via:myfoxhouston.com
HOUSTON – Grandparents raising their own grandchildren.
It is a growing trend, especially in the African-American community. And research suggests it carries a heavy price.
A study here in Harris County found 94 percent of grandparents in that situation suffer from clinical depression.
“If you look at the statistics, many of the grandparents who are raising the grandchildren are at poverty levels themselves,” said Mary Ellen Trail Ross, DrPH, who conducted the research at UTHealth School of Nursing.
Trail Ross said grandparents usually take over for mothers who are out of the picture for various reasons: incarceration, drug use, child abuse or death.
It was death that claimed 30-year old Tamara McPherson last week, just 14 days after childbirth.
Now McPherson’s mother, 51-year old Jessica Valentine, is facing the prospect of raising her daughter’s four children, who range in age from 3-weeks to 16 years old.
Valentine wants to keep the siblings together and preserve a sense of family.
Maybe because she hasn’t always had one.
“Growing up in a foster home, I know how it was,” said Valentine. “I have brothers and sisters that I never met.”
This will the a second round of rearing grandchildren for Jessica Valentine, who has already brought-up two children born to her daughter Whitney as a teenager.
“I did what I had to do,” she said, “and I’ll do it again.”
But first, she wants to lay to rest her own daughter. Tamara McPherson’s body remains at the funeral home, but Valentine needs to raise about five thousand dollars to pay for the burial.
“Maybe somebody that sees this will help me,” she said.
