Maintaining connections in kinship arrangements
CoramBAAF’s Members’ Week 2024 focused on ‘Listening to the child’ and on Tuesday 24 September we explored the importance of children maintaining connections with people important to them.
Current guidance and legislation use the word ‘contact’ but many of us are moving away from using it, preferring phrases such as ‘family time’, and ‘staying in touch’ or ‘maintaining connections’. Language matters because words also infer conceptual meaning – ‘contact’ perhaps suggests an event whereas ‘maintaining connections’ suggests a broader and more fluid process and ‘family time’ can have multiple meanings. Of course, when we work directly with a child and their family, we can ask their preferred term, and we should then use their words.
In a morning online event the President of the Family Division, Rt Hon Sir Andrew McFarlane, shared his thoughts on the importance of considering an adopted child’s need to maintain connections with their birth family, and I listened from a kinship perspective. Adoptive families and kinship families may have very different motivations and circumstances when they start caring for a child, but what they have in common is the need for that child to be supported to recover from loss and separation, understand their identity and make sense of their past. Often a key part of that journey involves building and maintaining relationships with significant people, often parents, siblings and other family members.
There is often a presumption of contact in kinship care. Research (Hunt, J 2020 and Hall, M. 2023) tells us that many kinship families feel unsupported and left to manage arrangements that can feel at best a challenge and at worst unsafe. So, in the afternoon event, we reflected with practitioners on what support kinship families need. Our case studies highlighted the uniqueness of kinship family life. One described a close but complex and at times difficult relationship between a Mum and maternal grandmother, and the young child’s weekly family time with her Mum, often in grandmother’s home. Another described how a maternal grandmother and Dad built mutual respect and trust over five years to ensure the child enjoyed a consistent relationship with his Dad. The building of this relationship also supported his identity needs in relation to his mixed heritage. All families, including kinship families, are unique. Both of these families needed support, but their support needs were very different. However, what they had in common was needing and receiving reliable, flexible and available support over a number of years from responsive services.
Some practitioners at the event reflected on the reality that resources are not always available to provide this planned and purposeful support, even when families and practitioners know it is needed. One practitioner spoke of ‘organisational impatience’ that does not recognise the need for extended support to families to affect change or to allow time for trust to be built. Others reflected on how we can all change the narrative to ensure children’s voices and needs inform planning around the time they spend with their parents, siblings and other family members.
The National Kinship Care Strategy states “if a kinship carer needs help to manage contact with a child’s parents, they could receive training and be offered mediation support” (pg 16). It commits funding to deliver universal training and offer support to kinship carers. This may help in supporting kinship carers to understand perhaps the purpose of contact, a child’s needs within it, and what support a child might need.
However, it is hard to see how this will make it easier for local authorities to deliver the purposeful, flexible and available ‘hands on’ support that many families need. In a universal service involving just adults, it is also hard to see how this will ensure a child’s voice and experiences stay central to decisions made about the relationships and connections they want to maintain. Good social work support to kinship families, including to the child when needed, is crucial to ensuring good outcomes in kinship arrangements.
Next week on 14 October, CoramBAAF will be holding our first ever Kinship Conference exploring the local authority role with kinship families. The conference is already sold out; but you can join the waiting list to receive updates about last-minute places or other ways to engage in some of the learning from policy and practice.
Book your place at our next kinship care practice forum on 23 October to keep up to date with the latest CoramBAAF projects supporting best practice with kinship families!
Ann Horne, Kinship Consultant, CoramBAAF