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Gerontologist Recruiting Custodial Grand-families for Study

Custodial grandparents and their grandchildren are a unique and little-understood population, as are the physical and social health challenges they face. A 黑料网 researcher has designed a program that could help to assess the well-being of families and provide resources to help them thrive.

Dr. Gregory Smith, Professor of Human Development and Family Studies in Kent State鈥檚 College of Education Health and Human Services, is now recruiting participants, nationally, for the second phase of his five-year $2.8 million project, 鈥淪ocial Intelligence training for custodial grandmothers and their adolescent grandchildren,鈥 funded by the National Institutes of Health鈥檚 (NIH) National Institute on Aging.

The project stands on the shoulders of two previous federally-funded studies Dr. Smith has conducted since he began researching custodial grand-families in 1996.Dr. Gregory Smith, Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at 黑料网

Custodial grandparents care for a grandchild full-time without involvement from biological parents, irrespective of formal legal status like adoption or foster care.

鈥淢ost of the researchers who study these families are gerontologists like me,鈥 he said. 鈥淚n the very earliest research on these families, we applied theoretical models and conceptual frameworks that we used to study family caregivers to older adults. Through my first study, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, I caught on to the fact that this is really a parenting phenomenon.鈥

Dr. Smith鈥檚 current project focuses on custodial grandmothers of children aged 12-18 in collaboration with Dr. Frank Infurna of Arizona State University.

鈥淎dolescent grand children had been largely ignored, so we鈥檙e the first nationwide intervention study looking explicitly at them,鈥 Dr. Smith said. 鈥淥ur focus on delivering our online program to the grandmother and grandchild simultaneously makes great sense because we know female caregivers have the greatest impact on adolescents鈥 social competence development, and adolescence is the peak period for developing social competence.鈥

Dr. Smith said social competence is negatively affected when people experience early life adversities like being abused by a parent, having a parent incarcerated, or the death of a parent.

鈥淭hat throws off a person鈥檚 ability to attain social competence, which in turn prevents them from forming meaningful and helpful relationships with other people.鈥

Dr. Smith said these grandchildren are highly likely to have experienced early life adversities, given the reasons most of them are in their grandmothers鈥 care. He said researchers also suspect that so too have the grandmothers, 鈥渂ecause these patterns of suffering early life adversities are transmitted across generations,鈥 he said.  鈥淚n turn, the lifelong distress associated with having experienced adversity in early childhood can negatively affect one鈥檚 ability to parent future generations.鈥

Dr. Smith said social intelligence training is thought to be especially effective in people who have experience early life adversities.

鈥淪o there鈥檚 a great deal of scientific basis for this study. Never mind the fact that these are custodial grand-families, ours is the first study of any type to look at the effects of delivering a social intelligence intervention simultaneously to a female caregiver and an adolescent child,鈥 he said.

Media Contacts:
Dan Pompili, dpompili@kent.edu, 330-672-0731
Emily Vincent, evincen2@kent.edu, 330-672-8595

 

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