American family support policies are failing the 2.6 million children who live with kin or close family friends, according to a report released today that includes recommendations at the local, state and federal levels for improving the situation.
“A fundamental flaw in the U.S.’s approach to family policy, systems, and support is that help is based on a family’s characteristics instead of children’s needs,” said Jennie Day-Burget, senior communications officer with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which co-funded the report with Generations United, a group that advocates for “grandfamilies” — that is, grandparents and other relatives and close family friends of children who do not live with a parent and are not formally in the foster care system. Such caregivers are more commonly called kinship caregivers. “We need to improve policies around housing, education, financial assistance, and health care to fix the siloed, inadequate systems that don’t consider all family types.”
Grandparents are the most common category of kinship caregivers, but all relatives and family friends who take on the burden of raising someone’s children with any legal tie to them face obstacles. For example, something as seemingly simple as enrolling children in school or taking them to the doctor can be difficult or impossible.
Among the more striking recommended changes called for in the report is the creation of a kinship caregiver tax credit at the state or national level and giving kinship caregivers access to states’ opioid settlement funds. Such financial supports are available to foster parents, but typically not to relative caregivers. They should also have access to other forms of support available to foster families, the report said. For example, in some states, a caregiver who is not related by blood or marriage cannot apply on a child’s behalf for benefits such as Medicaid or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
Usually, kinship families arise out of events that separate children from their parents, such as parental death, substance use and drug overdoses, incarceration, deportation, mental illness, divorce or military deployment. Their needs are especially acute in a year when hundreds of thousands of children lost parents to COVID-19 and the opioid epidemic, Generations United said.
“All children deserve a safe, stable, and loving home with access to healthy food, a quality education, and health care,” said Donna Butts, executive director of Generations United. “When children cannot remain with their parents, they do best with people who know and love them. We must do more to ensure grandfamilies have access to the basic support they need to help the children they raise thrive.”
Generations United was recently awarded a nearly $10 million grant as a part of the American Rescue Plan Act to coordinate the first-ever National Technical Assistance Center on Grandfamilies and Kinship Families.