Articles

Fun Ways to Create a Secure Attachment with Young Relative Children

While raising this young toddler or school-aged child in your home, you have a special opportunity to help them feel safe, loved, and strong. One of the best gifts you can give them is a secure attachment. This bond tells your grandchild (or nephew or cousin): “You...

When Siblings Harm Each Other

In this community, we value “family” as much bigger than just parents and children.  This is one of the most common reasons that grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other relatives step in to help raise a child when the parents can’t. The strength of kinship care helps...

When Your Grandchild Needs Help Making Friends

Making friends can be hard sometimes. For children who have experienced trauma, loss, big changes, learning differences, or prenatal substance exposure to drugs and alcohol, making friends may feel extra hard. As a grandparent or related caregiver to this child, you...

Healing from Trauma/Neglect/Abuse

Helping Kids Cope with Change

Helping Kids Cope with Change

Very few humans willingly embrace change. Even the most straightforward changes can create uncertainty, and learning to handle life's ups and downs is part of normal growth and development. We handle these changes differently, influenced by our personality, life...

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Helping Tweens and Teens Manage Money

Helping Tweens and Teens Manage Money

When a child’s developing brain is impacted by exposure to drugs and alcohol during pregnancy, early loss, neglect, or other trauma, they may struggle to understand money. Learning the value of money and how to manage it can also be an overwhelming task for kids with...

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Impacts of Prenatal Exposure to Alcohol and Drugs

Challenging Behaviors

4 Ideas for Handling Challenging Behaviors

4 Ideas for Handling Challenging Behaviors

Trauma, abuse, loss, and grief all create a sense of instability or insecurity in children of any age. When a relative’s child comes to your home, you may notice several behaviors, like talking back, temper tantrums, or whining. It’s understandable that they are...

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Understanding Why Kids Lie and Steal

Understanding Why Kids Lie and Steal

All kids tell lies or take something that doesn’t belong to them at some point in their childhood. But some children lie and steal often! As their caregiver, it’s stressful to live with these behaviors. You worry about the future and you want the behaviors to stop...

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ADHD

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Disrupting Birth Order

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Helping A Child Heal from Sexual Abuse

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School Issues for Foster & Kinship Kids

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Technology/Internet and Our Kids

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Self-Care for Kinship and Foster Parents

Practical Tips to Starting Regular Self-Care

Practical Tips to Starting Regular Self-Care

When you are raising a child from your extended family or tribal community, you are giving of yourself in new and challenging ways. Your grandchild (or cousin or nephew) needs you to help them overcome their struggles. It's easy to feel overwhelmed by their needs and...

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Making Self-Care a Routine

Making Self-Care a Routine

Raising a grandchild (or nephew or cousin) brings both joy and stress. You love them and you love knowing that they are safe, but raising a child is a lot of work! Think back to when you were raising your kids and remember how tired you were. Now add a few or a lot of...

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Relationship with Child’s Parent

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Working Together For the Good of the Child In Your Care

This website was supported with funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families’ Children’s Bureau through the Improving Child Welfare Through Investing in Family grant #HHS-2021-ACF-ACYF-CW-1921. The purpose of this grant is to provide an array of kinship preparation services and ongoing kinship supports, and provide shared parenting to build trusting relationships between all out-of-home caregivers and parents of children/youth in foster care to ensure parents and families remain actively involved in normal child-rearing activities.

This website is supported by Grant Number 90CW1149 (HHS-2021-ACF-ACYF-CW-1921) from the Children’s Bureau within the Administration for Children and Families, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Neither the Administration for Children and Families nor any of its components operate, control, are responsible for, or necessarily endorse this website (including, without limitation, its content, technical infrastructure, and policies, and any services or tools provided). The opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Administration for Children and Families and the Children’s Bureau.