made me feel hopeful knowing that grandparent caregivers are being provided support in raising their grandkids. Maybe GrandParentFamily Apartments will inspire more of the same.

Pauline Gordon, a senior at Acorn Community High School, is a writer with Youth Communication, publishers of Represent. Additional reporting by Kendra Hurley  



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