Do you still need me?

As kinship care becomes the preferred first placement option for children entering foster care, with family members and close family friends serving as caregivers, foster parents may wonder, “Do you still need me?”

Absolutely, we do, for a variety of reasons. Kinship care and foster care aren’t competing—in fact they work together in important ways, ensuring children have the care they need when they need it most.

Katie Magnuson is a family finding specialist with Bethany in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She works to locate potential kinship caregivers who may be an appropriate placement for children within 30 days of entering foster care. Here’s her perspective:

We need you now more than ever! If I’m searching for family members for a child entering foster care and exhaust a child’s family system, finding no kin who can care for them, how vulnerable is that child?

Sometimes people think, “Other people in this child’s life should step up.” But if I can’t identify anybody who could possibly step up, this is a child who needs you more than ever. Think of how hard and how hopeless this is for a child, to literally have no one in the world who can care for them.

It would be a dream for every child to be with family. But the data doesn’t tell me we can do it 100% of the time. While family finding does increase our capacity to serve a diverse group of children in foster care, it doesn’t work for every case. So, yes, we absolutely need foster parents.

I can tell you we have multiple placement crises every single week—we never have enough foster homes. So we still need licensed foster homes to care for kids who don’t have family members who can help.

Another reason we need foster parents is because children often need a temporary place to go while we get a relative caregiver ready for placement.

I have a case right now, an older youth who has a lot of very appropriate family in other states. She has one parent who’s deceased, and she’s not allowed to have any contact with the other parent. Placing a child who needs long-term care with family in another state is a lengthy, complex process that can take three months in a best-case scenario. We still need a safe place for this teen to live in the meantime.

No foster parent wants to keep a child apart from their family when there’s a safe and appropriate family member who can and wants to care for them. Foster parents just want to make sure kids are safe and in a safe place. Sometimes that means filling a critical, temporary gap in care before a child can transition to the home of a safe relative. At the end of the day, if there’s a safe relative, we all want them there.