Social Workers Reexamine Kinship Care
Unfortunately, the informal adoption structure that has worked so well in the African American and Latino communities for generations is fading. Although kinship placements have soared, their numbers fall short of the need. Many potential caregivers face a cluster of problems that overwhelm the traditional tendency to take in the children of family members. Inhibiting factors include economics, two-parent working families who cannot absorb another child, and the difficulty of dealing with birthparents who may abuse alcohol or drugs or have mental health problems.
"The black family's mutual aid system of informal adoption is breaking down under the pressure of crack, prison, poverty, middle-class success, death, and do-your-own thing individualism," says Azizi Powell, former director of Black Adoption Services for Three Rivers Adoption Council in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "There are a lot of motherless children unable to go home to kin."
Nonetheless, the advantages of remaining with the family are so powerful that social workers are reexamining kinship care as the preferred family arrangement for children in the face of nuclear family breakup.
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