African American extended families and kinship care: how relevant is the foster care model for kinship care?

Abstract

In supporting kinship care as a “new” solution to old child welfare problems, we should acknowledge the history of the extended family and informal kinship care in individual families. In this article, we review the role of extended family in the lives of 30 youth currently residing in kinship care households. We find that these youth have extensive experience living with kin prior to their formal placement in kinship care, and that these youth continue to rely on extended family networks after their official placement with kin. This familiarity with extended family households suggests that youth in kinship care may find these arrangements neither novel nor disruptive. We recommend that service providers and researchers working with kinship care understand the adaptable and flexible nature of the family and acknowledge that this flexibility often protects families facing social and economic adversity. We further suggest that continued idealization of the nuclear family—including its use in the conceptualization of foster care—may hinder service provision because it obscures the resources of extended families.