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Benefits and Limitations of Kinship Care

(Originally published April, 2026)

One of the most important developments in U.S. child welfare systems during the past 15-20 years has been the large increase in kinship care. At the end of federal fiscal year (FFY) 2010, 26% of U.S. children in foster care were placed in kinship care (The AFCARS Report: Preliminary Estimates as of September 30, 2010). In FFY 2024, 39% of children in foster care were placed with relatives or kin, which includes “fictive kin,” defined as “a person who is unrelated by birth, marriage or adoption, but who has an emotionally significant relationship with a child or child’s parent.” (Administration for Children and Families (ACF), 2026). According to ACF, all U.S. states except one include “fictive kin” in their definition of kinship care. During FFY 2024, 43% of children entering foster care were placed with relatives or kin-families, according to a March 2026 ACF brief on kinship care.

AFCARS data indicates that at the end of FFY 2010, 48% of children in out-of-home care were placed in non-relative foster homes; in FFY 2024, 28% of children in out-of-home care were living in non-relative foster homes.

The profile of U.S. foster care has dramatically changed since 2010. Kinship care, including both licensed and unlicensed homes, has become the most common type of out-of-home care placement, nearly reversing the percentages in 2010 of non-kin and kinship foster care.

The increase in kinship care has had the largest effect on the placement status of children, 0-5 years old. The ACF brief on kinship care asserts that almost half (47%) of 1–5-year-old children’s first placement was with relatives or kin in FY 2024 vs. about a third (34%) of children and youth, 6-11, and 25% of 17-year-olds. Large numbers of both kin and non-kin foster families care for children, 0-5; but non-kin foster families and residential care facilities provide out-of-home care for most school age children, many of whom have behavior problems and/or physical disabilities.

States vary widely in their rates of kinship care, from 11% to 57%, according to the ACF brief on kinship care. Washington State’s rate of kinship care in SFY 2024 was 57%, along with Illinois, the highest in the US. During the early 2000s, about a third of children in Washington’s foster care system were placed in kinship care. Washington’s rate of kinship care increased to 47% in SFY 2019 and 57% in 2024 after five years of a large reduction in the state’s foster care population. (DCYF 2025 Annual Progress and Services Report).

The increase in kinship care in Washington has been a long-term process that began almost three decades ago, initially due to the chronic shortage of foster homes and the reversal of child welfare attitudes regarding kinship care. During the first three decades of the U.S. modern child protection system (1965-1995), kinship families, especially grandparents, were often viewed with suspicion by public child welfare agencies due to the belief that child abuse and neglect was intergenerationally transmitted. For at least a couple of decades, some scholars and advocates maintained that a childhood history of maltreatment was the main cause of child maltreatment. Why place a child with grandparents who were assumed to have abused or neglected the parent of a child with an open CPS case?

During the 1990s, child welfare attitudes toward kinship care began to change for three main reasons:

A number of research studies found that intergenerational transmission of child abuse and neglect was the exception rather than the rule, an important risk factor rather than a stand-alone cause of child maltreatment.
The U.S. foster care population doubled from 1986-1999. Child welfare agencies in the U.S. routinely ignored or made exceptions to licensing standards that set limits on the number of children who could be placed in a foster home due to acute and chronic shortages of foster homes.
There was increasing concern with racial disproportionality of the U.S. foster care population and concern with both the loss of family ties and community connections resulting from the placement of Black and American Indian children and youth in foster care.

As attitudes of child welfare staff toward kinship care began to shift, caseworkers and supervisors encountered systemic obstacles to kinship care. Licensing rules made it difficult to license many kin-families as foster parents, either because the homes of low-income relatives and kin did not meet licensing standards, or due to criminal histories and/or a history of substantiated CPS reports. In addition, some relatives and kin were reluctant to undergo a bureaucratic licensing process or be supervised by an agency they distrusted.

Unlicensed relatives caring for a child were reimbursed for cost of care through AFDC or (later) TANF with less financial support than licensed foster parents received, especially for sibling groups. Unlicensed kinship families who were (on average) poorer than non-kin foster families received less financial support for cost of care than non-kin foster families. For many years, less than 10% of relatives and kin caring for foster children in Washington State were licensed. Currently, the rate of kinship families licensed as foster parents in Washington is 61%, a huge increase that reflects a praiseworthy DCYF commitment to improving financial support for kinship care.

Research on kinship care

There has been much research on kinship care during recent decades. One meta-analysis (Campbell Systematic Reviews, 2014) found more than a hundred published studies, many of which compared differences in outcomes such as placement stability and maintaining family connections between kinship placements and non-kin foster placements. Almost all these studies found that kinship care is more stable on average than non- kin foster care, and many studies have found that children in kinship care do better on measures of child development and children’s mental health than children in non-kin foster care.

However, authors of meta-analyzes and other researchers have pointed out that numerous studies have been vulnerable to selection bias, given their failure to control for child characteristics, e.g., behavior problems, at entry into care. Ferraro, et al (2022) comment: “In the meta-analysis discussed above, only one of the 102 studies reviewed was categorized as low risk for selection bias … defined as the failure to control for factors associated with placement in kinship care.” Research findings that children in kinship care had fewer behavior problems than children in non-kin foster homes may have been the result of differences in behavior problems between the two groups at intake, rather than an outcome. For example, in their sample from the National Study of Child and Adolescent Well- being (NSCAW II), Ferraro, et al, found that at baseline 45% of children in non-kin foster care had externalizing behavior problems in the clinical range vs. 26% of children in kinship care.

Studies that classify children as ‘in kinship care’ or ‘non-kin foster care’ sometimes fail to account for children’s placement histories. The idea that a child has been placed either with a relative or kin-family or in non-kin foster care is often mistaken. Many children in foster care are, at various times, placed in both kin and non-kin foster homes, and in residential care as well. For children who move from a foster family to a kinship family, or vice versa, researchers would need to take a careful look at placement stability and behavior problems after a move from one type of care to another to plausibly attribute an outcome to kinship care or non-kin foster care.

A common pathway for children in foster care is to move from an initial foster placement to a kinship family when the child’s behavior appears manageable, and to move from one foster home to another or from foster care to residential care after placements disrupt due to challenging behaviors. Children are often placed in kinship care because they have better mental health to start with; and if a kinship placement disrupts a child is likely to be placed in non-kin foster care rather than another kinship family.

In their study based on a sample from The National Study of Child and Adolescent Wellbeing (NSCAW II), Ferraro, et al, state: “We did not find a significant association between kinship care and changes in either externalizing or internalizing behaviors, though the direction of these changes suggest improvement for children in kinship care.” This is not to say that non-kin foster care has proven (in the aggregate) to be therapeutic for behaviorally troubled children and youth. However, there is no good reason to believe that kinship care is likely to be more successful than non-kin care in caring for behaviorally troubled children and youth, a moot issue given that most kin-families are not interested in caring for these children. Recent data regarding the age of children entering foster care suggests that kinship families are much more willing to care for children, 0-5 years old, than for school age children with difficult behaviors.

Infant and toddler placements

The enhanced placement stability of kinship care has a developmental benefit for infants and toddlers. In an important study of 1,388 children in four US. cities (Detroit, Memphis, Miami, Providence) with and without exposure to cocaine or opiates in utero, Bada, et al, (2008) compared developmental outcomes at age 3 for children who, after birth, remained in the care of their mother vs. children placed in non-kin foster care or with a relative.

Infants placed with relatives had more stable placements than infants placed in non-kin foster care, and had the best developmental outcomes at age 3. Bada, et al, state: “Total behavior problems increased … with each move/year and each year of Child Protective Services involvement.” And: “Children’s living arrangements were significantly associated with child behavior problems and adaptive functioning.” Children who remained in their mother’s custody following birth and children placed in foster care had similar developmental outcomes.

Foster care is often unstable by design, even when young children do not have behavior problems or serious physical disabilities. An infant removed from the home due to neglect and substance abuse may be briefly placed in receiving care or short-term foster home, then quickly moved into another foster home and, when reunification is not possible, moved into a pre-adopt home. In addition, foster placements sometimes disrupt for various reasons that have nothing to do with child behavior or a child’s needs, e.g., divorce, a family’s move to another community, a new job. Placement disruptions of this type occur less frequently with children in kinship care than in non-kin foster care. Family obligation still means something, even in the U.S.

However, kinship placements sometimes break down in ways rarely tracked by research studies. Caregivers in kinship families are older on average than non-kin foster parents. Infants placed with grandparents who are not reunified with birth parents will often have to move prior to age 18 due to grandparents’ failing health or death. Kinship placements stable for years may disrupt during adolescence when relatives cannot cope with adolescent rebellion. A Chapin Hall study of re-entry into care found that 17% of children in guardianships, a permanent plan frequently used for youth in kinship care, re-entered foster care. (Wulczyn, et al, 2020)

Caseworkers’ expectations of kin-families

During the years I worked in Washington’s child welfare system (1978-2004), caseworkers tended to have different expectations of kin-families than of non-kin foster families. Kin-families were often expected to bear much of the responsibility for arranging and supervising parental visitation. They received less concrete support (such as respite care), even when caring for sibling groups that put a strain on the limited economic and emotional resources of families. Caseworkers visited children in kin-care less often, and did not pursue permanency with the same urgency. As a result, children living in kin-families had longer lengths of stay in foster care than children placed with non-kin foster parents. There was often reduced attention to the safety of children in kin-care.

In Jill Berrick’s outstanding case studies of reunification in Take Me Home (2008), caseworkers in California were missing in action, while kin-families sometimes reunited legally dependent children with a birth parent without informing the child’s caseworker and in violation of a court order. Allowing a kinship placement to extend for years without completing a permanent plan can have serious (or fatal) consequences when, after several years, an emotionally troubled parent who has had little or no contact with her/his child asserts their parental rights to disrupt a kinship placement.

As the rate of kinship care has increased both in Washington and nationally, some of these practices may have changed. In Washington, kin- families receive better economic support than in past decades due to the increased percentage licensed as foster parents. However, there has been marked deterioration in timely permanent planning in Washington since 2019, as the rate of kinship care has increased from 47% to 57%.

Kinship care is not a homogenous phenomenon

For several decades following the creation of the modern U.S. child welfare system, there was an unreasonable suspicion of kinship care due to the prevailing theory regarding the cause of child maltreatment. In recent years, there has developed an uncritical support for kinship care in all circumstances without regard for differences in children’s placement histories and special needs. Next month’s Sounding Board will discuss distinctions in kinship care and their meaning for policy and practice:

Caring for children and youth with and without behavior problems at entry-into-care, or after failed placements.
Establishing a legal preference for kinship care at entry into care and/or within a few weeks or months of initial placement vs. a preference for kinship care after a child has been living in non-kin foster care for a year or longer.
Kinship care that maintains a child’s positive relationship with family members vs. moving a child to a kin-family with whom the child has no relationship.

References

Allen, K., Schreier, A., “States Increasingly Promote Kinship Care, Though Significant Opportunity Remains for Improving Licensing, Definitions and Reach: Nearly Two Thirds of Jurisdictions Have Not Yet Amended Title IV-E Plans to Adopt Separate Licensing Standards,” Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Washington D.C., issue brief, March 2026.

Bada, H., Langer, J., Twomey, J., Bursi, C., Lagasse, L., Bauer, C., Shankanan, S., Higgins, R. & Mazda, P., “Importance of Stability of Early Living Arrangements for Behavior Outcomes of Children With and Without Prenatal Drug Exposure,” (June 2008), Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, 29(3), 173-182.

Berrick, J. Take Me Home: Protecting America’s Vulnerable Children (2008), Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

2025 Annual Progress and Services Report, Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Family Services, Olympia, Washington, available on-line.

Ferraro, A., Maher, E. & Grinnell-Davis, C., “Family ties: A quasi- experimental approach to estimate the impact of kinship care in child well-being,” (2022) Children and Youth Services Review, 137.

Winkour, M., Holton, A. & Batchelder, K., “Kinship Care for the Safety, Permanency and Well-Being of Children Removed from the Home for Maltreatment” (2014), Campbell Systematic Reviews, Volume 10, issue 1., Click here to see report online.

Wulczyn, F., Parolini, A., Schmits, F., Magruder, J. & Webster, D., “Return to foster care: Age and other risk factors,” (2020) Children and Youth Services Review, 116.

See past Sounding Board commentaries

©Dee Wilson

deewilson13@aol.com