Stripping Grandma's Cupboard -- Congress Cuts Food Money to Grandparents Raising Kids

uckier than most," a California grandmother told a group of others. "They're not in a foster home. They get to know that we've loved them since they were born." The women were gathered at a community organization that offered grandparents raising grandchildren a support group, activities for the kids and a box of cereal to take home at the end of the month when the grocery money ran out.

Among the budget cuts that squeaked through Congress just before Christmas was a provision that will take food -- $400 million worth -- out of the already-bare cupboards of grandparent-headed households. The provision will cut foster care payments to thousands of children who live with relatives -- usually elderly, impoverished grandmothers.

This measure heightens an already-painful disparity between the support offered non-related foster parents and that provided to so-called "kinship caregivers." "I've seen grandmothers mortgage their houses to the gills in order to provide for the child," says Susan Burton, who founded and runs a network of homes in Southern California for prisoners re-entering society. Many of the women she serves left their children with grandma when they went to prison.

Grandparents care for at least 2.4 million children nationwide, according to the U.S. Census.

"I've seen grandmothers lose their homes, go into bad credit to supply the needs of the child," Burton says. "Then you see the amount of money that would go into foster care for that same child. It says that the state is promoting the separation of families -- that children's needs are more apt to get met if they are taken from their family."

In researching a book about children whose parents are incarcerated, I spent time with grandparents across the country -- old women and occasionally old men who had been handed the burden of caring for a generation left parentless by addiction and incarceration. They had shouldered it willingly -- there had been no question, they told me again and again, that they would take the children -- but they were struggling beneath its weight all the same. Under the new budget, that weight will get heavier.

Nearly two-thirds of children being raised by single grandmothers live in poverty. Only about a quarter receive any aid at all from foster care or welfare. As I spoke with grandparents about the shame and frustration they faced when they tried to get help in caring for their grandchildren, it wasn't hard to see why most walked away empty-handed.

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