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New Book From Gary Garrison

Raising Grandkids: Inside Skipped-generation Families
by Gary Garrison
University of Regina Press.

Everyone who has grandparents, knows somebody else’s grandparents, or may become a grandparent someday should read this powerful, engaging nonfiction book. It immerses the reader in the bittersweet lives of grandparents who commit to raising grandkids when the parents can’t or won’t.

These grandparents give up dreams of retirement and take in neglected, abandoned, grieving grandkids with a wide range of physical, emotional, and neurological challenges. Their full-time work of loving these children into healthy adulthood requires them to re-educate themselves about parenting, to learn to be therapists, to navigate dysfunctional children’s services systems, and to fight legal battles, even as they grieve for a middle generation suffering from mental illness and addictions and as they themselves face the financial and physical challenges of aging.

“Stories of love battered and bruised across a generation gap . . . Searingly honest.”
Myrna Kostash, author of All of Baba’s Children, Long Way from Home, and many others.

“This book shares heartfelt stories of grandparent caregivers providing care despite seemingly insurmountable odds. Grandparent caregivers will find the comfort of a support group in these pages.” Esme Fuller-Thomson, Ph.D., Sandra Rotman Chair in Social Work, Factor-Iwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto

“I highly recommend this book for pediatricians, child psychiatrists, psychologists and other therapists who do this work and see these families. I also recommend this book for the child welfare professionals who are legally responsible for the safety and structure these children require. And I especially recommend it for other grandparents who are also on this remarkable journey, for they are the true champions of these remarkable children.”
Andrew Bremness, Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, University of Alberta

Publication date: August 4, 2018
Available for pre-order through Amazon, Indigo/Chapters, and McNally Robinson’s websites.

Information provided by the Writers’ Guild of Alberta.

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