A word for grandparents raising grandchildren

What is a GrandRaiser?

A GrandRaiser is a grandparent who is raising a grandchild full-time, in their own home, often unexpectedly and often for the long haul.

There's no shortage of language around this. Policy documents call these households "grandfamilies" or "kinship care families." Academic researchers write "skip-generation households." Government forms reach for "custodial grandparent" or "kinship carer." Someone has been naming the situation for decades. Nobody got around to naming the person in the heart of it all. None of them name the person who knows nobody is coming to take over.

A grandparent and grandchild sharing a moment of wonder outdoors

The Distinction

A word that names the person, not the paperwork

Most of the existing vocabulary describes the situation. A grandfamily is a household arrangement. Kinship care is a category in a social services manual. Grandparents raising grandchildren is a phrase, not a name.

GrandRaiser is a noun. It names the human being.

The role is also different from grandparenting, which is what most people picture when they think of a grandmother and a grandchild. Grandparenting involves visits, baking, presents at Christmas, and handing the child back at the end of the day.

GrandRaising involves school pickups, parent-teacher meetings, doctor's appointments, custody paperwork, and the low-grade exhaustion of running a household at sixty-five that was supposed to be empty by now.

Around the World

How the world describes these families

The language has scattered across the English-speaking world. Same families, very different vocabularies.

Canada

The language sits somewhere between American and British usage. Statistics Canada counts "skip-generation households." Provincial child welfare systems use "kinship care" and "kin caregivers." In Ontario and several other provinces, "customary care" is the legal framing for Indigenous family-led raising arrangements. The longest-running national support organization is CANGRANDS National Kinship Support, founded in the 1990s. In British Columbia, Fairness for Children Raised by Relatives uses exactly that phrase as its core framing.

United States

The dominant terms are "grandfamilies" and "grandparents raising grandchildren," sometimes abbreviated GRG. The federal government passed the Supporting Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Act in 2018. Generations United runs a National Center on Grandfamilies. AARP uses "grandfamilies" in most of its public-facing materials.

United Kingdom

"Kinship care" has won. The Department for Education's 2023 National Kinship Care Strategy uses it throughout. The charity formerly known as Grandparents Plus rebranded as Kinship in 2021, because, in their own words, over forty percent of kinship carers are not grandparents.

Australia

"Grandparent carers" and "kinship carers" run side by side. Services Australia funds Grandparent, Foster and Kinship Carer Advisers. The Mirabel Foundation, founded in Victoria in 1998, has been one of the most visible voices for these families.

New Zealand

The longest-running advocacy organization kept the older name: Grandparents Raising Grandchildren New Zealand Trust, founded in 1999. Te reo Māori carries the practice through whāngai, the customary raising of a child by someone other than birth parents, very often by grandparents.

Sub-Saharan Africa

"Skipped-generation households" is the policy term. In South Africa, the Zulu word gogos (grandmothers) has crossed into English-language writing about the families holding orphaned grandchildren after HIV.

Spanish-speaking countries

The most common phrase is abuelos cuidadores, caregiving grandparents. The phrase appears across Latin America and Spain, often without distinguishing between part-time and full-time arrangements.

Beyond English

In Québec, the legal category is famille d'accueil de proximité. In Germany, Verwandtenpflege, relative care. In China, the millions of grandparent-raised rural children are named through the language of their parents' absence: 留守儿童 (liúshǒu értóng), left-behind children.

Different countries. Different histories. Different politics.
Same family. Same work.

GrandRaisers — grandparents raising grandchildren around the world

Why the word matters

None of the existing words quite fit the person doing the work

"Kinship carer" sounds like a job title. "Custodial grandparent" sounds like a court order. "Skipped-generation household" sounds like a demographer trying to be polite about something sad. When Generations United surveyed grandparents and other relative caregivers in the US, many said they did not see themselves in any of these terms.

GrandRaiser was coined to fill that gap. The word first appeared on the GrandFamily World blog and in the book Here We Go Again, written from the inside of the experience rather than from the outside looking in. It names the person, and it does it with dignity.

A verb made into a name.

A word that says the work out loud.

Not babysitting. Not just helping out. Raising.

The word is also gender-neutral, which the existing vocabulary often is not. Grandmothers do most of the work and get most of the attention, but grandfathers are quietly raising grandchildren too, often in invisibility. GrandRaiser includes all of them.

Who they are

Who GrandRaisers are

In the data, a GrandRaiser is most often a woman in her late fifties to early seventies. She often took the child in suddenly, sometimes overnight, sometimes after a phone call she had been dreading for years. The reasons vary: a daughter or son lost to addiction, mental illness, incarceration, death, or simply gone.

2.4M

US grandparents responsible for grandchildren

30K

Canadian skip-generation households

132K

UK children in kinship care

Across Canada, the United States, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, the population of grandparents raising grandchildren has stayed broadly stable over the past two decades. What has changed is the duration. The children are being raised, not minded. The arrangement is permanent more often than it used to be. The caregivers are older. The exhaustion is real.

In Indigenous communities across Canada, the United States, and Australia, grandparent and extended-family raising is part of a much longer cultural tradition that colonial child-welfare systems disrupted and that communities are reclaiming on their own terms.

Here We Go Again, together!

The book Here We Go Again came out of one GrandRaiser's experience of starting over and finding that nobody had given the role its own name. So she named it.

GrandFamily World grew out of the same recognition: that hundreds of thousands of people across Canada, the United States, and beyond are doing this work without a word to describe what they are.

That is what this word is for. A name for the role. A word for the work. A place to belong while you do it.

GrandRaisers belong here.

Join GrandFamily Village Read Here We Go Again

Common Questions

Questions people ask

What does GrandRaiser mean?

A GrandRaiser is a grandparent raising a grandchild full-time as the primary caregiver, usually in their own home. The word names the person. Most other terms (grandfamily, kinship care, skip-generation household) name the household or the arrangement.

Is a GrandRaiser the same as a kinship carer?

Not quite. Kinship carer is broader and includes aunts, uncles, older siblings, cousins, and family friends who take on the raising of a child. A GrandRaiser is specifically a grandparent in that role. In the UK, research shows roughly half of kinship carers are not grandparents, which is why both words are useful.

How is GrandRaising different from grandparenting?

Grandparenting is the relationship most people picture: visits, treats, time together, and handing the child back. GrandRaising is the day-to-day work of being the primary parent again. School pickups, medical decisions, custody paperwork, and full legal or practical responsibility for the child.

Where did the word GrandRaiser come from?

The word first appeared on the GrandFamily World blog and in the book Here We Go Again. It was coined by a GrandRaiser, for GrandRaisers, to name a role that the existing English vocabulary had described in many ways but never quite named.

How many GrandRaisers are there?

In the United States, about 2.4 million grandparents are responsible for grandchildren in their home. In Canada, roughly 30,000 grandchildren live in skip-generation households. The UK has approximately 132,000 children in kinship care, around half of them with grandparents. Australia has tens of thousands of kinship care arrangements, with First Nations children significantly overrepresented. The population has been stable for two decades, but the average length of caregiving has grown.