The Parent Comes With the Kid.
September is National Kinship Care Month. It exists to recognize caregivers who take in a relative’s child, a group that gets far less attention than foster or adoptive families, even in child welfare circles that specialize in this work.
I spent several years fostering my own adopted child’s child. That sentence takes a second to parse, and so did the situation. I wasn’t a stranger stepping into a new situation. I was raising my grandchild while staying in a relationship with my own child, the one facing insurmountable parenting challenges right then. Foster and adoptive parents usually get to build something new with the family in front of them. Kinship caregivers, like stepparents, don’t get that clean start. You already know the person whose child this is. In a kinship situation, you may have raised them yourself.
The Relationship Doesn’t End When Placement Starts
That relationship doesn’t step aside once the child moves in. You still go to Thanksgiving together. Still answer the phone when they call. You love this person, and you are also the reason a caseworker or a judge or your own gut told you their child needed somewhere else to live. Those two facts are both present, and neither one cancels the other out.
This dual relationship isn’t present in every kinship placement. Some kin caregivers take in a child whose parent has already disappeared, and the relationship problem never comes up. But in most kinship arrangements, the parent is still somewhere in the picture, and the caregiver must figure out how to parent the child while staying related to the parent. Most stepparents and foster parents with reunification plans face the same sort of challenge. We all have to figure out what ground rules are best for our kids.
Researchers have started measuring what those of us living it already knew. Kin caregivers generally report more frequent conflict with a child’s biological parent than non-relative foster caregivers do. At the same time, kin caregivers usually find it easier to keep the child in contact with that parent, because the parent is already family. Foster care research so far doesn’t address both of those facts together. Kinship care, though, has to live with both realities.
That conflict matters beyond the adults involved. A 2024 study found that kin caregivers who reported more frequent conflict with a child’s parent also reported higher rates of child hyperactivity, mental health concerns, and learning disabilities. The same study found the parent’s mere presence in the child’s life mattered less than how the adults around that child were getting along. A separate 2025 study found something similar from the other direction. When the birth mother-child relationship was higher quality, children showed fewer depressive symptoms. How we run the relationship with biological family is immensely important.
Grandparents raising grandchildren describe holding contradictory feelings toward the parent. A 2020 study of grandparent caregivers found guilt over not preventing the parent’s struggles as the same time as resentment that the parent put the child in this position in the first place. Both of those feelings make sense to me. Neither one has to be resolved before you can decide what to do next.
What Actually Helps: Boundaries
The clearest guidance from the research is about boundaries. This lines up with what I learned by trial and error. A 2024 study of kinship caregivers and child welfare professionals identified three things that made shared parenting actually work. These are: clear boundaries with the birth parent, clear communication between the adults, and outside mediation when the adults couldn’t agree on their own. When caregivers didn’t set clear boundaries, children got confused about who was actually in charge. That confusion isn’t a minor inconvenience. It’s the exact instability kinship care is supposed to prevent.
In practice, that boundary-setting might look like deciding ahead of time what the parent can and cannot decide about the child, telling the parent directly instead of managing it through the child, and holding to it even when the parent pushes back or the child is disappointed by the answer. None of that requires cutting the parent out. It requires being clear, out loud, about who has the final say.
A 2026 study of 133 kinship families found that a birth parent’s own involvement and attitude toward the arrangement predicted how well shared parenting actually went. Kinship families where a parent’s unaddressed mental health struggles were part of the picture had a harder time sharing parenting well, no matter how much the caregiver wanted it to work. Willingness on your end isn’t enough if the parent isn’t in a place to meet you there.
Formal vs. Informal Support
How much support you get with any of this often depends on whether your arrangement is formal or informal. Caregivers going through the court system typically have a caseworker who can help mediate. Caregivers who took in a child informally, through a family agreement rather than a court order, usually don’t have that outside structure and have to build their own. A 2024 review found informal kin caregivers often have more trouble connecting with the support that is available. If you’re in an informal arrangement, look for a kinship navigator program or a support group built specifically for kin caregivers.
Understand the Child’s Burden
Children in these arrangements can develop a split loyalty between the caregiver and the parent. You cannot resolve that tension for a child by pretending it doesn’t exist. Saying it plainly, in words a child can use (that Mom is having a hard time right now and you are the one making decisions), tends to help more than pretending the arrangement is simple.
When to Let the Relationship Go
None of this means every kinship caregiver, foster parent, or stepparent can or should preserve every relationship with a parent. Some parents aren’t safe to have around a child, no matter how much history you share with them. Some relationships must end, or narrow down to almost nothing, for the child’s sake. Adapt what you do here to your particular parent, your particular child, and what the courts or your own judgment require. There’s no formula that fits every kin family, because no two parents you’re related to failed in exactly the same way.
Every Plan B parent ends up managing a relationship with the person whose place they’ve taken. For a stepparent, that’s an ex-spouse you’ll be emailing about custody schedules for the next fifteen years. For a kinship caregiver, it’s your own child, your sibling, your niece. The shape is different. The work of staying steady, honest, and clear about who’s in charge is the same.
Want to go deeper? Our on-demand course, Commitment is Stronger than Love, covers how to set and hold boundaries in a Plan B family without losing the relationships that matter.
