Why reporters should include kinship families, or grandfamilies, in their beat coverage

More than 2.5 million kids in America are being raised by relatives — grandparents, aunts or siblings — rather than their parents. 

Even more children live with them temporarily. Among Black and Indigenous Americans, about one in five kids will live with a non-parent relative before turning 18. So that would add a million or two more to the figure above, giving a rough tally of how many children are or will be growing up with extended family. 

Even though “kinship families” or “grandfamilies” are common, they are little discussed by community leaders and policy makers — and journalists. As a result, public programs they often rely on are not designed with their needs in mind. The families themselves don’t know where to look for services tailored to help them. And the broader community is unaware of these gaps and opportunities they have to support neighbors. As a grantee of the 2025 Child Welfare Impact Reporting Fund at the Center for Health Journalism, I set out to tell kinship stories to raise awareness of the challenges and joys as well as to understand whether government programs adequately met their needs — or excluded them from help. All of this is further complicated when kinship families are formed after an intervention from child protective services. 

When I met Amy, I quickly realized her family’s story could help people understand both the personal and policy implications of kinship. From being removed from her mom’s home to being raised by a teen sister to taking in her nieces and nephews as an adult, Amy’s life paralleled major changes in American policy on how the government responds to poverty, mental health and substance use in families with kids. 

The second administration of President Donald Trump is moving to redefine, again, who deserves government help, for how long and what that looks like. Kinship families will be particularly vulnerable to changes. 

With reforms sweeping through child welfare systems after the 2018 passage of the Family First Prevention Services Act and an incoming vice president who has criticized the nation’s welfare programs as indulgent, it is a critical time for thoughtful, revelatory reporting about the policies shaping the path for millions of American children. Many of them will be raised by relatives. 

I encourage fellow reporters to consider kinship families on their beats: child welfare, yes, but also health, social services, aging, education and criminal justice, among others. We’re telling an incomplete story of America if we only write about parent-led households. 

Here are some of the things I learned about kinship from research and Amy’s personal story, any of which could be a starting point for reporting in your community: 

Kinship families often form suddenly in response to a crisis: Parents die in a car wreck, a single mom loses the job that pays for housing, a parent fatally overdoses, or child protective services removes kids from their home because of suspected neglect or abuse. Unlike other caregivers, they did not intend to raise kids and have time to prepare. They might not have a home with adequate space or a job with sufficient income. They likely don’t have toddler beds, diapers, car seats or toys on hand. 

Kinship caregivers tend to be older, poorer and in worse health than other parental figures. Most are grandmas, who often live in small homes, get by on meager fixed incomes and are juggling chronic health challenges. These circumstances complicate their best efforts to raise kids, as do public programs that weren’t designed with them in mind — such as requiring elderly caregivers to work to receive public benefits or having lifetime limits on assistance. Even those that do qualify for benefits might assume they won’t. The Annie E. Casey Foundation reports that “fewer than 12% of kinship caregivers receive help from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families,” a federal program that provides cash assistance and services to low-income families with kids.

If kids can’t live with their parents, they typically have better outcomes being raised by relatives than by strangers. Research has long shown kinship families reduce the traumatic effects of child protective services removing kids. Living with kin usually means maintaining cultural and community ties that often can be severed when kids are placed with strangers in foster care. The funding for preventing child removals supported under the Family First Prevention Services Act came with a heavy emphasis on kinship placement. It also, for the first time, allowed states to create alternative licensing structures so kin could receive support payments just as non-biological foster parents do Few states have actually done so.

When child protective services place kids with relatives, they often enter “hidden foster care.” Government-arranged kinship care has grown to represent more than a third of foster placements nationwide. But other times, caseworkers might seek informal kinship placements to avoid opening a case or to close one as part of diversion efforts. In essence, child welfare workers say they won’t take kids into foster care and take the parents to court if they leave their kids with relatives. This happens without due process protections. And these newly reordered families do not receive the same supports as those formed through foster care. Depending on how states implement the prevention programs funded under the 2018 law, more of those families could receive needed services — but at the cost of surveillance by child welfare officials. Paradoxically, asking for help sometimes is seen as proof a relative can’t adequately provide, leading officials to remove the kids to a stranger’s home after all. 

Most kinship families are “informal,” created outside the child welfare system without any court considering custody or guardianship. That complicates daily life. Access to education, health care and other services often hinges on whether an adult has legal custody or guardianship of a child. And while guardianship allows relatives to make critical decisions for children in their care, it does not end the parents’ legal rights, including their ability to take away their kids. 

Family relationships can be strained by kinship, which might turn loved ones into adversaries. Often, relatives choose guardianship with the hope that their loved one will one day be able to parent again. But sometimes the guardian disagrees with the parent about when they are, in fact, ready. Those who go to court and seek to end their loved one’s parental rights so they can adopt the child often find that they irreparably damage the relationship. It means a grandparent who wants to raise a grandkid must highlight the worst in their own child to prove they cannot competently and safely parent.

Amy’s story highlighted how these American policies push and pull on families already straining to hold themselves together. I hope this guide inspires other journalists to report on the dynamics shaping families who don’t fit the stereotypical structure. 

Kinship families are particularly vulnerable as the nation’s leaders once again revise the social contract between government and governed. How will these families fare? And will journalists tell their stories?