Teens who give COVID-19 to grandma could land in foster care
Raising teenagers can be a whiteknuckle experience for many parents when the nation isn’t being stalked by a deadly virus.
But imagine being a grandparent raising teenagers who can be accomplices in killing you with it.
That’s the predicament that people like Leslie Shaw, 58, are grappling with.
Shaw has been raising her granddaughter, Casha-mona Shaw, since she was 3 years old. Her mother struggled with a crack-cocaine addiction. Shaw’s son and Casha-mona’s father have been in and out of prison.
But now, Casha-mona is 14 and trying to understand why she can’t go to parties and sleepovers when the only person standing between her and a foster home is a grandmother who has Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, or COPD.
That’s a condition that novel coronavirus loves to feast upon and one that, if Casha-mona happens to pick up at a sleepover or party, can kill Shaw.
“We’ve been going back and forth about that [sleepovers and parties],” said Shaw. “She’s just in her room going stir-crazy watching TV...
“With me having COPD it’s tough...i’m trying to keep her occupied. She says she’s bored, and I tell her to read a book.”
Throughout the state and nation, grandparents are facing Shaw’s situation as the body count from COVID-19 accumulates.
According to AARP, more than three million older adults are raising grandchildren - a proportion that has doubled since the 1970s and increased by 7% over the past five years.
Those parenting duties fell upon many of them because of children who are struggling with crack cocaine and opioid addictions, or who are incarcerated, or who may be deployed militarily or who, for a variety of reasons, haven’t been able to handle the job of parenting, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other sources show.
About 6%, or 89,000, of youths in Tennessee lived with grandparents in 2018, the latest year for which statistics are available, according to Kids Count data. In Memphis, 6%, or 10,000, of children are being raised by grandparents.
For many grandparents who find themselves parenting again, that situation can be vexing. Most research shows that they are more likely to be poor or living on fixed incomes.
Like Shaw, they are also more likely to suffer from chronic health problems.
Gloria Carr, an associate professor of nursing at the University of Memphis whose research and teaching focuses on vulnerable populations and grandparents rearing grandchildren, said the COVID-19 lockdown creates extra pressures for grandparents who want to provide more than food, clothes and housing for their grandchildren.
“Grandparents really want to see their grandchildren happy, so this is tough for them,” Carr said. “Some may even go ahead and allow them to go out and be with their friends because they’re so unhappy now...”
Compounding that unhappiness are social-isolation steps that grandparents have to resort to even inside the home.
Shaw, for example, says that once upon a time, she used to allow Cashamona to come in her bedroom to talk and to watch television.
She’s stopped doing that to guard against coronavirus, but that’s also curtailed a bonding experience.
Another thing that makes many grandparents vulnerable to COVID-19 is that many have already neglected themselves to prioritize the needs of their grandchildren, Carr said.
“They aren’t taking care of their health, so their chronic conditions become even less controlled,” she said.
That’s why it’s important during this time that grandparents have support systems to help them endure the challenges that come with raising teenagers in this time of coronavirus.
Molly Crenshaw, director of ACE Awareness Foundation’s Universal Parenting Place at Perea Preschool, said that it is counseling grandparents struggling to raise teenagers during this time; a time when prom, dances and other life events that they look forward to are canceled.
It is also offering meditation and yoga classes online to help them combat stress, and showing them how to find some creativity in social distancing such as decorating masks with the grandchildren and stocking hand sanitizer by the door.
“This is also a great time for teenagers to bond with grandparents by showing them how to use technology,” Crenshaw said.
Yet Shaw says one way that she deals with her predicament is that she reminds Casha-mona, as well as a 20year-old grandson who once lived with her, that she’s all they have.
She reminds her granddaughter that even though she may be bored and restless right now, that’s bearable compared to being in a foster home.
Or, worse.
“My grandson, he’d be on the streets,” Shaw said. “Even though he’s not living with me now, if I die, he would have nowhere to go if he decided to come back. I’m their stability...
“I miss hugging and kissing them, sure. But at this point in my life, I’ve loved on them and kissed them enough to last a lifetime, and we’ll get to do it again once this is over.
“My advice to other grandparents is to take it one day at a time and to pray, because these children still need somebody.”
For more tips on how to cope as a grandparent during coronavirus, call ACE Foundation at 901-249-2456.
You can reach Tonyaa Weathersbee at 901-568-3281, tonyaa.weathersbee @commercialappeal.com