Grandparent kinship care in Australia

Grandparents taking on the full time parental care of their grandchildren is an increasingly prevalent family structure in Australia and the fastest growing form of out-of-home placement of children in contact with our public welfare system. Unfortunately, Australia lags behind the rest of the world in its characterisation of this parenting style. The limited accurate information available to community and national and state government agencies and policy makers effectively means that they do not have evidence on which to build a policy or service framework to support these families. The aim of this paper is to raise awareness of the needs of grandparents who parent their grandchildren in the Australian aged care community, with a view to a funded large scale research project in the near future. (author abstract)