When Rebecca Reed imagined life in her late eighties, she pictured church on Sundays, family dinners, and the occasional vacation. Instead, at 87, she is still in New Orleans, working two part time jobs for $12 an hour after spending years raising her two grandchildren following the deaths of her daughter and son in law.
Her story, shared in an essay for Business Insider, shows what happens when retirement collides with a second round of parenting.
Her experience is personal, but it is not rare. Recent census based estimates cited by AARP suggest that more than 7 million grandparents in the United States live with their grandchildren, and about 2.3 million of those grandparents are primarily responsible for the children in their home.
In many of these households, grandparents are already in their sixties or seventies when they step back into full-time caregiving.
A separate analysis from the Brookings Institution finds that roughly 1.4% of all children in the country live with a grandparent caregiver, and that this share has stayed high for two decades. Children in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi are among the most likely to live in these arrangements.
For many older adults, this second parenthood can mean putting retirement dreams on hold, sometimes for years.
When retirement turns into parenting again
Reed’s second round of caregiving began with loss. Her son in law died of cancer in his early forties, and her only child died a little over a year later. Their children were 13 and 11. Reed and her husband became the legal guardians, suddenly responsible again for school runs, rules, and teenage moods while they were already in their late sixties and seventies.
She describes driving across the city to school events and PTA meetings, feeling out of place as a gray-haired guardian in rooms full of parents who were decades younger. At home, the grief was mixed with rebellion.
The grandchildren were testing boundaries. Reed was trying to hold everything together. She eventually realized she had to pick her battles, let some things go, and accept that this chapter would not look like the years when she raised her daughter.
Like many caregivers in similar situations, Reed looked for support. She found a local group for grandparents raising grandchildren at a Jewish community center in New Orleans, where others were taking in grandchildren because of addiction, abandonment, or other crises.
Those meetings, she recalls, did not erase the stress but made it easier to see that she was not alone.
The financial strain of doing the right thing
Grandparent caregivers often say the decision to step in is simple. The financial reality is not. Reed and her husband relied heavily on their late daughter’s life insurance policy to cover private school tuition, uniforms, and eventually college for their granddaughter. Without that payout, she says, they could not have afforded the basics that let the children stay on track.
Even with that help, money stayed tight. After her husband died in 2011, Reed filed for bankruptcy and went back to work. Today she lives on Social Security and her modest wages, juggling a car payment, rising insurance costs, and the everyday bills that hit every household when the electric bill arrives or the roof needs repairs.
Research suggests her situation is part of a wider pattern. A census-based snapshot summarized by AARP reports that about half of grandparents who are responsible for their grandchildren are at least 60 years old, and many live in or near poverty.
A more detailed look from Brookings finds that children in grandparent caregiver families are more likely to live in deep poverty and more likely to live with a disabled adult compared with children in parent-led homes.
At the same time, there is pressure to spend. A 2025 survey highlighted by AARP found that 96% of grandparents provide some financial help to grandchildren, with many spending thousands of dollars a year. 17% said they felt pushed to give more than they could afford, and about one in ten had dipped into savings or retirement accounts to help.
For grandparents who are already raising kids full time, that tension can be even sharper.
A safety net full of holes
You might assume that grandparents doing this work receive the same help as foster parents. In practice, many do not. A recent report from the Government Accountability Office notes that about 2.4 million children lived in kinship families in 2023, meaning they were being raised by grandparents, relatives, or close family friends because their parents could not care for them.
Many of these families are outside the formal foster system, which makes them ineligible for some of the most generous supports.
The same report warns that high living costs, from food to utilities, are squeezing kinship caregivers who often rely on fixed incomes. Some delay home repairs or even their own medical care to keep children housed and fed. Others return to work after retiring in order to close the gap.
On paper, programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and federal kinship navigator funding can help relatives who step in. In reality, families face confusing rules, paperwork, and legal hurdles, especially when they do not yet have formal guardianship.
For an 80 year old learning new online systems just to keep benefits flowing, that process can feel as demanding as any job.
What would make second parenthood more sustainable
Experts who study grandfamilies tend to agree on a few steps that could ease the load.
Reports from Brookings and national kinship networks recommend lowering the barriers for grandparent caregivers to access safety net programs, expanding state-level kinship navigator services, and simplifying legal pathways to guardianship so that grandparents can enroll children in school and authorize medical care without a legal maze.
Community-based organizations also play a quiet but important role. Groups such as the Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Information Center of Louisiana offer legal information, support groups, and referrals that help caregivers understand their options and connect with local aid.
For many grandparents, a single conversation that explains which forms to file or which office to call can make the difference between coping and crisis.
Reed’s grandchildren are now adults. One is a certified public accountant, the other has built a career in events work. She is proud of the people they have become and still hopes to retire by 90 so that she can one day babysit a great grandchild instead of leaving family gatherings early for a shift at work.
Her story captures both the resilience and the strain inside many American living rooms where grandparents are raising kids for a second time. At the end of the day, the question is simple. If older adults are doing so much to hold families together, will policy catch up and support them before they age out of the workforce entirely.
The report was published by the Government Accountability Office.
