The importance of family‐focused and strengths‐based approaches to interventions for grandfamilies

Abstract Critical to maintaining and improving physical and mental health is self‐care, yet interventions for grandfamilies (i.e., skipped‐generation households) minimally address such practices. Grounded by family resilience theory and strengths‐based approaches, this article introduces our rationale for an intervention addressing grandparents' and grandchildren's self‐care practices. The GRANDcares intervention is a tripartite intervention for grandparents, grandchildren, and service providers who work with grandfamilies. Following the National Institutes of Health's stage model for behavioral interventions, we briefly outline the literature on promoting self‐care and resilience in grandfamilies and meeting service providers' needs when working with grandfamilies. Next, we apply these theories to the development of the GRANDcares intervention. We close with a discussion of the GRANDcares programming and a synopsis of our efforts thus far, including recommendations for future research on strengths‐based interventions for grandfamilies.