Just over two years ago, Constance Gray's 17-year-old granddaughter, Nessue, came to live with her. Gray, who is now 64, lives in Portsmouth, Virginia, a small city near Norfolk. Her own daughter was living on Long Island, a single mom struggling to raise a teenager and worrying that working full-time was getting in the way. When Nessue started skipping school, the family decided that she should live with Gray.

Gray, an active member of the Brighton Rock AME Zion Church, was meeting other parishioners once a week for the "Young at Heart" seniors' social group. "We started discussing the issues of taking care of children and realized that so many of us were doing it. It started to become a grandparent-as-parent support group," she says.

Soon after, the church's pastor, Reverend Clifford Barnett, was approached by another parishioner who told him she was taking in three granddaughters—a teenager and two preteens—from Chicago. "You're going to need some help," Barnett remembers telling her. "So I said, ?Okay, we're going meet and see where we can find support.'"

The number of U.S. children raised by relatives jumped by 76 percent between 1970 and 1990, according to the Children's Defense Fund. To help meet the needs of a growing population of these families in Portsmouth, Barnett and members of his church cobbled together local resources to create a comprehensive network of support: Brighton Rock's Portsmouth Grandparents as Parents Group.

The group holds weekly sessions at eight of the town's 17 elementary schools. After seeing their children off to class, the caregivers meet at the school to share problems and solutions. By this fall, the group hopes to be operating in all 17 schools.

"What I'm finding is that a lot of grandparents are just pulling their hair out because they don't know where they can go for help," says Barnett. "We try to use the resources around us, near the school, that relatives can easily access."

Portsmouth Grandparents as Parents has held special sessions to bring in social services staff, teachers, lawyers and pediatricians to talk with caregivers. Barnett and Gray, who is now a Grandparents as Parents group facilitator, are working to develop a resource guide to connect kinship caregivers with local information and supports.

Supporting a Vulnerable, Growing Population
A surprising number of U.S. children are in "kinship care," being raised by relatives because their parents are unable or unwilling to do so. According to 1990 Census data, just over 2.1 million children live in families headed by relatives, with no parents present. Nearly two-thirds of these caregivers are grandparents.

Such arrangements can help minimize the trauma of separation and give kids a sense of connection and family support. Moving in with Grandma or another relative often means staying in a familiar setting, and maintaining cultural continuity. These children also tend to have more frequent contact with parents and siblings than kids in other types of foster care.

Researchers now break kinship care arrangements down into three basic types: informal, where the family has no contact with the child welfare system (such as Gray and her granddaughter); voluntary, where a child has come to the attention of child protective services, but is given over to the care of relatives without being taken into state custody; and kinship foster care, where the child is taken into state custody and then placed with relatives in a formal arrangement.

State and local policies determine whether kids who have been abused and neglected are taken into state custody or not, says Rob Geen, senior research associate at the Urban Institute. In some states, placing children with relatives is viewed as a satisfactory long-term solution, and caseworkers may see no need to further involve the child welfare system.

There's no data yet on whether children placed with relatives fare better or worse if they are also placed in state custody, and continue to be considered active cases by child welfare authorities.

In fact, researchers are just beginning to learn about kids in voluntary kinship care—how many there are and how they're doing. "When I first started talking about this, people told me we must have made a mistake," says Rob Geen. The numbers seemed too large. "When 39 states told us they did voluntary kinship care at least sometime [during] 1999, it was a real surprise. People in the child welfare community were surprised by the number and how vulnerable [these kids] may be."

Beyond these voluntary placements, many states look to kin first when kids have to be formally removed from parents' care. States typically place 20 to 40 percent of kids in the child welfare system with members of the extended family.

Still, the vast majority of children in kinship care—roughly 1.3 million—are in informal arrangements, with no connection to the child welfare system, or access to financial assistance and supports like Medicaid and food stamps. In 1999, according to the Urban Institute, one-third of kids reared by relatives received neither TANF nor foster care subsidies, though they were eligible for one or both.

Connecting Families with Supports
Suzette Leathers, program director of the Portsmouth Grandparents as Parents Group, says that although they are often reluctant to admit it, many caregivers may feel cut off from much-needed financial supports.

"Some say they're made to feel like villains if they ask for supports," she says. "One grandparent told me, ?I'm made to feel like I'm only looking at getting my grandkids because of the support. But I can't afford to add three people to my household expenses if I don't have extra to spend on them.'"

Nationally, grandparents raising children are 60 percent more likely to live in poverty than those not raising kids. Kinship caregivers are also more likely to be single. And, according to new research by the Urban Institute, 41 percent of kids being reared by relatives other than parents live below the federal poverty line, compared with 17 percent of children overall.

Other problems can arise for family members raising children not their own. If relatives don't have custody or guardianship, they may have trouble enrolling kids in school, getting health care coverage or even making doctor's appointments. "When [caregivers] go to enroll the children in school, they often learn that they can't sign kids up for anything if they don't have guardianship or custody," says Suzette Leathers. "They come to us asking what to do, and what we can do is find the people who can help them best."

Helping these children succeed in school is another difficult task. One in three kids in kinship care live with a relative who didn't finish high school. Even for those with higher educations, helping with homework can be tricky after so long out of the classroom.

George O. Hicks and his wife, both active members of the Portsmouth Grandparents as Parents Group, raised their granddaughter Christian and are now raising her daughter, Jasmine, after Jasmine's father was killed.

In the beginning, says Hicks, helping Jasmine with homework was a real challenge. So Grandparents as Parents devoted one of the weekly sessions at Lakeview Elementary, where 7-year-old Jasmine is in school, to helping Hicks and the others brush up on the basics of math and the best strategies for helping kids with reading and spelling.

The group also facilitates regular "tutoring sessions" on subjects caregivers may have studied long ago, and teachers are available to work through upcoming assignments with caregivers.

Becoming Parents Again
Veda Branch, 63, and her 68-year-old husband have been raising their 10-year-old grandson Robert since birth because his mother, their daughter, is hospitalized with bipolar disorder.

It's not easy being a parent again, she says. "I'm trying to adjust my whole lifestyle, I was planning on [retirement] and arts and crafts, but I know I won't be able to do that." She wouldn't trade a moment with Robert, says Branch, but it is tiring.

Kinship care families face a range of obstacles, and a variety of needs. Few states have formal systems to meet these needs. Portsmouth's Grandparents as Parents tries to bridge this gap by connecting caregivers with legal information about physical and mental health care, support and respite care, and pointing them in the direction of help for the behavior problems, anger management or adjustment problems the children may have.

"A lot of these children have seen and experienced quite a bit. Think about how difficult it must be to match wits?with a 13, 14 or 15-year-old who was raised in a totally different way," says Reverend Barnett.

Outcomes for Kids in Kinship Care
There's no real data on whether kids in kinship care fare better than those in non-relative foster care. Researchers are finding that children tend to stay in kinship care placements longer, and are less likely to move from home to home when they are placed with relatives.

But what this means for children is unknown. "We know very little about how they fare when they are transitioning out of care," says Urban Institute's Rob Geen. "In kinship care, [kids] tend to be a little higher functioning in terms of education, mental health and behavior. What we don't know is whether that's because they came in that way. Does the difference have to do with what they were like before they were in the relatives' care?"

Most state and federal child welfare policies embody the belief that kinship care is usually preferable, in most cases, to foster care.

"There are many reasons for this belief," says Geen. "Placing children with relatives reduces an already traumatic event, and we know that kids have more contact with parents, siblings and community. This can be good or bad—good if they keep ties to healthy relatives, and a challenge if parents have unsafe access to their kids."

Resources on Kinship Care
With new U.S. Census data and other research beginning to build a portrait of the kinship care population—both children and caregiving adults—an opportunity exists for creating better support systems.

This is one issue where advocates, activists and concerned adults can help, by raising awareness of the size and the needs of this group. "In some ways, I feel we're at a crossroads," says Mary Bissell, senior staff attorney in the child welfare and mental health division of the Children's Defense Fund. "If we can give the attention to this issue that it deserves, with national and local organizations working together with the input of kin families, we'll be able to create a lot more of the programs and services families need."

Here are some places to go for information, resources and ideas for action.

• The Children's Defense Fund (CDF [1]) has resources, policy information and action alerts on a variety of topics. Be sure to check out their overview [2] on kinship care, Strengthening the Safety Net: Expanding Community Supports for Kinship Care Families and the guide [3] to the new Adoption and Safe Families Act regulations. A full list of kinship care information is available on their child welfare and mental health division [4] page.

• Generations United [5] is dedicated to helping grandparents and others providing kinship care.

• The Urban Institute [6] gathers comprehensive data on kinship care and the families providing it. Among their recent kinship care studies is Children Cared for by Relatives: Who Are They and How Are They Doing?, available online [7].

• The Child Welfare League of America (CWLA [8]) has a special kinship care [9] section of their site, and hosts a national conference on kinship care every two years.

• The Brookdale Foundation's Relatives as Parents Program (RAPP [10]) funds services and programs designed to assist kinship caregivers.

CDF is putting together a list of state-by-state regulations and rules to give kinship caretakers a survey of what's available in their state, and what the requirements are for eligibility. Look for that on Connect for Kids in the fall!

Caitlin Johnson [11] is staff writer at Connect for Kids.