You had a plan for this decade. Maybe it involved travel, or finally slowing down, or a small house and a quiet routine.
Instead you are learning a new math curriculum, negotiating screen time, sitting in a pediatrician's waiting room, and attending a parent-teacher conference where you are thirty years older than everyone else in the room.
Millions of children in the United States are being raised primarily by grandparents or other relatives. These households are sometimes called grandfamilies, and they are one of the most under-supported groups in the country.
The double loss
Here is what makes this different from any other caregiving situation.
You are raising a child because something happened to your own child. Addiction, incarceration, mental illness, death, or an inability to parent. So you are grieving your own child while parenting theirs — and often you are grieving someone who is still alive, which is one of the hardest kinds of loss there is.
This produces a set of feelings that are almost impossible to say out loud:
- Anger at your own child, and guilt about the anger
- Wondering what you did wrong as a parent
- Loving your grandchild fiercely and resenting the situation simultaneously
- Grief for the retirement you had planned, and shame about grieving it
- Fear about what happens if your health fails
- Exhaustion you feel you are not permitted to mention, because you chose this
Every one of those is normal. None of them means you love your grandchild less.
The practical realities
Money. Most grandfamilies are living on a fixed or reduced income and were not planning for children's expenses. Many do not know that assistance exists.
Health. Parenting is physically demanding, and doing it in your sixties or seventies with arthritis, cardiac issues, or reduced stamina is genuinely harder. Caregivers in this position also tend to neglect their own medical care.
Legal ambiguity. Without formal guardianship, enrolling a child in school, consenting to medical care, and accessing benefits become obstacles. Many grandparents are caring informally and hitting bureaucratic walls constantly.
Isolation. Your peers are retired and traveling. The parents at your grandchild's school are half your age. You fit in neither group.
Uncertainty. The child's parent may return, and may want the child back. Living with that possibility, sometimes for years, is a chronic stressor for the whole household.
The children are also carrying something
Children in these households have almost always experienced loss, disruption, and often trauma before arriving.
Expect: behavior that tests whether you will also leave; grief for a parent who is alive; loyalty conflict, where loving you feels like betraying them; anger that lands on you because you are the safe target; and questions about their parent that are difficult to answer honestly.
What helps most: absolute predictability of routine; honesty at their level about where their parent is; permission to love their parent without it threatening you; and repair after conflict, which many of these children have never seen an adult do.
Nevada-specific supports worth knowing
Many grandfamilies here do not know what exists.
Kinship care assistance. Nevada operates a kinship care program providing financial support to relatives raising children, with different pathways depending on whether the child is in the formal foster system. The amounts and eligibility differ significantly between formal and informal arrangements, and it is worth asking specifically.
Child-only TANF grants. Available to relative caregivers regardless of the caregiver's own income, and frequently unknown to families who assume they earn too much to qualify.
Medicaid for the child, which is generally available and separate from your own coverage.
Legal help. Nevada Legal Services and the Clark County Law Library provide assistance with guardianship. Formal guardianship resolves most of the school and medical consent problems and is usually worth pursuing.
Aging and Disability Services in Nevada administers caregiver support programs that include relative caregivers.
211 connects you to local resources for housing, utility, food, and childcare assistance.
Your own care matters more than you think
Caregivers in this situation consistently postpone their own medical and mental health care, and the whole household depends on your health.
Three specific things:
Treat the grief. The loss of your child — to addiction, incarceration, illness, or death — deserves its own attention. Many grandparents have never had a single conversation about it, because every conversation is about the grandchildren.
Find other grandfamilies. The relief of being with people who understand this specific arrangement is substantial, and general parenting groups do not provide it. Support groups for kinship caregivers exist in the valley.
Plan for the worst case. Who cares for the child if you cannot? This is frightening to think about and it is one of the most protective things you can do — a named successor guardian, documented, dramatically reduces the anxiety that most grandparents carry silently.
When to seek professional support
For yourself: persistent low mood, sleep problems, exhaustion beyond the physical, hopelessness, or an inability to stop thinking about your own child's situation.
For the grandchild: sleep or eating changes, aggression, school difficulty, withdrawal, regression to younger behavior, or any talk of self-harm.
For the household: constant conflict, a teenager who has become unmanageable, or a situation where the child's parent's involvement is destabilizing everyone.
Care that fits a grandfamily schedule
We work with older adults, children from age three, adolescents, and families together — including grief, family dynamics, trauma, and the strain of caregiving. Sessions are available at our east valley office on E Russell Road, our northwest office on N Durango Drive, and by secure video anywhere in Nevada, which for a household with school runs and no spare hours is usually the practical option.
We are in network with most major insurance plans. Medicare covers outpatient mental health care, and Nevada Medicaid covers the child's behavioral health.
What you are doing is enormous
Children raised by relatives generally do better than children who enter the formal foster system with strangers. That outcome exists because of people like you, doing a job you did not plan for, at an age when you had every reason to expect a rest.
That deserves support rather than admiration alone. Book a session — for the grandchild, for yourself, or for both.