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6 Elder L. Rev. [i] (2010)

handle is hein.journals/elr6 and id is 1 raw text is: GRANDPARENTS AND GRANDPARENTING: EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION In 2004, for the first time, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) included a question in its Family Characteristics Survey which sought information regarding families where grandparents, rather than parents, were acting as primary caregivers. This question was inserted at the initiative of the Council on the Ageing (COTA) in NSW. The result was a figure of 22,500 families in this situation., involving more than 30,000 children under 16 years of age. The ABS figures were almost certainly an underestimate, like all previous estimates. For instance, the ABS estimated, on the basis of its 1999 Family Survey, that there werel2,000 families with grandparents as primary carers. Most academic investigators consider that the ABS methodology leads to undersampling, because a high proportion of these families are concentrated in a relatively small number of areas, especially near the coast, e.g. the central coast of New South Wales. Since then, the ABS has produced new figures which indicate a decline in the number of grandparent-headed families. This is a counter-intuitive result, which underlines the fact that research on this topic has barely scratched the surface. There can, however, be no doubt about the rapid increase in the numbers of children who have been placed in out--of-home care, i.e. not in the homes of their parents. In the period 1996 to 2005, there was a 70 per cent increase in these placements. Of these, 57 per cent were placed in foster care, and 42 per cent in kinship care. Kinship care has increased rapidly in recent years. This is a world-wide trend which has become the new orthodoxy among welfare authorities. In practice, the most important providers of kinship care are grandparents, particularly maternal grandmothers. In Australia, there is a particularly high proportion of Aboriginal (or indigenous) children in kinship care, so that the role of grandmothers is correspondingly greater in indigenous communities. According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, indigenous children are six times more likely to be in out-of-home care than non-indigenous children. (There is a correspondingly high proportion of grandmother-headed families in the African-American population, where the US Bureau of the Census estimated in 1997 that there were more than one million families headed by grandparents). Apart from acting as parents, grandparents also play a major role in providing child care for working families, classified by the ABS as informal care. This has increased from 30 per cent of school age children in 1984 to more than 40 per cent at the present time. Grandparents, and especially grandmothers, are the largest source of informal care, accounting for more than half. There appear to be four main factors which have brought this about: 1. Increased labour force participation by women 2. Increased rates of marriage breakdown 3. Increasing numbers of sole parents 4. Rising age of childbirth. The continuing effect of these trends, combined with increased longevity and better health among older people, has been to affect family life in a number f ways, including the role of grandparents. These effects were already visible to some sociologists a generation ago, a notable example being Bernice Neugarten in the 1960s. (Neugarten, B.L. and Weinstein, K.K., 1964, The Changing American Grandparent, Journal of Marriage and the Family, 26, 199-204). The consequences of these changes are now increasingly the subject of discussion among

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