Continued from the previous post.

Mom had been none too pleased by my unfortunate and unplanned pregnancy at the ripe young age of all of 17 ... see the series on "The Girls Who Went Away" for all the gory details ... and worried more than a bit, I'm sure, when I had my second child just 18 months later.

By... more

Writing as I have lately about grandparents raising grandchildren ... and gratitude toward parents, as well ... this seems a good time to share some of my personal experience as it relates to both issues.

I'll have to go back in time, thirty-something years should about do it, to when I was single-parenting my now-grown children... more

The assumption of total responsibility for the raising of grandchildren may come fraught with issues, as we saw in the last post.

Often the situation can rise suddenly and unexpectedly, leaving grandparents not only emotionally unprepared for wearing the parenting hat again after maybe many years and ideas of a completely different sort of senectitude, but also dangerously short on extra resources.

According to a 10-year-old... more

A story that popped up in the course of today's research about grandmothers raising children ended up taking me all over the place in a search for information.

According to the report, one in twelve American kids is in the care of a grandparent, usually a grandmother. That is a huge number of grandmothers taking on the parental role all over again.

The US Census Bureau puts the figure at around 2.5 million grandparents presently... more

There's been some follow up to a story I posted about last month on eighty-something grandparents losing custody of their grandson to foster care.

The grandparents, Morris (88) and Mildred (85) Brasovankin, are fighting to bring their hyperactive grandson home, and the question they are facing from all quarters is, of course: How old... more

A couple of stories in the news about older parents need talking about today. The first, this one that asks the question, "How old is too old?".

It's grandparents raising a child this time, and they must not have been spring chicken-ish when the son who is dad to the little one was little, as they're now 89 and 86, and have been parenting the child off and on almost since birth a... more

I posed this conundrum in my last post:

Aside from a few obvious similarities ... both being about baths, and neither written for children ... what is the connection between the songs "Splish, Splash" and "Mother's Lament"? And to stretch the point just a bit more, what... more