RESEARCH General Home & Garden

CHILD WELFARE
Ignorance of kin-care system has hindered its encouragement

Mark Reutter, Business Editor
(217) 333-0568; mreutter@uiuc.edu

11/1/02

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Operating largely outside the radar of white America, grandparents in the black community have found homes and effectively raised children in ways that have eluded established foster-care and welfare programs.

Compared to foster care, which has been beset by periodic scandals and poor administration, kinship care in black America "has remained stable and successful" for more than a century and currently cares for more than 1.3 million children nationwide, according to a legal scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Kinship care refers to a living arrangement in which a grandparent or other relatives take primary responsibility for raising a child.

Sonia Gipson Rankin, a 2002 graduate of the Illinois College of Law, asks why a system with such a proven track record has not been more encouraged. An important reason, she writes in the latest issue of the Elder Law Journal, is that most legislators and child-welfare experts know so little about it.

Kinship care, which has roots in Africa, came into existence in America’s slave period when the parents were sold or the family was otherwise fractured. Grandmothers and other older relatives were then called upon to care for the children. This contrasted to abandoned or orphaned white children, who were either placed in almshouses or in indentured servitude.

After the Civil War, white children were moved into orphanages, and black children were allowed into almshouses, but not orphanages. They were also barred from white public and private sector child-welfare programs."

As a result, extended families operating outside the child welfare and orphanage systems developed in the black community. Grandmothers took on a more central role during the "great migration" of blacks from the rural South to northern cities, caring for grandchildren who waited, sometimes forever, for their parents to come back and retrieve them.

In government circles, kin caregiving either was dismissed as "a practice among cultures of color only" or derided as working "in opposition" to the child-welfare system, which sought to reunify children with their biological parents.

Official attitudes began to change as the supply of non-kin foster homes declined. In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled in Miller v. Youakim that kin were entitled to receive the same federal financial support for foster care as non-kin foster parents.

Since then, however, many minority grandparents have been forced "to bend and twist to the changing whims" of federal policy. Under the 1996 welfare reform act, for example, relative caregivers were to be given preference for placement purposes, but then had to abide by strict work requirements to receive Temporary Aid for Needy Families grants.

Many kin caregivers prefer to live in poverty rather than subject the children under their care to intrusions by caseworkers and their own lives to welfare-agency rules.
"Presently, child welfare policies are not meeting the needs of kin caregivers," Rankin concluded in her article.