This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Michael Frost, 67, and his wife Connie, 63, who are raising their teenage granddaughter in Georgia. They have permanent custody of her and said they’ve prioritized providing her with a stable home and strong education. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
MICHAEL: My wife and I have been raising Kinsley, our granddaughter, since she was 2 years old. Now, she’s 13.
This is the second marriage for both my wife and me, and we married in 2012. I have three daughters, and she has four. I tease everybody that we live on the “Estrogen Ranch.”
My family owns a party rental business, where you can rent anything from a large excavator to a lawnmower to tents and chairs. Two of my daughters are also in that business. My wife has long worked in ministry, and she did event planning for church events and weddings.
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I retired in 2010. My family had a farm in Winston, which is about an hour from Atlanta. My family bought the farm in 1987. My parents died in 2009, and I bought the farm from the estate in 2010. It’s 57 acres, and we have cows, goats, and chickens, as well as sawmills and a pottery studio.
We have 20 grandchildren and one great-grandchild. It’s a large family, and we try to be as present as we can in their lives.
We were empty-nesters for almost two years.
MICHAEL: After we got married, our children were all out of the house, and it was awesome being empty nesters. Kinsley’s mother had moved around a lot. Kinsley was in some situations that weren’t great. Her mother, Connie’s daughter, was also in and out of the hospital with liver disease and wouldn’t see Kinsley for a few months at a time.
After a series of liver transplants, she improved and has her own place. She had another child whom she is raising.
We were granted temporary custody of Kinsley, then won permanent custody. I knew that this was going to be at least 18 years of taking care of a child again. I wouldn’t be an empty nester again until I was 72. I didn’t want to do this, but there was nobody else willing to do it. My wife believed this would be only temporary.
This was all about safety. My wife has so much compassion and is willing to do anything. I’m not saying I’m not that way, but I also understand that people have responsibilities.
CONNIE: The adjustment was hard. She couldn’t sleep in the bed by herself, so we had to tag-team until she was asleep. We made her a really cool bed and playhouse. Mike has a great sense of humor, and he’s been super gracious, especially given that he’s not related to her.
MICHAEL: We expected there would be differences between raising our children and raising Kinsley. We’re much older now, so in all her school activities, it felt awkward that the parents of all the other kids were our children’s age. But we now have a lot of friends that age. We also sent Kinsley to a private school because we didn’t have confidence in where her education was headed.
Raising her has been complete bliss.
CONNIE: There were plenty of challenges, though. We have a lot of grandchildren, and when she was very small, she was always sharing her toys and room with the other grandkids who came over. It was a challenge to share attention. It’s a tug-of-war in my heart to make sure that when Mike’s grandchildren from his previous marriage are here, they have time with him without Kinsley. She feels like she owns the place.
She definitely runs us now. She’s such a great kid, and we’re really blessed. She was always very busy and active, but she’s always been gracious with people. She can get along with just about anybody. We’re trying to teach her to be generous and kind.
We wanted her to have her own space, and she needed to feel like we were the nucleus. I try to keep her busy because we don’t want the other grandkids to be jealous of her. We eventually established that we’re not grandparenting her but are instead parenting her.
We have some friends who are raising grandkids, but we have it a lot differently. We’ve had to tighten our belts a lot, especially recently. Now that we’re not out in the world as much, we rely on whatever’s been set up for retirement. I tell Kinsley, much like I told my daughters, that they have more than we ever had.
We don’t have as much put away as I would like to have had at this age, but we’re OK.
MICHAEL: We aren’t solely relying on Social Security. We have some rental properties that help us.
I turn all my hobbies into businesses, and we’ve tried to make this more of an active farm than just a hobby farm. There are days when I wonder if we should try to stop because it costs more than what we make from it, but we need to add to our income. We also jump in to help my daughters when they’re overwhelmed. Connie recently started volunteering to help them out with linens. We always look for ways to increase our income and reduce expenses.
CONNIE: We’re not wealthy, though some of our grandchildren think that we are. Kinsley had to have surgery on her foot last year, and it was very expensive. We were looking at dental work, and all these extra expenses have piled up. It’s hard not to think in those terms. We have to plan for all these things again, though we thought they were behind us.
Raising her hasn’t been too strenuous on us.
MICHAEL: We are homeschooling her this year in hopes of traveling more and having her with us. There is a lot of traveling we would have liked to do that friends our age can do.
My heart goes out to people who are in their 70s, and all of a sudden get a 2-year-old. We were fortunate to be both younger and active when we got Kinsley. It does get taxing, though, when a lot of our grandkids come and stay with us.
My daughters like to tell me that I allow Kinsley to do things that they were never allowed to do. I don’t feel we’re that far off from how we parented our girls, though. We’re more strict than her peers’ parents are.
Electronics weren’t involved when we raised our daughters. Kinsley just got her first iPhone, but for five years, all her friends had them, and we resisted.
CONNIE: I try to watch what she’s doing, and maybe it’s because we’re older, but the electronics thing is a whole other world, and I don’t think it’s healthy. I don’t have a problem knee-jerking this tech out of her hands. The kids are bombarded online. We don’t care so much about what she thinks of us as much as a lot of young parents do because we know that eventually the kids are going to come back and say, “Thank you for doing that.”
We’re pushing her to get a scholarship. We do tease her about taking care of us when we’re old. We don’t believe she should bear that burden, but she jokes about it and says, “You could adopt me.” The consensus among everyone in our family is that she belongs here.
