Evaluating a Pilot Self-Care Curriculum for Custodial Grandparent Caregiver Support Groups

Background/Purpose: While much of the current literature focuses on needs and challenges, an emerging line of inquiry centers on the empowerment of grandparent caregivers, as well as preventative efforts to address holistic health and well-being. There is strong evidence that custodial grandparent caregivers are not adequately attending to their own needs due primarily to the attention on the children in their care. Less consideration has been given to developing evidenced-based practices to facilitate custodial grandparents’ prioritization of their own health and well-being through self-care. As such, the purpose of the present study is two-fold: 1) to evaluate a pilot 9-session self-care curriculum integrated into a short-term pre-existing program designed to support grandparent caregivers and 2) to explore caregivers’ understanding and experiences with self-care.  This poster focuses on an innovative community-based intervention that draws on previous research and is also grounded in a new conceptualization of self-care.  The emphasis is on empowerment, intentionality, and self-advocacy of caring for ones’ self rather than healing, recovery, and avoidance of negative outcomes.

Methods: Using a basic interpretive qualitative design and purposive sampling, data were collected through in-depth, face-to-face interviews with 10 custodial caregivers, seven African American and three Caucasian women, between the ages of 41 and 70 years old. The range of participation was 3 to all 9 of the group sessions that incorporated the self-care curriculum. Short surveys completed post interview provided additional data and included variables such as health perception and frequency of self-care practices. Health perception was measured with a single Likert-scale item from the Short Form Health Survey-36, and personal self-care practices were measured using the Personal Self-Care scale of the Self-Care Practices Scale (SCPS). Most of the grandmothers reported “fair “to “good” health (n = 8) and that they took care of themselves “rarely” or “sometimes’ (n = 6).  

Findings: Thematic analysis revealed caregivers found the curriculum to be helpful in decreasing stress and increasing consideration of self-care, and highlighted caregivers’ perspective that self-care is primarily about physical health.  The analysis also indicated the need for ongoing development and implementation of the intervention to continue to promote a broader perspective about self-care grounded in empowerment, intentionality, and self-advocacy rather than only healing, recovery, and avoidance of negative outcomes. Grandparents reported stressors such as finances, time, other caregiving responsibilities hindered the grandmothers from being able to care for themselves.  As a result, the importance of self-care can be lost, resulting in the holistic health and well-being of the caregivers being in jeopardy.

Conclusions/Implications: Findings support continued development of the intervention and the manner in which it was provided. An expanded self-care curriculum to be used with two new caregiving groups is explored along with recommendations for future interventions. There is support for the notion that buy-in from grandparents and assistance with the other stressors in their lives will increase the likelihood self-care is prioritized by custodial grandparents. At a programmatic level, the benefits of self-care to holistic health and well-being needs to be continually emphasized as a priority for caregivers.