Understudied Areas of Kinship Families: Implications for Social Work Research, Policy, and Practice

Relatives raising children is a global phenomenon that continues to grow in prevalence. Despite the increased research in kinship over the past several decades, there are areas that remain understudied. For this roundtable, five understudied areas will be discussed. These include the experiences of informal caregivers, caregivers of children with disabilities, caregivers in rural communities, grandfathers as caregivers, and caregivers from a cultural perspective. This roundtable will begin a dialogue about exploring these understudied areas of kinship families. Each panelist will provide an overview of one topic and the implications it presents for social work research, policy, and practice.

The first presenter will discuss kinship caregivers in informal care. Informal kinship care, where children live with kinship caregivers without a public child welfare agency’s involvement makes up the majority of kinship families. However, current knowledge of their experience is very limited, partly due to their invisibility with no centralized systems to identify and track them. The limited literature on informal kinship care reports the disparity children and caregivers in informal kinship care experience.

The second panelist will focus on the experiences of kinship caregivers who are raising children with disabilities. Children with disabilities in out-of-home care have worse outcomes than peers, but kinship care is a demonstrated protective factor for them. However, their caregivers rarely receive training, respite care, financial support, or other services that are critical for their children’s needs and their own well-being. Support programs identified in the literature for this population are few, not evidence-based, and often targeting only grandparent caregivers.

The third panelist will discuss kinship caregivers in rural communities. Kinship caregivers often face financial strain and significant barriers to accessing resources. These issues are exacerbated in impoverished rural communities that are geographically isolated and lack the social services infrastructure to address community needs. For Black kinship caregivers in rural communities, geography often intersects with inequities related to race, class, and gender. However, the lived experiences of Black kinship caregivers in rural communities are often neglected in the literature.

The fourth panelist will discuss grandfathers raising grandchildren. For some 150,000 children, grandfathers serve as their sole parental figures and, by extension, primary father figures. As fathers and father figures are taking on more caregiving roles, it is important to underscore and examine the roles grandfathers take in raising children in their care, along with an understanding of factors that facilitate or hinder their “fathering.”

The fifth panelist will discuss the experiences of caregivers from a cultural perspective. To date, the majority of grandparent caregiver research has focused on the experiences of caregivers in the United States. When the experiences of caregivers from various cultures are examined, it is often in comparison to those of U.S. caregivers. In the current global society, it is important to understand the experiences of caregivers from various cultures.

There is a critical need to address these understudied areas in kinship families. By understanding these caregivers’ experiences social welfare policies can be created to minimize inequality and poverty and enhance their well-being.