Honoring Where They Came From, Honoring What’s Next
I once told one of my foster daughters something my grandmother had told me years earlier. She got quiet for a minute. Then she admitted that it had been so long since she’d seen her own grandmother that she’d forgotten what her face looked like.
That comment has stayed with me for years. We spend a lot of energy in foster, adoption, kinship, and stepfamily life worrying about parents. Reunification plans, custody schedules, and the biological parent relationship get most of the attention. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins get almost none. But for the kids in our care, that extended biological family often carries the answer to a question that matters more than we realize: where did I come from?
National Cousins Day falls on July 24. National Aunts and Uncles Day follows two days later, on July 26. They’re minor, probably made up holidays, and easy to skip past. But they’re a good excuse to ask a question Plan B parents don’t ask often enough. What are we doing to help our kids hold onto the extended family they came from, even as we build the extended family they’re gaining with us?
Why Extended Family Matters, Not Just Parents
Most articles about foster and adoptive kids focus on the parent-child bond. That focus makes sense. But a child’s world was never just a parent. It was grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, family friends who counted as family. When we only track what happens to the parent relationship, we miss the rest of the network our child may have lost.
Grandparents in particular carry weight of their own, separate from parents. A 2025 study found that grandparent support during early childhood predicted emotional wellbeing years later, in emerging adulthood, and that this held true even after a grandparent had died and even when the child’s relationship with a parent was poor. This is one study, not a body of research, so the finding is suggestive rather than settled. But it fits what most of us have seen firsthand. A grandparent’s love doesn’t have to run through the parent to matter.
The evidence is stronger for kids whose parents have already separated or divorced. A 2009 study found that grandparent involvement mattered more, not less, for kids in stepfamilies and single-parent households than it did for kids in two-parent biological families. The researchers found that grandparents were often the person a child confided in right after a parental separation, when the child wasn’t ready to talk to either parent about it yet.
That finding should reframe how we think about stepfamily kids specifically. When a marriage ends, a child doesn’t just lose day-to-day time with a parent. Depending on custody arrangements, they can lose regular contact with an entire side of their extended family: a grandmother, an uncle, cousins they used to see every holiday. This loss is real and we need to not forget it.
The Cost of Losing Extended Family Contact
For adoptees, the research points the same direction. A study following adopted young adults from childhood found that those who maintained sustained, satisfying contact with their birth family reported lower psychological distress and higher well-being than those whose contact stayed limited or ended entirely. The researchers also noted something that matched what I’ve heard from kids in foster care directly: even kids who came through the child welfare system, who may have experienced real harm in their families of origin, still long for contact with siblings, parents, and extended family members. Wanting that connection isn’t confusion, and it isn’t disloyalty to the family that’s raising them now.
There’s also a quieter cost that doesn’t show up as easily in a study. Kids build their sense of who they are partly out of family stories, the ones parents and grandparents tell and retell at holidays and dinner tables. A 2022 review found that intergenerational family storytelling plays a helpful role in a young person’s identity and mental health, connecting them to something bigger than their own immediate circumstances. When a child loses contact with the grandparents, aunts, and uncles who hold those stories, they lose access to a version of their own history that a Plan B parent usually can’t reconstruct alone. I don’t have research isolating cousins specifically, so I’ll say this from experience rather than data: cousins often hold pieces of that history too, particularly shared childhood memories that don’t exist anywhere else.
Honoring Where They Came From
None of this means every child should have unsupervised, unlimited contact with every biological relative. Some extended family members aren’t safe, and a Plan B parent has to make hard calls about who gets access to a child and how much. But for the extended family members who are safe, even imperfect, Casey Family Programs’ research on family time is useful here.
It found that meaningful contact doesn’t have to mean frequent in-person visits. Phone calls, video calls, letters, and photos all count as real connection, particularly when distance or scheduling make visits hard.
Practically, this can be simple. A Plan B parent can set up a quarterly video call between a child and a grandmother the child can’t visit often. A parent can forward a photo from a cousin’s birthday party, even if the families aren’t close. A parent can encourage a birthday card from an aunt who lives across the country. None of these steps require reunification or a custody change. They require a Plan B parent deciding that a child’s biological history is worth the effort of staying in touch, even secondhand.
Adoptive parents, this might mean initiating contact with extended birth family even when the adoption itself is closed to the birth parents. Foster parents, it might mean asking a caseworker directly whether the agency can arrange contact with extended birth family. Stepparents, it might mean actively supporting a child’s relationship with a noncustodial parent’s extended family, instead of letting it quietly lapse because it’s inconvenient or the divorce made things awkward.
Honoring What’s Next
Holding onto a child’s biological extended family doesn’t compete with building a new one. My foster daughter needed both. She needed to remember her grandmother’s face, and she also needed the new people I brought into her life: my own family, the people who showed up for her birthdays and holidays going forward.
A child in a Plan B family often ends up with two sets of aunts, uncles, and cousins, sometimes more. That’s not a complication to manage. It’s an asset, if we let it be one. The stepfamily research bears this out again: grandparent involvement helped kids in single-parent and stepfamilies the most, not because it replaced anything, but because it added another layer of support to an already-stretched family. The same logic applies to new aunts, uncles, and cousins gained through fostering, adoption, or remarriage. They don’t have to compete with what came before. They can simply add to it.
I won’t pretend this is simple. Loyalty conflicts are real. A child can feel guilty for loving a new aunt as much as an old one or confused about which family they’re supposed to claim at a holiday gathering. Plan B parents can’t resolve that confusion for a child, and I’d be lying if I said I always helped my kids stay in touch. What I can say is that discussing it honestly, instead of pretending the child only has one family now, usually helps more than any other approach.
A Small Thing Worth Doing
Cousins Day and Aunts and Uncles Day aren’t going to fix a broken family connection. But they’re a low-stakes reminder to check in on something that’s easy to let slide. Has a grandparent heard from your foster child lately? Does your adopted child know a story from the biological family’s side, one you could help them hold onto? Is there a cousin on the other side of a divorce who used to matter to your stepchild, and could still?
I don’t have research telling me exactly how often that contact should happen, or in what form, for every family. What I have is a memory of a teenager who had forgotten her grandmother’s face, and a belief that we owe our kids the effort of making sure that doesn’t happen if we can help it. Where they came from and what’s next don’t have to be in competition. Most of the time, a child needs both.
Want to go deeper? Being the People Who Are Not Supposed to Be There (Course 1) covers how Plan B parents hold their role with confidence while still honoring the biological family a child came from. https://www.ysoacademy.com/courses/not-supposed-to-be-there
