When Grandparents Are Called to Parent

In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Vice-Presidential nominee J. D. Vance referred to his grandmother as his “guardian angel by my side.” Acknowledging the important role that his grandmother played in rescuing him from a chaotic household with an unstable mother with a series of husbands and boyfriends and a drug problem, Vance dedicated his best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, to his grandparents, who were, he writes, “without question or qualification, the best things that ever happened to me.”

Vance understands better than most that grandparents are needed now more than ever before. Stepping in to fill the void that parents are leaving in the wake of parental substance abuse, incarceration, parental mental health issues, or death, the most recent U.S. Census data shows that 7.1 million American grandparents are living with their grandchildren under 18. More than 2.3 million of those grandparents are fully responsible for raising their grandchildren and about a third of those grandchildren in the care of these grandparents are younger than 6 years old.

This is not just an urban problem. “Split-generation” households — households that are formed by grandparents when parents are no longer able to take of their own children — are equally common in central cities and in rural areas. In urban areas, split generation households are more likely to be poor and Black, while those in rural areas — like that of J.D. Vance who often describes himself as a “Hillbilly” — are more likely to be white. Appalachia has been hardest hit.

In fact, West Virginia has the highest rates of split households in the country. Over half of the grandparents in most counties in West Virginia report that they are raisingtheir grandchildren. Most research indicates that this high rate of split households is primarily due to West Virginia’s drug epidemic.

It is not a coincidence that the state with the highest drug overdose mortality in the country is also the state with the highest numbers of grandparents raising grandchildren. West Virginia has a drug overdose rate of more than 90 per 100,000 individuals. That is nearly three times the national rate of overdose of 32 per 100,000. The only other states that comes close are Kentucky and the District of Columbia, which have rates about half of that of West Virginia.

J.D. Vance is correct that his grandparents — like all grandparents who are willing to step into the void left by abusive or neglectful parents — are truly the “guardian angels” when it comes to keeping children out of the state system of foster care. This is not to say that his grandparents were perfect people. And for this perceived imperfection, Vance has been recently vilified by the left. An especially vitriolic article published recently in the New Yorker accused Vance of having a distorted view of women’s roles and the importance of fathers. Criticizing Vance for yearning for a traditional two-parent family, theNew Yorker article described Vance as nostalgic for a time when “the ideal matriarch [is one whose] place is at home. Their job, which they have no choice whether to quit, is to have babies. Their entire material well-being is tied to one fallible man.”

Denigrating Vance’s grandmother as a woman with “meager education, no skills or training, little in the way of a social network, and quite possibly, serious mental-health challenges,” the New Yorker author claims that “Perhaps to bolster his Second Amendment bona fides, he shared an affectionate anecdote about the nineteen loaded handguns that Mamaw kept scattered around her house.”

The attacks on Vance — and his family history — have recently escalated as the left is now claiming that Vance is using his chaotic family situation to call for strengthening traditional families — at the expense of women. He was especially vilified for an unfortunate comment he made in 2021 in a Fox News interview when he said that “We are effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”

Vance knows — as we all must know — that a two-parent stable family is the best way to raise children. Vance has suffered the pain of a fractured chaotic family and was rescued by imperfect grandparents who loved him. These grandparents — flawed as they may have been — were the best thing to happen to a young J.D. Vance.  We should be grateful to them and to all of the grandparents who are stepping up to raise their grandchildren in what is an increasingly chaotic culture.

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