EU Kinship Carers Project

Francisco Guillen and his colleagues from the University of Navarra in Pamplona Spain have completed an update of the literature review they undertook at the beginning of the project and which was published on this website in January 2009.

The update is structured in six parts. The first offers an overview of the scale of kinship care. The second deals with the motivation of kinship care providers. The third looks to compare kinship care with other placement types. The fourth explores findings about what happens when parents are incarcerated. The fifth is a section on removing children from maltreatment and the final section looks at meeting the needs of kinship carers and the children they look after.

One of the new key pieces of evidence suggests that:

Youth in kinship foster care had considerably lower rates than other groups for post-entry onset of depression and substance use disorders.

Another study, looking at the use of kinship care where the child has been maltreated, suggests:

children in kinship foster care experienced better behavioural development, mental health functioning, and placement stability than do children in non-kinship foster care.

However, other research indicates that while the stability of kinship placements is high this can be at the expense of kinship carers, this suggest that:

it is important to provide services to kinship carers and children when placements are in difficulty so as to ensure that good outcomes for children in kinship care are not achieved at the expense of the kinship carers themselves.

Download the paper here.