There’s an old saying: If I’d known how fulfilling grandchildren were, I’d have skipped having children. It’s meant to capture the sweetness of grandparenting — the joy without the grind. But thousands of grandparents in Massachusetts don’t get that luxury. They are not weekend babysitters. They are full-time parents again — navigating school systems, trauma therapy, special education plans, orthodontics, rent, and groceries — often on fixed incomes and in the years they were told would be their “retirement.”
Their situation exposes a policy gap rooted in something deeper: a quiet, structural ageism embedded in how we design social programs.
When children enter foster care, Massachusetts provides stipends, allowances, and case management. But when grandparents step in through guardianship petitions or informal family arrangements, as more than 90 percent of kinship caregivers do, support drops sharply. The labor is identical. The compensation is not. This disparity does not come from explicit prejudice. No statute says older adults deserve less. The bias is subtler.
It lives in a life-course assumption: that late adulthood is a stage of diminished responsibility. Our systems are built around a predictable arc of work, retirement, and winding down. Public benefits for older adults are largely designed to support lower consumption and reduced caregiving demands. When grandparents re-enter high-intensity parenting, the architecture doesn’t adjust. Instead, the state implicitly treats its intervention as a private family obligation rather than a compensated public service.
That is what structural ageism looks like. It is not an insult. It is an expectation. The expectation that grandparents will step forward because “that’s what family does.”
The expectation that they will absorb costs quietly. The expectation that their years, savings, and retirement plans are flexible buffers for social crises. Meanwhile, the commonwealth benefits from their labor. Each grandparent who prevents a foster placement reduces caseloads, administrative costs, and institutional disruption for children. Children raised by relatives often experience greater stability than those placed with strangers. These grandparents are not peripheral actors; they are functioning components of the child welfare system.
Yet they remain administratively invisible because they are not formally licensed. Ageism in policy often does not appear as discrimination. It appears as moralization. Older caregivers are praised as selfless. They are celebrated as heroes. But praise substitutes for parity. Admiration replaces funding. Walter names the deeper vulnerability plainly: “They’re going to be young when we die. They will lose us.” That fear is not an argument against kinship care. It is an argument for stabilizing it, financially and structurally, while caregivers are alive and capable.
And capable they are. These grandparents are not fragile figures overwhelmed by age. They are experienced adults managing trauma, schools, medical systems, and adolescence —often with more patience and institutional knowledge than younger caregivers. Their age is not the liability. The policy design is. If the state were to pay a foster parent to perform this work, it should not rely on an age-coded assumption of family duty to avoid paying a grandparent.
Parity is not charity. It is recognition that caregiving labor retains its economic value even when the caregiver is older. Massachusetts has led the nation in many areas of child welfare reform. Recognizing and correcting the structural ageism embedded in kinship support would be another step forward. Grandparents are not asking for applause. They are asking that when they become parents again, the commonwealth treat them as part of the system it already depends on, not as invisible volunteers in the final chapter of life.
James A Lomastro lives in Conway. Our grandchidlren lived with us and their parents for 17 years. We were foster parents for relatives as well and provided residential support for aging parents.