Grandmother Roles: “First Grandma”

We are quite used to the “People’s House” at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue being temporary home to not just Presidents and First Ladies, but also to their children. From the toddler-hood of John Kennedy Jr. to the late teens and young adulthood of the Nixon and G.W. Bush daughters, the house has served as a true family home for many of the First Families privileged to live there. With the election of Barack Obama, we the people get something extra to include in our thinking about what it means to be a First Family. We’re getting a “First Grandma”.

Her name is Marian Robinson, mother of Michelle Obama and grandmother to First Daughters Sasha and Malia. The 71-year old family anchor will be moving into the White House to extend the role she’s been playing for the past two years in the Obama campaign – holding down the family fort as only a grandma can. As Obama said in an article during the late stages of his election campaign,

“One of the best decisions we made when I was elected to the Senate was that we wouldn’t move from Chicago. A big reason for that was that Marian lived 10 minutes away. She loved nothing more than to spend time with her grandkids.”

In an article on MSNBC, More grandmothers raising another generation, Robinson was featured as the prominent face of a growing trend – grandmothers putting aside their own careers (Robinson was a bank secretary who left her job in 2007 to help out) or juggling work with the task of raising their children’s children.

In a sign of the times, the Census Bureau started tracking the phenomenon in 2004, and it’s becoming more pervasive.  Today 1.5 million working grandparents are caring for grandkids, up from 1.4 million in 2004.

“These grandparent caregivers have the same issues working parents have — balancing working with caring for children,” says Jaia Peterson Lent, deputy executive director of intergenerational advocacy group Generations United. She noted that more than two-thirds of grandparent caregivers are under the age of 60, and 71 percent are still in the work force.

I am lucky enough to have helped raise our eldest grandchild. He and his mother have lived with us since he was born, and we just paid the first installment on his college tuition for his first semester. Like many other grandmothers helping on that level, there are indeed “special needs” involved. Those, however, belong to his mother, who has struggled with late development of epilepsy for some years, and would have been very hard-pressed to provide a secure home and family life for her son – something we were happy to provide to them both, for as long as necessary.

Our other grandchildren don’t live with us, but we do get to see them fairly regularly and their parents don’t mind at all that I’m always willing to keep them so they can have a nice night out (or make that business trip or… whatever). Though at this point, in hoping to get live-in grandson through college so he has a decent chance at life, we are definitely NOT looking to raise any great-grandchildren. While grandparents are really the only truly “professional parents” around, great-grandparents should be truly and respectably retired from the tasks.

Because Barack Obama is taking charge of this nation at a time of unprecedented economic insecurity and a future full of unknowns, perhaps Marian Robinson will herself provide a necessary role model for how modern Americans can learn again how important extended families can be to survival in tough times, as our grandparents did during the Great Depression of the 1930s. And perhaps some of my readers will appreciate a helpful resource guide in the form of a gook by Sylvie De Toledo and Debora Elder Brown:

Grandparents as Parents: A Survival Guide for Raising a Second Family.

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