When children can’t live safely with their parents and must enter foster care, child welfare policy prioritizes placement with relatives or close family friends, also known as kinship foster care. Research confirms that children do best in kinship foster care and that family connections are critical to healthy child development and a sense of belonging. Kinship care also helps to preserve children’s cultural identity and relationship to their community.
Child welfare systems across the country are redoubling their efforts to identify and engage kin as foster parents. These efforts are influenced by several factors:
- Research repeatedly shows placing a child within their own family reduces the trauma of removal from a child’s home, is less likely to result in placement disruptions, and enhances prospects for finding a permanent family if the child cannot return home.
- There is growing national consensus that institutional care does not benefit children except in time-limited therapeutic settings to meet specific treatment needs.
- A shortage of foster parents exists in most communities.
Despite the strong value of kinship foster care, many child welfare systems face barriers to finding, approving and supporting kinship families and seek strategies to create a culture that truly values kin families. This article from the Child Law Practice Today July/August 2017 Issue on Kinship Care summarizes seven steps to create a kin-first culture—one in which child welfare stakeholders consistently promote kinship placement, help children in foster care maintain connections with their families, and tailor services and supports to the needs of kinship foster families. Lawyers and judges can play a meaningful role in creating a kin-first culture by promoting each of the steps in their daily practice, supporting agency leaders and staff striving to create kin-first cultures, and reflecting on ways they can help advance the seven steps. These seven steps are adapted from a consensus document by the ABA Center on Children and the Law, Generations United, and ChildFocus, drawing on the experiences of several jurisdictions on the forefront of creating child welfare cultures that truly value kin.