Whenever it is safe and possible, children belong with their families.
Across child welfare, there is growing emphasis on keeping children safely with their parents and, when that isn’t possible, placing them with relatives or other people they already know and trust. That shift matters. Children benefit from maintaining connections to family, community, culture, and the people who have been part of their lives.
But there is another reality we can’t lose sight of: kinship care isn’t possible for every child. Some children cannot safely return home. Some don’t have relatives or other kin who are able to care for them. Others have needs that require caregivers with particular experience, training, capacity, or support.
For those children, foster families remain essential. And often, the families willing to say yes to them are being asked to say yes to a lot more than any one parent or couple can do alone.
Kinship care should be a priority
The U.S. Children’s Bureau states plainly that when children must be removed from their homes, placement with relatives or kin is preferred. Kinship care can help preserve relationships, culture, community, and a child’s sense of identity.
Learn more about kinship care from the U.S. Children’s Bureau
Reunification should be pursued whenever it can happen safely. Kin should be sought, engaged, and supported. Fostering Hope supports that direction.
But prioritizing kinship care and supporting foster families are not competing ideas.
Both can be true.
Some children will still need foster families
Even in a system that does everything possible to preserve families and identify kin, there will be children for whom those options aren’t available or appropriate. Federal child welfare policy itself recognizes that reunification is not always possible.
The foster care system therefore also provides safe, stable care until children can return home, achieve permanency through adoption or guardianship, or reach another appropriate permanency arrangement.
For these children, the availability of strong foster families isn’t secondary to the work of child welfare. It remains essential to it.
The families we can least afford to lose
Who are the children where kinship placements are least likely? Typically they are part of large sibling groups. Teenagers with deep-rooted trauma. Children with complex medical, behavioral, or developmental needs.
Now consider the foster parents who are willing to care for them? They often have a unique skill set and expertise and a deeply held conviction to help these children when most others will not.
In other words, these are both children and parents where the impact of burnout or placement disruptions is extraordinarily high.
And with an exceptionally heavy load, the risk of this is just as high. Appointments. School meetings. Caseworker visits. Court dates. Transportation. Therapy. Family visits. Behavioral challenges. Interrupted routines. Advocacy. The everyday responsibilities of parenting—all layered on top of the complexity that can accompany foster care.
What if we gave those families what they asked for?
These families, when surveyed, ask for the kind of everyday practical and emotional support that anyone might need in their situation. Help with rides to school. Meals on busy weeknights. A date night every once in awhile. Just to be seen and not so alone.
These are not things the child welfare system is designed to provide, but it is something volunteers are meant for.
People who want to help. Most of those people will never become foster parents. They don’t need to. They can bring a meal. Drive a child to practice. Help with homework. Babysit. Attend a basketball game. Listen when a foster parent has had an impossibly hard week. Celebrate birthdays. Keep showing up.
In other words, they can do many of the things aunts, uncles, grandparents, neighbors, and friends do for families every day.
That’s Where Fostering Hope Comes In
For nearly 20 years, Fostering Hope has surrounded foster families with teams of trained volunteers who become something like extended family. Rather than asking foster parents to carry the work alone, volunteers provide practical help and consistent relationships based on what each family says it needs. Professional Fostering Hope staff recruit, screen, train, and coordinate those volunteers and work alongside child welfare partners.
The impact: fewer families quitting and fewer children bouncing from home to home.
- Learn more about why Fostering Hope works
- Explore Fostering Hope’s impact
A world where kinship care and foster care coexist
The future of child welfare should continue moving toward stronger families, greater use of kin, and fewer unnecessary removals. At the same time, we need to be realistic about the children for whom those options won’t be possible. They deserve family too.
And the foster parents who open their homes to them deserve more than our gratitude. They deserve a community willing to help them carry the weight.
If we want stable homes for children with some of the greatest needs, we have to invest not only in finding those homes—but in surrounding the families who make them possible.