Honoring Kinship Care Month
By content specialist Leah Lusk and program manager Delphine Veith
September is Kinship Care Month, which recognizes and celebrates the crucial role of grandparents, other relatives, and close family friends who provide care for children when their parents cannot. These caregivers offer something difficult to replicate — continuity of family, culture, identity, and history. And, as we listen to voices of people with lived experience in kinship care, both caregivers and youth, we also recognize that kinship care brings with it additional complexities that are worthy of considering.
A recent blog post by CASA of Yellowstone County (Montana) shares more about what kinship care can involve. Children placed with kin are more likely to maintain familiar routines and stay connected to culture and family, but there are some big shifts for everyone: Caregivers may lose previous family roles and assume parental responsibilities overnight. Children may experience complex emotions about what was lost, what changed, and where loyalties lie.
In Snohomish County, Washington, grandparents who are kinship caregivers just published a children’s book inspired by their experience. When they couldn’t find books that spoke about kinship care, the couple decided to write one. “Jaxon and the Magic of the Forest” was inspired by the beauty of nature and the strength of kinship and foster families. Raquel McCloud (@McCloudlife on Instagram) is another person openly sharing her perspective as someone with lived experience in kinship care, both as someone who was raised by kin and as someone who is now the adoptive parent of her half-sibling. She also wrote a children’s book titled “Tell Me My Story: Why do You Live With Your Grandparents?” and has shared about her experiences through multiple podcasts, articles, and through her social media posts.
Kinship care and private adoption share many goals: a desire to provide children with stability, safety, and love when their parents cannot. But they often take very different paths to get there. Private adoption typically establishes a clean legal break from birth parents and gives adoptive parents full parental rights from the start, though most private adoptions ideally involve ongoing contact with biological family. Kinship care can look very different — sometimes formal, sometimes informal, and often with ongoing contact with birth parents or other relatives. While this closeness can bring comfort and preserve identity, it can also create complex family dynamics. Caregivers may be thrust into the role unexpectedly and without preparation or resources, and children may struggle with blurred roles and shifting relationships. The resources available to kinship care families vary widely, in part depending on whether the placement is formal or informal, and child welfare policies and supports for kinship care are inconsistent, with kinship care providers in many cases receiving less tangible support. Even when a kinship placement becomes permanent through adoption or guardianship, the child may still carry grief or uncertainty about where they belong.
By recognizing Kinship Care Month, we can validate the love and sacrifice that kinship caregivers offer while acknowledging the layered realities people raised by kin face.