LaShawnDa Pittman’s book begins with a table of 74 women’s names listing their age, marital or dating status, and the number of children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren they have.
The common denominator among the women are that they are Black grandmothers who are raising any number of their children’s offspring, creating what is known as skipped-generation households, those consisting of only grandparents and grandchildren.
In her book “Grandmothering While Black: A Twenty-First Century Story of Love, Coercion and Survival,” Pittman, associate professor of American ethnic studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, plumbs the nuances of the role of Black grandmothers in today’s landscape.
The Northwestern University alumna collected data from nearly 100 women on Chicago’s South Side for four years through in-depth interviews with the women and ethnographic research via doctor’s visits, welfare offices, school and day care center appointments, and caseworker meetings.
In so doing, Pittman explored the myriad forces that help and hinder their caregiving, taking a deep dive into the relationship between elder and youth where the former is working to fulfill the functions of motherhood without the legal rights of the role.
Pittman showcases the strategies that Black grandmothers use to manage their caregiving role among state and federal systems to ensure the well-being of the next generation.
“This book shows the complexity of what these grandmothers are up against. It’s a lot,” Pittman said. “This long lineage of Black women dealing with a lot and the importance of us in giving voice to what that looks like and giving each other opportunities to share that information … it’s not small.”
Pittman points out research that found more grandparents are currently raising their grandchildren than at any time in American history. The number of U.S. children living in a grandparent’s household more than doubled from 3.2 percent in 1970 to 8.4 percent in 2019, with 26 percent of those children in skipped-generation households.
Two- and three-generational living arrangements are more prevalent in communities of color, with Black families being more likely than any other group to raise grandchildren in skipped-generation households.
The factors that contribute to this range from changes in social and child-welfare policies and practices to increases in divorce rates and single parenthood and declining birth rates and marriage rates, as well as teen pregnancy, mental and physical health issues, child abuse and neglect. Black children also are the most likely to live in a single-parent family.
Compound that with some Black-grandmother-household incomes being at or below federal poverty levels, and it raises a lot of questions.
“There’s a lot of systemic things that force it upon us. … Incarcerated Black men and women, that’s had a huge ripple effect — it decimated our communities and families,” Pittman said. “It used to be that a Black man could work in some kind of manufacturing job and send their children to college and buy a home. Now, the physical labor jobs are in the service sector, they pay less, they don’t come with benefits, it’s harder to make it. There’s more discrimination. All of those kinds of things matter. Can you afford to live? Forget moving into the middle class; can you even maintain working class and not slip into poverty?”
Over the course of more than 300 pages, Pitman pores over the economic survival strategies that Black grandmothers employ during the struggle of kinship care. It’s a mix of “burden and blessing,” rewards and consequences that range from an opportunity to parent again and a sense of purpose to the restriction of retirement freedoms and the impairment of physical and mental health.
Pittman said that too often during her interviews with grandmothers, she found they felt alone in their caregiver role. To help fix that, she is building out her website so Black grandmothers can share resources, knowledge and their stories with one another.
“It’s raising awareness and providing a sense of solidarity,” she said. “… It is so important for us to understand what we are asking of our mothers, grandmothers and aunts.”
