Critical to maintaining and improving physical and mental health is self‐care, yet interventions for grandfamilies (i.e., skipped‐generation households) minimally address such practices. Grounded by family resilience theory and strengths‐based approaches, this article introduces our rationale for an intervention addressing grandparents' and grandchildren's self‐care practices. The GRANDcares intervention is a tripartite intervention for grandparents, grandchildren, and service providers who work with grandfamilies. Following the National Institutes of Health's stage model for behavioral interventions, we briefly outline the literature on promoting self‐care and resilience in grandfamilies and meeting service providers' needs when working with grandfamilies. Next, we apply these theories to the development of the GRANDcares intervention. We close with a discussion of the GRANDcares programming and a synopsis of our efforts thus far, including recommendations for future research on strengths‐based interventions for grandfamilies.
Native Hawaiian custodial grandparents have a distinctive set of strengths and challenges that may lead them to benefit from a structured self-care program. The purpose of this paper is to describe a feasibility study with nine Native Hawaiian custodial grandparents who participated in a 6-week self-care intervention. Based on openended questions during the post-questionnaire and at the 6-month follow-up focus group, grandparent participants noted that their grandchildren needed education and clothing. Most grandparents did not endorse statements that their grandchildren had any mental or physical health conditions. Grandparents reflected that the intervention provided them with skills to help cope with raising grandchildren and helped them realize the importance of their health to providing care to their grandchildren. Based on the findings from this pilot study, the self-care approach may have benefits for Native Hawaiian custodial grandparents.
Background: Custodial grandparents experience greater physical health declines and higher rates of depression than their same-age peers who do not provide care, and grandchildren in grandfamilies often have behavior problems. However, few researchers have explored the impact of self-care education on decreasing these negative outcomes. Our study examined how a self-care and life-skills intervention influenced health behavior change in a sample of grandparents and grandchildren. Methods: Data were collected during eleven focus groups (and two interviews) with 55 grandparents, and one focus group with five grandchildren, at 6 months after the 6-week intervention detailed in this paper. Grandparents ranged in age from 46 to 84 years old (M = 62.19, SD = 8.24). Participating grandchildren ranged in age from 9 to 12 years old. Focus group transcripts were coded for content related to grandparents’ and grandchildren’s positive behavior changes following the intervention. Findings: Grandparents reported taking more time for themselves, reducing negative self-talk, increasing healthy physical choices, and having better communication skills after participating in the intervention. Similarly, grandchildren reported increased confidence in making friends, making good decisions, and getting along with others. Findings suggest that a self-care and life skills program show promise for improving the health and wellness of grandfamilies.
Objective
This article describes the development and implementation of a tripartite educational intervention to support custodial grandparents, grandchildren, and service providers who work with grandfamilies.
Background
Grounded in theory and practice of working with both grandparents and their grandchildren, this article provides an overview of strategies and approaches for recruitment and retention of grandfamilies in educational intervention programming and a discussion of our approach to bridging science into practice and the important role of university–community partnerships using community‐based participatory research principles.
Implications
Although we provide specific examples from the development and implementation of the multistate GRANDcares program, these methods and the lessons from the field may be broadly applied to many aspects of working with skipped‐generation and multigenerational families.
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