Understanding kinship care and foster care

When children enter foster care, whenever possible, we search for relatives or a family friend who can provide this temporary care. Research is showing positive outcomes—including higher potential for reunification—with far less trauma when children can stay with people they know. They’re more likely to stay close to their community, where their school and friends are, and that’s important when everything else in their world feels out of control.

Kinship care is becoming the first choice for placement when out-of-home care is needed. To better understand kinship care’s relationship with foster care, consider these similarities and differences. Rather than competing, kinship care and foster care often complement each other, giving children the safe care they need.

SIMILAR: Kinship care and foster care have several things in common

• Parental substance use and domestic violence are common reasons for Child Protective Services to remove children from a harmful situation.
• For parents on a path to reunification, ongoing positive communication with their child and the caregiver is beneficial for the child and increases likelihood for reunification.
• Providing care for a child will change the caregiver’s life, home, family, and rhythms.
• When you say yes, you don’t always know how the case will go, if this will be short term or longer than you expected.
• You get attached and even if reunification is what you hoped for all along, it’s still emotionally hard when the child returns home.
• A child entering care may need a temporary placement with a foster parent until a kinship care provider is identified and ready to receive the child for longer-term placement.

DIFFERENT: The caregiver’s relationship to the parent

Foster care: The child’s parent is unknown to a foster parent, beyond information that may be shared by a caseworker. In some states, a foster parent may have the opportunity to communicate directly with the parent, to build trust and establish a relationship. Working together as a team for the child’s best interest, this communication can be reassuring to both parent and child, keeping them connected whenever it’s safe to do so.

Kinship care: The child’s parent is often the caregiver’s adult child, grandchild, or sibling. There’s an existing relationship, although it may be complicated. This relationship may make setting and holding boundaries more challenging for the caregiver but also can make communication and connection with the parent easier.

DIFFERENT: Who initiates contact

Foster care: Foster parents initiate contact with a foster care agency about fostering a child or children they don’t know.

Kinship care: A foster care agency initiates contact with a potential kinship caregiver, asking if they will provide care for a particular child (or siblings) who needs help right now and is a family member or family friend.

DIFFERENT: Lead time from consideration to placement

Foster care: The process to become a caregiver often takes place over time, after a period of months or years of consideration. Foster parents do research, get counsel, read articles, watch videos, and talk to other foster parents. They search out agencies, go to information sessions, and weigh a variety of factors before agreeing to a placement. If they’re people of faith, they will likely also pray over this decision. They complete hours of training, have a home study, get licensed, and prepare a bedroom for a child before they are called to take a placement. The licensing process alone can take months to complete.

Kinship care: When the caregiver gets the call from the agency, they’re not expecting to take in a child, so they’ve made no specific preparations. They’ve completed no specialized training and have done no research. Their home may not be equipped with a ready bedroom and essentials for a child. Their phone rings with an urgent need, and if they agree, the child may come to their home within a day or two of receiving the call, with other supports put in place later.

DIFFERENT: Ongoing contact and support after the child returns home

Foster care: A caregiver may stay in touch IF the parent chooses to maintain contact, although there’s no formal expectation. Years later, caregivers often think about a child they cared for, wondering where that child is now.

Kinship care: The quality of ongoing relationship is still up to the parent, but it’s far more likely that the child and their family will continue to be part of the caregiver’s life as part of the family. Caregivers are likely to see more of the child’s experience once reunified, which won’t be exactly what they provided in their home, and that may be its own struggle or joy.