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An Ontario Grandmother Shares What It's Like Being A Kinship Caregiver Of Two
“You have a grandson and he needs a home.”
Earlier this year, Rhonda*, 56, found herself responsible for a newborn overnight, after answering a phone call from Children’s Aid Society (CAS). Her estranged daughter had given birth to a boy, they told her, but wasn’t able to take the baby home. Unless Rhonda stepped in, her youngest grandson would likely go into foster care.
Rhonda and her husband made the decision to bring him home quickly — after all, they had made the same choice five years ago, when they were in their early fifties and brought home his older brother, who was three weeks old at the time.
Rhonda is a “kinship” service caregiver. Kinship service and kinship care are similar, but distinct, forms of family permanency that place children and youth in the care of relatives or close family friends, without being legally adopted.
Kinship care providers take all the required steps to become CAS-approved foster parents and receive the same financial supports other foster parents get. The state is still legally responsible for the children. And kinship service caregivers like Rhonda can bring children into their home without fostering; CAS supervises them, but does not offer the same supports.
There aren’t national numbers on how many families are formed this way in Canada, but in recent years it has become more common. For example, one in four Ontarian kids who needed to be placed outside of their parental home last year stayed with a relative, the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies reports.
Kin carers tend to skew older, as most are “skip-generation” families like Rhonda’s. According to the last census, more than 32,000 Canadian children living outside of their parental home are raised by their grandparents, in contrast to more than 28,000 kids being raised by all other family members.
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