Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Grandparents are increasingly involved in the care of grandchildren, including after child protection intervention.METHOD: A recent Australian qualitative research partnership explored how relationships between grandparents and their grandchildren could be optimised after child safety concerns. Interviews and focus groups were undertaken with 77 participants, including 51 grandparents, 12 parents, six foster carers and eight child and family workers. Emerging themes reported here focus on the role of grandparents and their perceptions of, and interactions with, the child protection system.FINDINGS: Overall, findings identify that grandparents wanted to help safeguard their grandchildren but many encountered an adversarial child protection system that left them feeling powerless, fearful and unimportant. Aboriginal participants reiterated that child protection workers needed to better understand how maintaining kinship networks provided a protective factor for Aboriginal children, and that grandparents were key stakeholders in their grandchildren’s lives.IMPLICATIONS: The findings from this study affirm the value and role of grandparents and highlight the need for implemented family-inclusive child protection practice within and beyond the Australian context.
Highlights
Grandparents are increasingly involved in the care of grandchildren, including after child protection intervention
Overall, findings identify that grandparents wanted to help safeguard their grandchildren but many encountered an adversarial child protection system that left them feeling powerless, fearful and unimportant
Aboriginal participants reiterated that child protection workers needed to better understand how maintaining kinship networks provided a protective factor for Aboriginal children, and that grandparents were key stakeholders in their grandchildren’s lives
Summary
Grandparents are increasingly involved in the care of grandchildren, including after child protection intervention. International and national literature identifies the growing role of grandparents as full-time carers for their grandchildren, often due to family breakdown, substance abuse by adult children, family violence, poor parental mental health, poverty, housing instability, an absent or incarcerated parent, and where parents are unable to care for children (Backhouse & Graham, 2012; Irizarry, Miller, & Bowden, 2016). Some researchers have reported that, while non-Indigenous grandparent carers may see the full-time carer role as culturally nonnormative and an unexpected challenge in later life, many Aboriginal kinship carers see the role as a familiar, cultural obligation that can break the cycle of inter-generational child protection intervention (Hunt, 2018; Milosevic, Thorpe, & Miles, 2009)
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