When a child cannot safely remain with their parents, turning first to family or another trusted adult can preserve something critically important: connection. In September, we celebrate National Kinship Awareness Month, recognizing that kinship care can help children maintain relationships with the people, communities, culture and history that are part of who they are. Research supports its benefits, including the importance of family connections to healthy development and a sense of belonging.
But finding kin is not the same as achieving permanency.
Melissa Geesaman, executive director of the Pennsylvania State Resource Family Association, understands that distinction professionally and personally. Her own family has been affected by addiction and kinship placement.
“I think sometimes we see that a child is safely placed with someone they know and think, ‘Great, we found a home,’” she said. “But really, that’s just the beginning.”
What happens next depends not only on the family, but on how the people and systems surrounding them approach permanency.
Courts: Keep family connections in view
Courts have an important role in ensuring that identifying kin is not a one-time exercise. The American Bar Association and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges encourage judges to ask parents and children about important relationships, review efforts to identify and engage kin, and consider how non-placement kin can remain involved in a child's life.
That reflects a larger responsibility: keep asking who matters to this child and how those relationships can be preserved. A safe placement matters, but so do sibling relationships, connections with extended family and the child's long-term sense of belonging.
Permanency professionals: Understand the family, not just the case
Kinship changes family relationships, often under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. A grandparent caring for a grandchild may simultaneously be coping with grief, anger or worry about their own son or daughter. An aunt may be supporting reunification with her sibling while preparing for the possibility of raising that sibling’s child permanently.
Voce paralegal Jennifer Asti experienced those complexities when she and her husband became kinship caregivers for their grandson. Despite years working in child welfare, she was struck by how much of the process went unexplained and how easily procedural requirements could overshadow the family experiencing them.
“We have a system so focused on meeting deadlines that we forget we are trying to develop and foster connections, permanency, relationships,” she said.
Kinship also requires professionals to recognize that children bring an existing family story with them, even when that story includes trauma, loss and broken relationships. That includes listening to children themselves about who they consider family, which relationships matter to them and how they hope those connections will continue.
Reflecting on her grandson’s experience, Jennifer said, “He had a life before all of this—we know it was awful, we know how it ended and how he came to us—but it was his.” Good kinship practice means understanding that whole family story—not simply completing the requirements surrounding the case.
Child welfare leaders: Design systems that work for kin
Jennifer's experience raises an important question: If someone who works in child welfare can struggle to navigate the system, what is the experience like for a relative encountering it for the first time?
Kinship caregivers may step into their roles suddenly, without the preparation that typically precedes becoming a foster parent. They may not know what financial assistance is available, what services exist or even what questions they should ask.
The responsibility of system leaders, then, is to examine whether policies, licensing, communication, services and supports reflect the realities of kinship families. Pennsylvania law gives relatives and kin first consideration when children in county custody need placement, and the Commonwealth allows temporary approval that can enable a child to be placed with kin while the family completes the full foster home approval process.
These provisions recognize that relatives and other trusted adults often step forward unexpectedly, amid a family crisis, rather than after months of preparation.
Kinship caregivers: Recognize families as informed partners
Once they step forward, families cannot make sustainable permanency decisions without understanding their choices.
Kinship caregivers need clear information about permanency options, legal responsibilities, available benefits and what support will remain after formal child welfare involvement ends. In the Judge’s Action Alert: How to Support a Kin First Culture, the ABA and the NCJFCJ recommend that courts assess whether caregivers understand those implications and have what they need to make informed decisions.
Pennsylvania's KinConnector helps address that need by connecting kinship caregivers across the Commonwealth to information and services, including health, financial and legal services, parenting support, support groups and available federal, state and local benefits.
Perhaps more importantly, families need to be heard. As the Judge’s Action Alert concludes, well-informed and engaged families bring expertise about themselves that the system needs.
Communities: Be there when the system leaves
Legal permanency may close a child welfare case. It does not end the family's story.
Kinship families may continue to need financial resources, behavioral health services, peer connections, respite and people who understand their experience. Courts are similarly encouraged to consider before issuing permanency orders whether caregivers have what they need to care for the child without agency involvement and whether they understand available post-permanency supports.
As Melissa put it, kinship caregivers step up when children need them. “We need to make sure we're stepping up for those caregivers too.”
That may be the larger lesson of kinship permanency. Finding family is not the finish line.
True permanency requires courts, professionals, system leaders, caregivers and communities to recognize the relationships, history, strengths and needs surrounding each child, and create the conditions that allow those connections to endure.
