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SUMMARY
Kin caregivers can provide continuity and connectedness for children who cannot remain with their parents. This is one reason kinship care has become the preferred placement option for foster children. However, despite the growing reliance on kin caregivers, kinship care policies have evolved with little coherent guidance. This article examines kinship care and finds:
* Kinship foster parents tend to be older and have lower incomes, poorer health, and less education than non-kin foster parents. As a result, kin caregivers face more challenges as foster parents than non-kin caregivers.
* The links between payment and licensure, and the haphazard evolution of licensing policies and practices, complicate efforts to provide fair compensation for kin caregivers.
* Kinship caregivers receive less supervision and fewer services than non-kin caregivers, thus kin may not receive the support they need to nurture and protect the children in their care, even though their needs for support may be greater.
Kinship foster care questions many traditional notions about family obligation, governmental responsibility, and the nature of permanency for children in care. The article concludes by discussing these concerns, and calls for more thoughtful consideration of the uniqueness of kinship care in developing policies and best practices.
Historically, kin have often served as alternate or supplementary caregivers when birth parents were unable to care for their children. Surprisingly, however, when the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 passed, forming the basis of federal foster care policy, kin were very rarely formally designated as foster parents for related children. Today, child welfare agencies increasingly consider relatives as the first placement choice when foster care is needed and a relative is available to provide a safe home. Once considered an uncertain placement option, kinship care has become central to any discussion of how best to support and nurture children in foster care. The frequent references to kinship care throughout the articles in this journal issue underscore the centrality of kinship care in contemporary child welfare policy and practice (see the articles by Jones-Harden; Alien and Bisscll; Stukes Chipungu and Bcnt-Goodley; and Testa in this journal issue). But kinship care is more than simply a placement option for children who must be removed from their parents' homes. Kinship care influences and is...