Articles in this section serve as resources on child educational development and challenges, as well as information on child-rearing practices.
1. Font, Sarah A. “Kinship and nonrelative foster care: The effect of placement type on child well‐being.” Child Development 85, no. 5 (September 2014): 2074-2090.
This article compares the academic achievement, behavior, and health of children in formal kinship care to children in non relative foster care, with the purpose of examining the effects of placement type. Utilizing a national sample of 1,215 kin and foster children, the authors found their results to vary: they consistently estimated a negative effect of kinship care placement on child reading scores but in math and cognitive skills, and even health, there was no substantive difference between children in different placement types.
2. Kakooza, James, and Sitawa R. Kimuna. “HIV/AIDS orphans’ education in Uganda: The changing role of older people.”Journal of Intergenerational Relationships 3, no. 4 (2006): 63-81.
The study that this article discusses examined the epidemic creating a crisis in the Sub-Saharan African family structure that is HIV/AIDS. In Uganda, it was discovered that many of the roles of older people had been reversed from receiving care, to providing it. Subsequently, the study used cross-sectional data from the Kayunga district in Central Uganda to examine HIV/AIDS impact on the older people. Almost all grandparent-headed households (97.3%) in the study had on average 3 orphaned-children going to school. This article highlights the challenges that grandparents and other older kinship care providers face in providing for their children’s educational needs on top of other financial and psychological strains.
3. Strom, Paris S., and Robert D. Strom. “Grandparent education: Raising grandchildren.” Educational Gerontology 37, no. 10 (2011): 910-923. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03601277.2011.595345
The authors of this article discuss how for many grandparents raising their grandchildren, they can feel underprepared in being second-time parents, as previous experience raising their own children often differs considerably from the present challenges of caring for grandchildren. The authors recommend a specific type of educational support group to help grandparents in managing their roles as parents-again. They discuss how a kind of peer-led support group, in which successful grandparent-caregivers provide a constructive paradigm in parental matters for other grandparents, can be beneficial.
Grandfamilies Resources 