The information that has been presented in this report is neither complete nor sufficient -- indeed, it only starts to address the questions that we feel must be answered in order to understand the increasingly important subgroup of American children that are being cared for by relatives in the absence of a parent. The limitations of this report should stand as yet another signal that too much of the raw information that we need to understand the present conditions, patterns, and trends among children in our society is not available for analysis. Our capacity to make long-term policy decisions suffers greatly when we only partially understand the realities of the present.
Caveats aside, we also believe that the information contained in this report significantly extends our understanding of the nature of kinship caregiving in the United States and, in many ways, should serve well as a starting point and guide for continued progress in the development of knowledge on this topic.
Summary
We have shown that kinship caregiving is not an unique or isolated social phenomenon, but rather that it pervades of all sectors of society. While the case of each specific child carries its own human story, the processes that bring children into kinship care arrangements are embedded in the much broader context and overall patterns of American family life. The term "breakdown" is probably premature, but the primacy of the traditional two-parent family has declined significantly over the past several decades-- through increases in both family non-formation and family dissolution. At the aggregate level, a strong positive relationship between the prevalence of children living in the care of relatives and the prevalence of children living in single-mother families extends across all regions of the nation. Both caregiving types appear as symptoms of, and adaptations to, family disruption. Interestingly, the prevalence of other adaptations of the traditional family form, such as single-father families and children living with non-relative caregivers, do not vary in a similar systematic way, but rather seem to result from an independent set of processes.
Children in kinship care and their related adult caregivers differ from the general population in many ways -- some of which we could demonstrate with available data. The population of children in kinship care is over-representative of children of color, even while the numerical majority of them are white. Older children are more likely to live within kinship care arrangements than are younger children. The adult kinship care providers are older than parental caregivers (about two-thirds are grandparents). They are also much more likely to be poorly educated, outside of the labor force, below or near the poverty level, and recipients from public programs than are parental caregivers. In the aggregate, the persons who are caring for their related children are an economically and socially marginal class or subgroup, without access to many personal resources or to the means to bring influence to bear on behalf of themselves or the children in their care.
When we turn to investigating the relation between the formal and informal kinship care groups, the picture becomes somewhat more vague. In part, this is because the comparisons were made on scanty information and in only four states (CA, IL, MO, NY). The clearest observation was that, while informal kinship arrangements appear to operate in a similar fashion in each of these four states, the utilization of formal kinship foster care varies widely. The state with the highest incidence of formal kinship care in 1990 (New York) had a rate over ten times as large as the state with the lowest incidence (Missouri). In New York and Missouri, kinship foster care arrangements existed almost exclusively in the primary urban county, and California was the only state where there was substantial use of kinship foster care outside of the central urban place. These results suggest that while informal kinship is an adaptive response to general social conditions, formal kinship is far more a creation of local policy, agency practice, and conditions that affect the administrative operation of governments.(25).
We do see some differences between the children cared for in formal and informal kinship arrangements. Even where formal kinship is common, the informal kinship care population is still much larger. Among formal kinship cases, it is the younger kin-care children -- children under the age of five years -- that are more likely to enter the foster care system, doing so at almost twice the level of older children. In contrast, older children are far more likely to be in informal kinship arrangements than are the younger children. African-American children are disproportionally likely to be cared for in both formal and informal kinship arrangements, but only formal kinship care is also a disproportionally urban phenomenon. The modal attributes of children in formal kinship care -- being very young, African-American, and highly urban -- combine to produce a highly visible and compelling group. The modal child in informal care -- being white, older, and non-metropolitan -- is less likely to draw public attention.
All of the relations, trends, and processes described above merit close observation in the near future. The potential influence of changes in our welfare system under TANF has led to much conjecture about the future role of kinship care (both formal and informal) as current program recipients exceed their time-limits or are sanctioned from further receipt for other reasons. Many technical issues, such as whether the new rules should even apply to relative caregivers, and whether time-limits should be measured for child recipients as well as for the adult grantees, are actively being debated in state capitals around the nation. Most analysts agree that fundamental shifts in the welfare system can be expected to change the current order, yet we are unsure as to how this will occur. One possibility is a rapid increase in kinship caregiving as some mothers lose access to the public transfer payments that currently support their households. Another possibility is a gradual shift towards the involvement of more fathers in what had been single-mother households. Our almost total inability to anticipate consequences is reflected in the fact that we do not yet know how to define the rules.
Data issues faced within this project
Discussions of data resource issues have been interwoven throughout this report, as these have steered the research activity and discussion at least as much as have substantive concerns and questions. Certain of the approaches and analyses were chosen specifically to exploit unique data opportunities, while others had to be qualified carefully due to the specificity of the information that was available. As a result, this task took a patchwork format, with each type of available information being exploited to provide one vantage point on the complex set of questions involved in kinship care. It is clear that our ability to describe formal and informal kinship care is highly limited by the range of information that is available for consideration. Several methodological issues that are particularly salient for describing kinship care are discussed in some detail.
Definition of Child Relationships
The "American family " includes a diverse set of social institutions. While the current family landscape is dominated by traditional two-parent, two-generational nuclear families, other family forms are common -- particularly among specific subgroups of the population. Tracking the living arrangements and household situations of children is an important part of understanding the status of children in our society and an important first step in evaluating child well-being. In this work, oriented as it is to investigating alternative forms of caregiving for children, it is necessary to view the family environment from a perspective that centers on each child. In order to define informal kinship care arrangements, we need to identify the relationship of each child to their caregivers and to know whether or not a parent is also in the home.
Much of the attention given to family patterns and even to kinship caregiving does not presume such a fine definition. It is well documented that many children reside in complex family units headed by a grandparent or other relative. It is also known that, in many of these multi-generational homes, the grandparent is the effective caregiver, even in the case that a parent is present. But in our attempt to define alternative care structures, our interest is directed to those children who are being cared for by a relative in the absence of a parent. These are unambiguous arrangements where the custody and care of the child have clearly passed from the parent to another family member. This is not the type of information that is most commonly sought from household-based census and survey data. Typically, the organization of the household unit itself (including the presence or absence of children) is of greater interest, and the defined head of the household is the primary person described. After all, the household is the living unit that associates persons with residential space, it is a definable social and economic unit, and the notion of a household easily subsumes a broad range of possible combinations of people and arrangements.
In order to identify the specific situation of each child from data collected on a household level, it is necessary to refer to a matrix of information that defines each individual person and their relation to the others in the household-- information that often is collected as part of a census or household survey. In the portion of this project that was based on data from the Current Population Survey, this information was available and the complex task of defining a child's relationship in the household was performed as part of the data analysis effort. In the portion of this project based on Census data, though, the detailed individual-level relationship data was not publicly available, so the analysis had to rest on summary data as tabulated and provided by the Census Bureau.
From the 1990 census data, as distributed in the common Summary Tape File 3 format, the family relationships of all children within the household can be identified, reflecting real improvement in their sensitivity to the existence of subfamilies and complex living units. But the only other variable that can be directly associated with this information is a two-category age classification (0-4 and 6-17 years). More detailed information is available for other classes of children ("own" children, children classified by relation to head-of-household, etc.). Other variables, such as race/ethnicity and poverty status can only be evaluated on an aggregate geographical level.
Sampling of "rare" events
The main reason that sampled data sources present a particular problem for this subject area is that kinship caregiving, both formal and informal, is a relatively low-probability event in American family life. While a fairly large number of American children lived in homes with some non-parent adult relatives in 1990, only two to three percent did so in the absence of either parent. Thus a random sample of 1,000 children would only be expected to identify somewhere around twenty to thirty children in kinship care -- hardly enough to support detailed decomposition and analysis. As we commonly observe with more familiar findings based on sampling results (such as election polls), the confidence interval within which we can "trust" estimates drawn from sampled data are often expressed with a range of plus or minus several percentage points. When the true underlying number is around two to three percent, an estimate that is accurate within plus or minus two points does not provide a level of precision that is satisfactory for comparison, for trend analysis, or that encourages any further analysis.
The error range of an estimate is mostly a function of the size of the sample, though it also depends on the underlying prevalence of the characteristic being estimated. Therefore, to discuss national patterns and trends about kinship caregiving, we must turn to very large samples or to population-based information if we hope to obtain reliable information. The Current Population Survey, which is based on annual national samples of about 11,000 [households], is the best source of this type of information. In rough terms, the national one-year estimates for 1994 produce the child living arrangement estimates at the following levels of accuracy:
| CPS Estimate | 90% confid interval +/- | +/- as % of estimate | |
| N children w/ 2 parents | 48,084,000 | 690,000 | 1.4 |
| N children in kinship care | 2,150,000 | 166,500 | 7.7 |
| % children in kinship | 3.1 % | 0.24 % | 7.7 |
| % white ch in kinship | 1.8 % | 0.22 % | 12.5 |
| % afr-amer ch in kinship | 8.0 % | 1.11 % | 13.8 |
| % hisp ch in kinship | 3.4 % | 0.81 % | 23.5 |
As we can see from these numbers, the CPS provides a rather close estimate of the national kinship care population, here as 3.1% of all children plus or minus one-quarter of one percent. As we move from a national to any sub-national estimates (region, state, ethnic group, etc) the precision of the estimates decays as the N decreases. Therefore, the CPS provides poor state estimates of kinship care levels except in the few largest states. Looking at race/ethnicity in the numbers above, it can be seen that the relative size of the error margin for white children in kinship care is about one-fourth of that for Hispanic children, and less than one-fifth of the error margin for African-American children.
The Problem of Different Sub-Populations
When we attempt to interpret any simple univariate frequency or a bivariate relation describing the association between the level of children in kinship care and another variable, say region or age, we are implicitly assuming (at least for the moment) that this relationship is not somehow influenced by the impact of other factors. When we have reason to believe that other factors do intervene in the relationship, good research procedure suggests that variables be explicitly introduced into the analysis to represent the influence of these factors. The racial/ethnic subpopulation estimates for children in kinship care above point to the type of factor that a well-designed analysis would always evaluate. On the national level, the 1994 CPS data estimate the kinship care levels at 1.8% of the total for white children, 3.4% for Hispanic children, and 8.0% for African-American children. This is an interesting, and not unexpected, finding in its own right. Kinship and extended family relations have been more prevalent in African-American families for a long time. However, these differences require that we ask a certain empirical questions before we continue. Are four times as many African-American children as white children in kinship care arrangements because they are differentially exposed to the same causal conditions? Are different causal factors operating independently on these different racial/ethnic subgroups of children?
Arguments can be developed in support of both interpretations. To support the "same causes" position, African-Americans are more likely than white Americans to be exposed to forces that we already know to be associated with increased family breakdown, such as poverty, unemployment, program receipt, and teenage childbearing. In contrast, our observation of ethnic cultural patterns also suggests that the practice of sharing child-rearing responsibilities across members of the extended family is accepted and considered more normative across a much broader segment of the African-American community than among white Americans, thus supporting the "different causes" position. This argument will not be unravelled here(26), but it highlights the significance of the issue. Because there are such wide differences between racial/ethnic subgroups in the formation of family groups and in the prevalence of kinship caregiving, we should not expect all relations or explanations to be the same across the entire population. Race and ethnicity should be paramount in the study of family structure and living arrangements, and any study that cannot explicitly control for racial/ethnic effects will necessarily be limited in its ability to define and describe these phenomena.
In the Current Population Survey portion of this report, resource limitations resulted in race/ethnicity only being evaluated as a univariate category. Because race/ethnicity is such an important discriminator variable in describing relative caregiving, far more descriptive value could be gained by controlling some of the other relationships (i.e. for age, region, metro/nonmetro, poverty) by race/ethnicity. For example, the South showed significantly higher levels of relative caregiving than the other three regions of the nation. Is this due to the higher proportion of African-Americans in the South? Do whites in the South also have higher kinship care levels than whites in other regions? Is there a difference between urban and rural southerners of any race? These are the type of questions where racial controls would be useful. They are necessary to help see if racial/ethnic factors alone explain other relationships, and to help look for variability along other dimensions within each race/ethnic group. Direct racial/ethnic classification of children and families was available in the preceding analysis only for the four-state data on children in formal kinship foster care and for the records of Illinois kinship AFDC cases. None of the analyses of informal kinship were able to address racial subclassifications, due to the fact that the Census-based data for kinship care cases were not available in a format classified by race.
Some data-oriented recommendations for the study of Kinship care
1. Extend the analysis of the Current Population Survey data. This work can be extended in two ways. First, by continuing to generate data pulls for children in kinship care relations from each of the new Annual Demographic Surveys (March CPS). This report ended with the 1994 data, which unfortunately showed apparent empirical changes that we must presume are largely an artifact of changes in data collection methodology. While these newest estimates are presumably improved, continued collection must start to obtain a time series of data for continued comparison.
Second, the Current Population Survey analysis must be performed in a multivariate fashion. The univariate findings reported here are new, important, and informative because they describe a carefully defined kinship care population. But they do not yet provide a sufficient information basis for the development of research or policy. While the survey sampling basis of the CPS will not allow highly detailed analysis, the sample size is sufficient to support controls for region, race/ethnicity, poverty levels, metro/nonmetro, etc, especially when several years data are pooled together. Because the CPS is collected annually, this should be the cheapest and most cost-effective way to follow general population trends in kinship caregiving on an ongoing basis.
2. Support a reclassification from 1990 Census STF 3 data that would allow race/ethnicity to be determined for the detailed relationships of child living arrangements. The full Census databases contain the information required, it just was not produced for public distribution. Similarly, this topic is of sufficient policy importance that the Census Bureau should be encouraged to tabulate more information classified directly for children and their family-household relationships for its reports from the next decennial census in year 2000.
Alternately, analysis of kinship care should seek to take advantage of the STF 4 data files created by the Census Bureau. These files are much larger and less widely distributed than the STF 3 data, but they contain detailed ethnic and racial subcategorizations for the entire record as reported for each areal unit. The productive gain from well-defined census information is potentially huge, as it offers not only very large samples (or full populations), but also provides the capacity for analysis by areal units. Our intention had been to demonstrate this approach in the current project to compare formal and informal kinship, but the extreme concentration of formal kinship care in a few urban places prevented this effort.
3. Analyze formal kinship care for more than four states, and include comparisons of kinship and non-kinship foster care into the analysis. This effort clearly demonstrated that the levels of kinship foster care respond more to local policy and practice issues than to basic social causes. With this understanding, each new state should be seen as a new case study rather than just an extension to a pooled dataset. In the current project we focused on differentiating formal and informal kinship cases. New research should approach questions like, for the states with low formal kinship care participation, where do the children live who would probably be formal kinship cases in another state. Do they tend to be placed in nonrelative foster care? In informal kinship arrangements? Are they more likely to remain with a parent?
The kinship foster care data would also be far more useful if it were able in all cases to identify the reason for initial removal from home and information about the kinship caregiver, including their family relationship to the child. The former information might help us to classify kin care types, and the latter would help us to contrast this population to the informal kinship group.
4. Encourage continued efforts to integration administrative data sources for service contacts with children, such as the linkage which supported the examination of Illinois AFDC and foster care populations in Section IV. Linkages are currently being pursued in several states between child welfare, child protection, public assistance, child support, mental health, public health, vital records, and other administrative databases.
The Illinois AFDC-foster care analysis, as preliminary as it was in design, emphasized the value of this type of effort. The ability to describe flows of children between various statuses and points of contact with social service providers brings the potential to empirically observe processes and to introduce causal-type arguments to a study.
Substantive recommendations for the continued study of kinship care
The impetus for this project emerged largely from concerns about recent growth in the size of formal kinship (foster) care population in many states. Several of these states have recently submitted IV-E waiver applications to support programmatic reforms being implemented to respond to their growing kinship caseloads. One reason that HHS requested this report was the premise that in order to understand the formal kinship care population, we needed to gain more insight into the nature of all kinship caregiving, with or without formal public supports. Of particular concern was finding out how similar these two groups are, and if the informal kinship group should be seen as a latent group with high potential of moving into the formal foster care system.
Interest in describing the kinship care population has also been rooted in a more general framework, which recognizes that variations in the size and prevalence of the kinship care population are related to stresses in the social conditions of families. Thus, the levels of children in kinship care might well serve as an barometer of the impact of generalized social problems on families, as well as a means for identifying a specific population od children and caregivers that have been directly affected by tensions in their daily lives. For these issues, the kinship care population is enumerated and described in a manner that treats its prevalence as an outcome, presuming that it is symptomatic of other processes affecting the social order.
To really understand the nature of kinship caregiving, we need not just to describe the children in kinship arrangements, but to represent the processes by which children come to live in households with their relatives and without their parents. Children enter kinship care arrangements at different stages of their lives, for different reasons, and with different expectations of permanency. In some cases the arrangement is initiated and pushed by agencies of the state, in others state support or custody is sought by the family, and sometimes the entire arrangement is created by family agreement.
If kinship care is typically to be understood as an adaptive and alternative to own-parent care, it should be useful to determine what problems it is solving and under what conditions alternative care arrangements are sought. Most of us will react to the each following situations very differently, finding that each scenario elicits a different emotive reaction and a different set of concerns.
These examples start to illustrate the myriad of possible scenarios that might lead to kinship caregiving. It is easy to note as we run through this list that our response to a kinship care arrangement is framed by the social and behavioral context of the situation, and not on the fact that it involves kinship placement, per se. Our understanding is conditioned by knowledge of where the mother and father are, why one or both of them are not the caregiver, why the relative assumes care of the child, what responsibility the different parties feel is being assumed, the extent to which the relative is able and willing to provide good care, and a sense of what the alternatives to the given care arrangement might be.
One substantive point to be drawn from this discussion is that, in attempting to classify and evaluate cases of children in kinship care arrangements, we should be seeking information about the processes that lead to changes in living arrangement status -- about the reasons children move into kinship care arrangements and the nature of the transitions that initiate (and terminate) kinship situations. The existence of children living in alternative care arrangements with relatives is an opportunity to identify cases where the traditional own-parent family does not function. Ideally, we can know something about the status of the parent, the precipitating reason for kinship care, or the permanence of the arrangement. Any information that might help us differentiate types of kinship care cases will increase our ability to interpret the meaning of new patterns or shifts in trends.
Another substantive point is that study of these alternative care arrangements must continue to be framed in the context of all care arrangements provided for children. The scenarios above include many distinct reasons for the movement of children to care of relatives, but almost all of them contain some evidence of fragility in their original own-parent household. Often this fragility derives directly from parental problems, that might become manifest in forms such as substance abuse, criminal activity, or abusive behavior. But it also seems that certain families are at high risk of disruption. Poverty often is a significant contributing factor. Single-parent families are especially vulnerable, if only because the one person filling the roles of parent and provider should be expected to have far more trouble buffering against crises and mediating problems than a household with two or more responsible adults. The argument being made is that because kinship care is a product of the family environment, all of the prior processes that are involved in family formation and dissolution are informative in that the help set the stage for later events. Information about teenaged childbirth, marriage rates, and births within and outside of marriage; frequency of non-marital coresidence, partnership and parenting; marital breakdown rates; participation in extended family households; establishment of paternity and child support participation -- all of these bear directly on this discussion because they help to define the size and severity of the population of children "at risk" of living in tenuous or nonviable home care environments.
One reason that "process" investigation is so important is because a phenomenon like kinship care can result from so many possible causes. It is difficult to assign explanations or reasons when kinship care levels are observed to change. We expect that the fundamental reordering of the welfare system will have an observable impact on kinship care levels and on the child welfare system. Yet, as the welfare reforms are implemented, many other changes will occur simultaneously--some related to welfare reform and others quite independent of it. We will be far better able to untangle the meanings of these changes if we have better detail about the nature of individual transitions between these statuses. Some parts of this information can be produced by exploiting existing data sources such as welfare records, child welfare data, and other service contact information. A stronger source of information would be tracking information obtained directly from the children and caretakers involved. Data of this quality can only be acquired by survey techniques. Because some significant national data-gathering efforts on child well-being are now on the drawing board, it would be fruitful to ensure that the instruments will be able to detect information about the family status of children and the types, timing, and reason for changes in these arrangements.
(25)These "forces" might involve many types of conditions. For example, the utilization of kinship care has been explained by the influence of local court decisions, the availability of spaces in nonrelative foster homes, management directives, etc.
(26)The argument as posed is also extremely simplistic. Even if one of these could be shown to be more important in current child-rearing practices, the causal impetus could have emerged due to the other set of causes. For example, the greater normative acceptance of kinship caregiving could have developed as a response to structural need.