Kim Rahn is the managing editor of The Korea Times. Since joining the company in 2003, she has covered various beats including the presidential office, Seoul city government, the Bank of Korea and the tourism industry. In 2014, she won the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) award for her coverage of the ordeals of migrant women in Korea.
Families headed by grandparents continue to rise
The number of households comprised of grandparents and grandchildren, without their parents, is increasing due to a steady surge in divorces, with many of these children being stripped of opportunities to advance to higher education institutes because of financial difficulties.
The majority of these children aged 18 and younger living with their grandparents aged 65 and older are forced to give up advancing to high school or college due to financial difficulties, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family said Tuesday.
It said 53.2 percent of these households are left without parents because the parents refuse to take responsibility of the children after getting divorced or remarried, the ministry said, after surveying 12,750 out of 51,852 such households across the nation.
About 15 percent of the households said this type of family came about because the parents left home, while 7.6 percent cited the parents’ unemployment or bankruptcy.
Only one out of four parents provided childcare expenses to the grandparents. Many such families suffer from financial problems, with two thirds of them earning less than 600,000 won per month.