Kathy Procter spent the long drive back from Wellington Hospital to her Kāpiti home sobbing. She was in her early 50s, with a 14-year-old still living at home, when Oranga Tamariki asked her and her husband, Andrew, if they could take in their 11-month-old grandchild, Anna*, because their adult daughter was not capable of caring for her.
That was 12 years ago, and the answer was yes. They bought a cot and a car seat, and reorganised their household for the little girl, who had special needs.
Reflecting on her ambivalence about taking on the responsibility, Procter recognises she went through a period of grief – for the child, for her daughter and for herself.
“You’re grieving because this is not your idea of how grandparenting should be. You realise you’re not going to be the grandparent of that child, you’re going to be her mother.”
Grandparenting has got more involved and complex for many New Zealanders. The support group Grandparents Raising Grandchildren (GRG) has a national membership of 6949 – up 9% on a year ago. Collectively, they’re looking after about 16,000 young children, often awarded custody by the Family Court. Then there are the uncounted superannuitants whose adult children and their children move in with them, sometimes to save money, sometimes because the housing market has just got too difficult or to offer support in a time of crisis.
AUT associate professor Barbara Myers refers to this situation as “intensity grandparenting’'. Internationally, researchers have referred to the rising pressures on the “grand-sandwich generation”. Myers’ area of research is older women in the workplace and, increasingly, she sees women working and balancing the pressures of caring for grandchildren beyond fun sleepovers at Nana’s or holiday activities.
Procter co-ordinates the Kāpiti branch of GRG, which has 80 members. She estimates about 90% have adult children who are addicted to drugs – mostly methamphetamine – and/or alcohol and they can’t raise their children for this reason. Some of the children are neurodiverse. Many have trauma and behavioural problems. “Grandparents and other whānau are changing their lives around to care for these kids,” she says, citing cases where grandparents have raised loans of up to $30,000 to engage lawyers for Family Court tussles.
“We’ve got grandparents coping with pressures while the grandparents are also growing older and having normal ageing illnesses. The husband or wife has a stroke and they’re dealing with that or dementia. All these normal things happen. And more so because we’re under stress a lot.”
But when the alternative may be state or foster care, Procter shakes her head. “You can’t give your grandchild away.”
Grandparents with custody of children up to the age of 18 can apply for the unsupported child’s or the orphan’s benefit, depending on the circumstances. Base rates for the unsupported child’s benefit range from $286 to $332 per child a week. In September (the most recent figures available), 14,259 children were receiving this benefit (it is in the name of the child), up by more than 2000 in four years. Superannuation payments are not affected by any additional benefits.
Oranga Tamariki aims to place a child who can’t live with a parent with whānau before it looks for other carers. At the end of last June, 455 children were in statutory care – the status of children for whom Oranga Tamariki is the legal guardian – being raised by grandparents. The agency’s definition of grandparents includes birth grandparents, great-aunts and great-uncles, great grandparents, kaumātua and kuia.
The agency says 17% of all children placed in statutory care in the year to March 2024 were placed with whānau caregivers, including grandparents. Another 18% were placed with non-whānau caregivers; the rest were in other arrangements such as Oranga Tamariki residences or provider-run homes.
“Oranga Tamariki recognises the importance of ensuring children are able to maintain a connection to their culture, while also being clear that safety is paramount,” a spokesperson said.
Age is no barrier
If the care of a mokopuna can start with a newborn, there’s no upper age limit for grandparents, either. GRG’s members include plenty of great-grandparents; its oldest caregiver is 91. “It’s always through trauma. It’s never a happy circumstance,” says GRG’s interim chief executive officer, Tatum McKay, of how the grandparents come to be in loco parentis. Addiction is a common cause, sometimes custodial sentences.
GRG has 37 groups around the country. It’s a not-for-profit run largely by volunteers. Its focus is on advocacy, education and wrap-around support, including trauma-based care workshops.
“It can be challenging raising grandchildren who have come through trauma,” says McKay. “Someone who has raised their own kids a generation ago might not understand that behaviour, so we try to help them understand it.
“People usually think of grandparenting as this wonderful time of life – we’ve done the hard mahi with the kids, now we get to enjoy our grandkids. But at a time of life that generally they’ve not anticipated, they’re having to do this. Often, it’s in the hardest way possible, at a time when people don’t have extra income sloshing around, so we have grandparents who have to go back to work, or they have to give up work to be around young kids or children with disabilities.”
McKay knows of grandparents now raising five or six children. “I don’t think New Zealanders understand how prolific this is. New Zealand is not unique, but if you have pockets of places where people suffer from addiction, it’s often the grandparents who step in to fill those parenting roles.
The baby was born addicted. Our daughter had gone out somewhere and our granddaughter also needed her fix. You’ve got no idea.
“I want to be clear that it’s not a burden. But it is hard that at a time of life when we expect people to ease off a bit, we expect these people to ramp it up again.”
When Procter goes to school to pick up her granddaughter, she sees other grandparents at the gate. The child’s mother has severe autism and has another daughter as well, now 10, being raised by her paternal grandparents.
The two sets of grandparents do what they can to let the half-sisters spend time together: Sunday night is dinner at the Procters with the siblings, and often their mother, too. To Procter, her daughter is more like an aunt to the girls, while she and the other gran are the “mothers”. “We’re the ones saying no and putting in boundaries.”
The Procters have six now-adult children and, in total, 13 grandchildren. With the other kids, Procter enjoys being “a typical grandmother”, turning up with gifts and doing baking. “I get to do the fun stuff. And then you give them back.”
Although her other children are supportive that she is raising their niece, they “grieve a little bit because I’m not there for their families as much as I would have been. But that’s just how it is. Life is like that, and they get it. But some families aren’t supportive.”
It can happen to anyone
Clare and Tony* are hands-on grandparents who live daily with the fallout from a child addicted to methamphetamine. The couple care for two primary-school-age granddaughters, Ruby and Rose*, the children of one of their own three girls. Clare describes them as “a typical, white, middle-class family. We never imagined this would happen to us.”
Their daughter, Angela*, developed a P problem and, at 20, became pregnant to a violent partner. She was hospitalised a week before her first baby was born after her partner kicked her in the stomach. She broke up with him and after she had the baby, moved in with her parents for six months. The baby was born addicted. “One night, the baby was screaming and her body was stiff; there was this horrendous noise. [Our daughter] had gone out somewhere and our granddaughter also needed her fix. You’ve got no idea.”
Angela returned to the partner and became pregnant again. Again, she moved in with her parents, again with a drug-addicted newborn. Again, she went back to the father, but this time, Oranga Tamariki stepped in and asked Clare and Tony to take both grandchildren.
“When they were living with their parents, the girls would leave kindy and go to the shops and steal food because they were hungry,” says Clare. “Oranga Tamariki said at the time that if you don’t take them, we might have to foster them out and you might not see them. We thought, ‘Oh, my god, we couldn’t do that.’ What else would you do?’ We’ve never regretted our choice.”
Angela has had two more children. Clare, 59, and Tony, 61, made the tough decision that they could not take on any more children. Another granddaughter, the girls’ half-sibling, lives with a relative and they see her. They also visit Angela, who lives with a new partner and a baby son.
“She’s covered in more bruises than a professional boxer. She’s had ribs broken by her current partner. You just feel helpless,” says Clare, who has reported her concerns to Oranga Tamariki.
They are also fighting in the Family Court to keep their granddaughters. Their father has applied for custody, which Angela opposes, as do her parents – Clare says he is a drug addict, violent, and has been in prison for burglary. Clare and Tony must fund their own legal costs; the girls’ father gets legal aid.
Clare and Tony offer stability – Ruby is now well settled at school after a rough start. The girls don’t like loud noises and they’re still experiencing trauma. Their grandparents have organised counselling and psychologists. “We’ve spent five years doing all we can for them. Our other kids feel like we’ve been cheated of our retirement but that’s life – it’s about these kids now.”
It starts with whāngai
Chris [surname withheld] is preparing for a busy Saturday morning with her whāngai grandchildren. Māori grandparents have played an important role in raising mokopuna, often through whāngai arrangements where Māori children are raised by someone other than their birth parents but the latter remain their legal guardians.
On a typical weekend morning, the 70-year-old drops 8-year-old Maisy* at basketball and takes 13-year-old Jay* out for breakfast while they wait for his basketball game to start. Sport is 20 minutes away from their rental home in the Bay of Plenty, so they all later have lunch at the skate park. The pensioner has full-time care of the two children, whom she considers her mokopuna even though they aren’t blood relatives.
In the early 1990s, Chris was a social worker in Taupō and raising her own six children – the youngest then 8 – when she came to know a gang family. There were five children in that household and a sixth on the way. When the baby was five weeks old, the mother started a jail sentence. The father called Chris and asked her if she could raise the child.
“My neighbour and I hopped in her car; we didn’t have a car seat or a nappy or a single thing for a baby. We went over, picked up the baby, and that was that.”
The baby stayed with Chris. Diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome, “she struggled through her life with issues, not only fetal alcohol but abandonment. When she was a teen, she reconnected with her family and she got involved in the gang lifestyle.”
We didn’t have a car seat or a nappy. We went over, picked up the baby, and that was that.
The children Chris now raises are the sons of that whāngai daughter. “It’s amazing. She’s not very strict,” Jay says with a smile about Chris, whom he calls Nana. He likes tech at school. “I get to do cooking and stuff.” He’s the second-tallest boy in his class, loves basketball and his hero is LeBron James.
“Other than financial, a lot of it is physical,” says Chris of raising teens at 70. “These days, I get a bit puffed and physically it can be a challenge.”
Chris has whakapapa to Te Arawa and Jay and Maisy are Tuwharetoa. While her whāngai arrangement with their mother was informal, she had to apply to the courts to get day-to-day care for the children.
“Everything has changed since the 1990s. Now, you can’t enrol them at school or get child immunisations without legal documents.”
Later, Chris sends photographs of Jay’s end-of-year leavers’ dinner. He stands proudly in a white shirt and tie next to her.
She has friends who are travelling. Asked if she envies them, she says: “No, I’m having more fun here. I’m getting more enjoyment. I get affirmation from little people who are excited to see me. It’s keeping it real and I feel like I’m doing the right thing.”
All about support
On Auckland’s west coast, Mandy Jakich represents a more typical Kiwi grandparent than those rescuing grandchildren or turning to hands-on parenting. In the UK, Jakich would be part of what’s called “the grandparent economy” – grans and poppas who provide free childcare to support other family members. A recent study reported in the Telegraph found 59% of UK grandparents helped with care, saving their adult children an average £13,500 (NZ$30,000) a year in costs they would otherwise pay.
At 57, Jakich, an artist, and her boatbuilder husband, George, are empty nesters – most of the week. Every Wednesday afternoon, Mandy or George picks up their grandsons, Rocky, 3, and Dax, 2, from kindy in Kumeū and brings them back to their Muriwai home for an overnight stay. The boys’ mother, their daughter, Tayla, and her husband, Joe, live locally, but both have jobs that require a lengthy commute.
Jakich has provided a day of childcare for the boys since they were young, but when Tayla got a new contract requiring her to commute, her parents helped out with overnight care. That contract has now ended but the arrangement worked so well, the whānau have kept it going.
Former America’s Cup sailor George has built a small boat for the boys, which they’ve named T-Rex, and plans to teach them to sail. They have a large garden, which invites play. Jakich reflects on her own relationship with her grandmother, picking boysenberries from her garden.
Now, it’s her turn to create happy memories. But the difference then was that her own mother didn’t work.
“We were never sent there to help mum and dad out, as happens with this generation. Today, young kids have to work. For grandparents, there are lots of different options to be able to support them in their lives, and this is how we choose to do it.
“George and I are both busy, self-employed people who have a lot of interests and are quite social. My own grandparents probably had a lot more time to give, but they probably didn’t give it. A lot of grandparents these days don’t seem like old people and they’re still working.
“It is wonderful to be able to offer our grandchildren something their parents might not have time for, and being able to pass on knowledge and experience to our grandsons is really special.”
Tayla and Joe lived with Mandy and George before they had their children, and returning to the nest is an increasingly typical scenario. According to the 2018 census, more than 64% of young adults aged 18-30 were living in the family home – an increase of about 20 percentage points since 2006. Some are adults moving back with their own children, and Age Concern hears that grandparents are under growing pressure.
“Grandparents are stepping into care-giving roles more frequently, whether due to housing challenges, financial strain, or the need to support whānau in times of crisis,” says Age Concern CEO Karen Billings-Jensen.
Grandparents need to establish boundaries if they feel they need to, Billings-Jensen says. “Grandparents are living longer, and many are managing their own health challenges. Balancing their needs with the demands of caregiving creates a level of pressure that we didn’t see to this extent in previous generations.”
Great expectations
Also in the mix are different parenting styles over the generations, which can create conflict. AUT’s Barbara Myers has made a study of grandmothers in the workforce. She refers to the “intensification” of mothering, which has spilled over to the intensification of grandmothering.
“There’s information overload, an app for everything; today’s mothers understand child development so much more than we did. You’ll hear grandparents saying, ‘My daughter arrived with the baby and this long list of things I need to do or note.’”
Myers has eight grandchildren aged 7 and under. “My philosophy is that I always do what that family want. I follow their rules. But there can be resistance. Some grandmothers might say, ‘I’m just going to do it my way and I’m not going to tell them.’”
But if there is caregiving to do, it is usually gendered, falling on grandmothers rather than grandfathers. New Zealand has one of the highest rates of senior employment in the OECD, and Myers says many grandmothers are expected to help their families while they’re also still working.
Our other kids feel like we’ve been cheated of our retirement but that’s life – it’s about these kids now.
“Granny nannies” like Mandy Jakich often step in to help daughters with young children who want to return to work. A Washington University study found living within 40km of a grandmother raised the labour force participation rate for married women with small children by 4-10 percentage points. The practice isn’t as common in countries such as Sweden, which has widespread, publicly funded childcare.
Here, Myers’ concern is that working grandmothers can feel overburdened if they’re expected to do too much. There can be a trade-off, especially for grandmothers who need to keep working for as long as they can. “Anecdotally, I’ve spoken to some grandparents who have had enough, and feel like they’re taken for granted.
“They’re the pivot generation, these grandparents, particularly women. Grandmothers are often caring for or helping grandchildren and they’re parenting their parents and mothering their adult children with complex lives. There’s a lot of pressure on grandparents.”
And while grandparents can feel torn between meeting the needs of different children and grandchildren, Myers has been upfront with her kids, telling them: “One little family will need you more at some point in your lives and you can’t spread that out equally on a daily or weekly basis.”
Just as families are diverse, so is grandparenting, and Myers empathises with those who are raising grandchildren in their senior years.
“Even if I’m feeling it as a grandparent when I’m busy at work, at least I get to come home at night and crawl into my own bed.’’
*Names changed for privacy