Helping Kin Care for Kids.

• Author: Christian, Steve

State lawmakers are recognizing the important role that grandparents and other relatives play in caring for children who might otherwise end up in state custody and in the care of strangers.

When Charlene Bannon moved from New York to San Francisco two years ago to study acupuncture, she never dreamed she would end up taking care of her sister's kids. Living on savings and credit cards and going to school full-time, she was hardly in a position to take responsibility for two youngsters.

But her sister had serious drug and alcohol problems. The children's living situation was, she says, "grotesque." Five-year-old Brianna was extremely withdrawn. Brandon, 9, suffered from major hearing loss due to untreated ear infections and was reading at a kindergarten level. Both children had been traumatized by the chaos and neglect at home. Their mother, unable to cope, handed the children over to Charlene, who became their legal guardian and started receiving welfare payments of $565 a month, not for herself, but for the children.

Jacqueline Hope lives in Denver and cares for her four grandchildren, ages 2, 4, 10 and 14. Her daughter also has a drug problem and drifts in and out of her children's lives. The two youngest, Leonard and Janea, were both born with drugs in their blood. Before her husband died two years ago, the family lived on his modest pension, his Social Security benefits and the $415 in welfare payments that the children received. With her husband gone, Jacqueline gets no pension. At 55, she is too young for Social Security. She started work as a house cleaner to make ends meet, but had to stop when health problems left her feeling tired and weak. Luckily, other family members have pitched in to help with expenses. Raising the children with so little money "gets to be kind of tough," she says. But she is determined to keep going. "The most important thing is that these children feel loved and wanted."

What Bannon and Hope have in common is that the children in their care are, in welfare terminology, "child-only" cases, in which no adult is on assistance. Analysts and policymakers have paid a great deal of attention in recent years to moving adult welfare recipients off the rolls and into jobs. They are just beginning, however, to look closely at child-only cases in the wake of federal welfare reform, which replaced the old AFDC program with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF).

In 1999, there were 770,000 child-only cases, about 29 percent of the total TANF caseload. About 60 percent of these cases nationwide are children who live with parents who are ineligible for TANF because they receive Supplemental Security Income, have broken welfare rules, are immigrants who have been in the country less than five years or for some other reason. The other 40 percent of child-only cases are children who are being cared for by a relative other than a parent. These relatives generally do not have to meet work requirements or time limits to receive cash assistance.

More than 2 million children in the United States today live in households headed by a relative. Two-thirds of these children are being cared for by grandparents. The number of these families grew 52 percent during the 1990s. Many of these grandparent-headed families receive no public assistance. Other grandparent caregivers receive welfare for themselves or foster care maintenance payments. Some of these families receive TANF child-only grants. According to most experts, children come to live with relatives for the same reasons they are removed from home and placed in foster care. Nevertheless, relatives in child-only cases generally receive much smaller monthly payments and far fewer services than do licensed foster parents.

HELP FOR RELATIVES

States and counties are beginning to understand the special needs of families like Charlene Bannon's and...