Abstract
Kinship care makes up a large portion of foster care placements across the United States and has become the preferred placement option for the child welfare system for many reasons, not least of which is that parents who are not able to provide safe and stable living situations for their children prefer to see them placed with relatives rather than strangers. These families live with a myriad of issues—at turns positive or challenging, established as well as emerging—and this special issue aims to assess the milieu wholistically. To that end, these articles identify solutions and opportunities that can inform advocacy efforts and prioritize policy change that supports kinship caregivers, evolves child welfare policies, and increases funding for kinship care programs.
Oversight of the protection and safety of children who live and reside in the United States is a task mandated by the U.S. Congress and assigned to the Children’s Bureau (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families) to carry out. The Children’s Bureau has set many priorities on how it intends to carry out this responsibility. These include:
preventing child maltreatment and unnecessary foster care placement;
using foster care as a means to support families and not as a substitute for parents;
sustaining community-based programs that support families;
prioritizing child welfare practice that supports the well-being of children and families;
ensuring a strong, healthy child welfare workforce to achieve better outcomes; and
advancing equity in child welfare practice (Children’s Bureau, Administration for Children & Families, n.d.).
Four percent of children in the United States—approximately 2.6 million—are estimated to be living in kinship care (Kids Count Center, 2020), which has increasingly been relied on as a solution to meeting several of the Children’s Bureau priority goals. Kinship navigator programs have become the go-to community-based support programs for kinship caregivers of children in kinship homes that are either formal (state supervised foster care) or informal (placements that occur outside of the care and custody of the state child welfare agency).
The goal of race equity in child welfare is also advanced through kinship care; it is a cultural practice that has existed far longer than the formal child welfare system. Black, Indigenous, and other families of color have used kinship care as a cultural resource to mitigate the impact of colonization, slavery, and other forms of oppression (Barrio & Hughes, 2000; Mooradian et al., 2007). The continued practice of kinship care today ensures that children placed in out of home care are placed in homes that reflect their race and culture, and research has demonstrated that children in kinship care are more likely to have regular contact with birth parents than children placed in nonrelative care (Palacios & Jiménez, 2009). In addition, multiple researchers have indicated greater placement stability and permanency; decreased likelihood of disruption in home and school changes; lower foster care reentry after permanency is achieved; reduced experiences of trauma; increased maintenance of connections to siblings; and an increased ability to preserve children’s cultural identity, relationship to their community, and greater child well-being (including lower levels of mental health challenges) among children placed with kin caregivers compared with those who are not (Epstein, 2017; Timmer et al., 2004; Winokur et al., 2014). Children themselves have also expressed more positive feelings about their placements and are less likely to run away (Epstein, 2017).
Parallel to the positives that kinship care embodies, though, is the recognition that kinship families are more likely to experience financial hardship than nonrelative caregivers and thus require community-based supports to ensure the well-being of the family unit (Bavier, 2011). In a 2020 survey of 600 grandparents who identified as kinship caregivers, 38% stated that they were unable to pay their rent or mortgage, or worried about their ability to pay it in the future (Generations United, 2020). Other needs expressed by kinship caregivers include legal services referral and support, caregiver support groups, training on adoption or obtaining legal guardianship, and referral to health services (Schmidt & Treinen, 2017). But categories of kinship arrangements based on state involvement have created an inconsistent patchwork of policies that produce disparities in the resources and services available to kinship caregivers (Berrick & Hernandez, 2016). The legal and policy implications are complicated as specific laws and regulations governing kinship placements vary by states and child welfare systems within these states.
Kinship care is important for social workers and providers working within communities to help preserve family connections and cultural ties. In addition, the stability and continuity children receive while placed in kinship care allows for improved emotional and behavioral outcomes. The collection of articles included in this special issue builds on the existing evidence in the field of kinship care and offers new insights and suggestions on how to co-build solutions (in both the public policy and practice arenas) to further support these vital family units. We encourage readers to use this research to inform state and federal legislative debates as a strategy to continue to expand the practice of kinship care and address disparities in resource allocations and number and types of services available to support kinship families.