About 83,000 grandparents care for nearly 260,000 children across the commonwealth, according to state officials. They often take over these roles after losing their adult children to disease, trauma or other reasons.\n<\/p>\n
Several ongoing issues can play a part into why a parent is no longer able to care for a child and a grandparent steps in<\/a>, said Karen Buck, executive director of the SeniorLAW Center.\n<\/p>\n \u201cThe opioid crisis<\/a>, the addiction crisis, the housing crisis<\/a>, incarceration<\/a>, poverty, even military deployment,\u201d she said.\n<\/p>\n Older and aging residents may struggle to navigate a complex field of judicial systems and policies to obtain temporary custody or even permanently adopt their grandchildren, Buck said, which can be financially challenging and time-consuming.\n <\/p>\n Under Pennsylvania law, parents or grandparents do not have a right to counsel in civil court cases, as they do in criminal court matters, she added, which presents another barrier.\n<\/p>\n The legal line can be especially helpful in these cases, Buck said.\n<\/p>\n \u201cBecause it\u2019s a telephone-based service, you can access it from the privacy of your home,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd for older adults, that overcomes the obstacles of transportation, of mobility, of disability, of poverty and other obstacles to accessing legal services.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"About 83,000 grandparents care for nearly 260,000 children across the commonwealth, according to state officials. They often take…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":254698,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5132],"tags":[5229,11871,55147,1448,4757,2830,1311,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-254697","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-grandparents","10":"tag-growing-golden-aging-with-purpose","11":"tag-pa","12":"tag-parenting","13":"tag-pennsylvania","14":"tag-philadelphia","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115267409369835435","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/254698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}