Supporting kinship caregivers: Tips and tools featuring Foster Kinship

When Ali Caliendo launched Foster Kinship in 2011, she knew she wanted her nonprofit to meet a real need.

“Children really need their family,” she said. Caliendo witnessed the importance of continued family connection directly through her experience as a foster parent, adoptive parent, and kinship caregiver. This led her to start Foster Kinship, an organization that raises awareness and support for kinship care.

“It’s all about children’s needs,” she said. “Kids need to know where they come from. Family tends to alleviate a little bit of the additional trauma that can come from children experiencing foster care. [With kinship care] kids are more likely to stay with their siblings and kinship families are often able to affirm and maintain community connections and family connection for kids.”

Research supports the benefits Caliendo shared, confirming an overall increase in desired outcomes when children experiencing foster care are placed with kin or fictive kin. Studies comparing youth placed with relatives versus non-relatives show that those placed with relatives have better overall wellbeing outcomes, including academics, mental and behavioral health, identity, belonging, family connection leading to improved permanency and placement stability outcomes (Washington and Mihalec-Adkins, 2023).

This data has led to many child welfare agencies shifting to family-first approaches and launching kin-first initiatives. With this shift comes a responsibility for child welfare agencies to ensure they are providing consistent, responsive, and strengths-based services that adequately meet the unique needs of relatives and fictive kin interested in providing care. It is important that agencies are equipped with the tools to effectively support kinship caregivers and alleviate barriers that may arise throughout recruitment, licensing, placement, fostering, and permanency. Supporting kinship caregivers ultimately supports positive outcomes for children and youth.

Consider kinship caregivers’ unique barriers

Unlike unrelated foster families, who have planned to care for additional children in their home, kinship caregivers often come into these circumstances unexpectedly and without as much time to prepare. Some of the questions they may have include:

Finance: Can we afford to care for another child(ren)?
Physical space: Do we have the space/enough rooms in our home?
Childcare: Who will care for the child(ren) when I’m at work or during school breaks?
Transportation: Is our car big enough? How will they get to/from school and other activities? What if they need to be picked up from school during the school day?

As child welfare professionals, it is important to see these questions and challenges as areas to collaboratively work through with kinship caregivers, rather than viewing them as barriers that prevent reasonable consideration for placement and/or permanency.

The impact on kinship family systems

A challenge unique to kinship caregivers is the impact on their family systems, relationships, and dynamics. It can be difficult to balance interpersonal relationships, loyalties, and obligations to family members while meeting the expectations of child welfare workers.

Kinship caregivers are responsible for setting boundaries with birth parents and other relatives who are within their own family system. This shift in relationship and dynamics can often lead to feelings of disloyalty, guilt, and isolation from family members with varying levels of understanding and support regarding the children being removed from the birth parents and the requirements put in place by the child welfare system.

Caliendo recognizes how significantly these unexpected life changes can impact familial ecosystem.

“One of the biggest challenges families face is issues with family dynamics and family systems,” she said. “That underlies everything, then you bring the system into it. Now, not only are you dealing with the family system issues as they exist organically, you also have a system that is going to tell you how you’re going to have relationships within that family system. This is a challenge that we don’t see in the traditional foster care space” (Caliendo, 2024).

Resources

Child welfare professionals can take many actions to support kinship caregivers, including exploring options for financial assistance, childcare vouchers, respite services, transportation services, as well as helping those caregivers build formal, informal, and peer support systems.

Many of these services are provided through licensing and traditional foster care programs but are often not available for caregivers who are unlicensed. Licensing barriers lead to inadequate access to resources and support for unlicensed kinship caregivers.

Data demonstrates the gap in resources accessible to licensed caregivers compared to unlicensed caregivers (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2024).

“Unlicensed kinship caregivers need attention because [oftentimes] they’re not getting financial and other support but still have all the burdens and challenges of navigating the foster care system, with none of the benefits. More than anything, they need to feel heard, while still getting assistance and support” (Caliendo, 2024).

Licensing

Regulations that disqualify kinship caregivers from becoming licensed significantly impact the level of resources and supports caregivers can access. Waivers and exceptions for kin caregivers vary by state, tribes, and territories.

Having policies and procedures that allow for exceptions in areas that do not compromise safety (such as the number of children in the home or number of bedrooms) can help alleviate this barrier.

Federal policy put in place by the Final Rule on Separate Licensing Standards for Relative or Kinship Foster Family Homes has established principles for child welfare agencies to create separate, kin-specific licensing regulations and approval standards for relative and fictive kin caregivers. These regulations are intended to address barriers and prioritize kinship placements.

Providing collaborative customer service approaches to licensing for kinship caregivers is imperative. This includes when kinship caregivers are out of state and working with two separate child welfare systems to meet the requirements of the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC).

High-quality customer service

Providing customer service to kinship caregivers means being available, responsive, reliable, consistent, transparent, responsive, and strengths based.

Effectively supporting kinship caregivers involves more than just informing them of the expectations (i.e. training, licensing requirements) and having family members work through them on their own.

Genuine collaboration, support, and partnership can break down barriers, enhance families’ strengths, and promote successful kinship care placement. A collaborative partnership with kinship caregivers, when based on mutual investment in the family’s success, can improve placement stability and permanency outcomes.

Important components of high-quality customer service include:

building trust through consistency, availability, and transparency
providing clear communication about what is required of kinship caregivers and what they can expect from the professional team to confirm that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goals
incorporating processes to obtain and integrate feedback from kinship caregivers to give voice to kinship caregivers and improve overall practice

“Deep empathy and listening to stories are a non-negotiable. Once someone can say ‘I trust that you want the right thing for my family,’ they’re way more likely to take us up on the burden of jumping through the hoops of licensing than a family who feels like you’re another government face that doesn’t understand them and what their family is going through.

Emotional support at the beginning to build trust–without it nothing works; with it almost anything can work” (Caliendo, 2024).

Training and education

The knowledge that we, as child welfare professionals, have about how the child welfare system functions is not common knowledge. Relatives and fictive kin often come to the table with limited knowledge of the system and what will be expected of them.

Our responsibility is to provide support and education around this and to ensure that kinship caregivers gain a comprehensive understanding that supports their success throughout the processes of licensing, fostering, and permanency.

One vital area for training is child welfare policies, procedures, and practices. Pre-service and kinship trainings provide information about the child welfare system. But it is also important that direct service staff reiterate and ensure understanding of these concepts throughout the case.

For example: how case plans work, court hearings (how often they take place, what they are for, how to appear), expectations around contact and visits with birth parents and other family/fictive kin (setting the expectations around department approvals and supervision needed, but also not gatekeeping relationships if the kinship caregivers can demonstrate the ability to be protective while supervising contact), options for permanency, etc.

It is also essential to provide education and support tailored to the needs of children and youth in foster care. This includes offering information on trauma and trauma-informed parenting practices, as well as training that addresses the specific needs of the children being placed in their care.

Kinship caregivers benefit from specialized training that recognizes their unique experiences. Such training should support caregivers in navigating shifts in family roles, such as transitioning from a grandparent to a primary caregiver, and should offer opportunities to learn from peer mentors who have faced similar challenges.

Kinship navigating programs

Kinship navigating programs provide local, kin-specific services and supports such as training/education, referrals, and support groups.

Grandfamilies & Kinship Support Network: find programs for local kinship families on the kinship navigator programs around the country.
Generations United and Grandfamilies & Kinship Support Network: If your state, tribe, or territory does not currently have a kinship navigator program listed, find resources for implementation on the kinship navigator toolkit.

Respite

Kinship care can be taxing. Kinship caregivers need sustainable supports when they need a break, as no one can pour from an empty cup.

Planned respite can be a preventative approach to providing both the caregiver and the child a break and helps to alleviate situations where respite is needed as a reactive response to high-stress, crisis situations.

For example, if a child is placed with their grandparents, perhaps plan for them to spend one weekend per month with their aunt and uncle or a neighbor. Child welfare professionals can support kinship caregivers in creating these support plans and exploring other appropriate, approved supports that can step in to help.

Having support plans for times of crisis are also important. For example, who can the caregiver call for support during an escalation or if the child needs to be picked up from school during the caregiver’s work hours? Both formal and informal supports should be explored, including supports that can continue post-permanency.

Support groups and support systems

Support groups can provide opportunities for kinship caregivers to build community with others with shared experiences. Support groups are offered in-person or online to best meet the needs of the caregiver.

Assisting kinship caregivers in building both formal and informal support systems can involve:

using customer service to approve informal supports and helping kinship caregivers identify individuals within their informal support network to assist with respite, transportation, providing a listening ear of support
connecting kinship caregivers with formal resources that can provide sustainable services for respite, childcare, and support services
providing resources for peer support groups (options available through the child welfare agency, in the community, and/or online)

Caregiver feedback

Listening is a foundational approach that can guide all other methods for improving supports.

“One thing I would share with anyone who’s working in the kinship space is [that] you have to empty your brain of what you think families need and you have to sit with families in front of you and listen to what they say to you. Yes, you do your research, as well, but you have to be caregiver-led in this space. If you’re not listening to what caregivers are asking for, you’re not going to get family engagement. Listening to caregivers is my number one piece of advice” (Caliendo, 2024).