The following resources discuss reasons for placing children with relatives or kin, considerations for kinship caregivers, and strategies for making-decisions in the children's best interests. Resources include State and local examples.
Becoming a Kinship Care Provider (legal Options). (chapter 2 in A Kinship Guide to Rescuing Children for Grandparents and Other Relatives As Parents.)
Ellis (2008)
Explains reasons children come into kinship care, voluntary kinship care families, and placement situations. The chapter also discusses considerations in making the legal authority decision and uses case studies to illustrate best practices.
Becoming Involved in Raising a Relative's Child: Reasons, Caregiver Motivations and Pathways to Informal Kinship Care
Gleeson & Wesley & Ellis & Seryak & Talley & Robinson (2009)
Child and Family Social Work, 14(3)
Describes a dynamic process that influences how children come to live with a relative other than their parent and discusses how these influences may shape policies, programs, and interventions to support families as they consider whether to care for a relative's child.
Kinship Care: Fostering Effective Family and Friends Placements
Farmer & Moyers (2008)
Compares formal kinship care to traditional foster care in order to ascertain which children are placed with kin, in what circumstances, how well such children progress, and how often these placements disrupt.
Kinship Placements: An Integrative Approach (chapter 10 in Foster Care Therapist Handbook: Relational Approaches to the Children and Their Families)
Crittenden & Farnfeld (2008)
Child Welfare League of America. (2008)
Describes kinship care as an important alternative to standard foster care and offers guidelines to help case managers make decisions involving relative and nonrelative foster care to help protect children and promote the development of close familial connections.
Placement Preferences Among Children Living in Foster or Kinship Care: A Cluster Analysis
Merritt (2008)
Children and youth services review, 30(5)
Reports findings that indicate that across waves of data collection, children express a sense of belonging in their foster homes, providing great utility in evaluative efforts that include listening to the voices of the children by encouraging their participation in case planning and service evaluation.
State and local examples
Different Pathways to a Common Destiny: Grandparent Caregivers in the District of Columbia. (also Published as Tradition and Policy Perspectives in Kinship Care.)
Crewe (2007)
Journal of health and social policy., 22(3/4)
Reports on findings from an AARP focus group study of 40 grandparents raising grandchildren in the District of Columbia. It tells the stories of individuals who have traveled different pathways to arrive at their common destiny of being a grandparent caregiver.
Foster Care Re-Entry: Evidence and Implications (PDF - 430 KB)
Bay Area Social Services Consortium (2008)
Presents findings on risk and correlates of foster care reentry, resilience and correlates of successful reunification, and the impact of child welfare interventions and service models on reducing reentry, outcomes of kinship care are also shared.