Raising Them Again

When her son's addiction left her three grandchildren with nowhere safe to go, Patricia Doyle did what so many grandparents before her have done: she said yes before she had time to think it through. What followed was not just a parenting challenge but an entirely unmapped journey through family court, school enrollment offices, benefits paperwork, and a grief she had never expected to carry twice in one lifetime.

Raising Them Again: The Grandparent's Playbook for Kinship Caregiving is the comprehensive, heartfelt guide Patricia wishes someone had handed her on day one. Drawing on more than two decades as a licensed clinical social worker and kinship care navigator, alongside her own lived experience raising her grandchildren to adulthood, Patricia walks grandparents step by step through the legal custody and guardianship basics no one explains clearly, how to enroll a grandchild in school without a custody order in hand, how to find and apply for benefits like child-only TANF and Medicaid before months or years of unnecessary financial strain pass by, how to parent a second time around with a body and a generation gap that bring their own challenges, and how to hold space for both a grandchild's grief and your own without losing yourself in the process.

This is a book for grandparents raising grandchildren, grandparents navigating kinship care, and any relative caregiver searching for practical guidance on custody for grandparents, kinship caregiver support, or how to parent grandchildren after trauma. Warm, direct, and unflinchingly honest about both the difficulty and the unexpected grace of this chapter, this book is the steady hand so many grandfamilies are searching for.