Earlier this year, when child-welfare officials in Santa Clara County, California, determined that two-year-old Jaxon Juarez’s biological father was unable to care for him, they placed him under the care of his father’s relative—a situation commonly referred to as a “kinship foster home.” The placement proved fatal for “Baby Jaxon,” who was sexually assaulted by his foster mother’s 17-year-old son on Easter Sunday and died several days later from his injuries.
Many are questioning whether county officials ignored red flags to place the child with relatives. One such warning sign: Jaxon’s foster mother—a cousin of his biological father—had a felony conviction for child endangerment.
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Unfortunately, questionable placements like Jaxon’s are increasingly common, as advocacy groups have pushed federal leaders and state child-welfare agencies to adopt a “kin-first” culture, which prioritizes “preventing unnecessary family separation, partnering with families at every stage of decision-making, and supporting families holistically.” Santa Clara County, once considered a model for how to expand kinship care, is not alone in ignoring warning signs to ensure that foster children stay with kin.
In 1988, Ronald Reagan proclaimed May National Foster Care Month, asserting that our policies must focus on “the well-being of the child” and placements that provide “actual care and not mere custody.” Too many of our leaders and child-welfare officials have lost this focus, confusing their views about what is best for “communities” with what is best for children. The movement toward a “kin-first” culture is illustrative. Keeping families together is important, of course, but the culture of foster care should be singularly focused on the welfare of the child.
Kin-first culture is ostensibly about removing non-safety-related barriers to placing children with relatives. The coalition behind this concept is powerful because its message resonates with the public: most parents would prefer that their children be cared for by a relative or close friend over a stranger.
In fact, the law already makes provision for kinship care. For decades, federal law has given known relatives favorable treatment for placement and licensing. States have long permitted foster children to be placed in unlicensed kinship care homes and have licensed kin as caregivers under modified standards.
Current advocacy efforts highlight “easing certain housing requirements” and “streamlining paperwork,” but the continued push to expand kinship care has made it easier for dangerous individuals to gain custody of vulnerable children—and to get paid as foster parents.
Child-welfare agencies now set arbitrary benchmarks for kin placements. Connecticut, for example, has set a goal of placing 70 percent of foster children with kin. To meet these goals, agencies must approve kin who would normally trigger safety concerns or loosen definitions of who counts as kin. It’s easy to find evidence of the harm both strategies have caused across the country.
Federal foster care licensing standards already lack clear rules against placing children with people on child-abuse registries or with non-felony family-violence convictions, but kinship advocacy groups have encouraged states to go even further, stripping away the modest safety standards that licensure provides. For example, the federally funded Grandfamilies & Kinship Support Network points out that, though background checks are still required, kin caregivers with disqualifying federal convictions—including felony child abuse, child pornography, and rape—are merely ineligible for federal reimbursement. Incredibly, agencies can place children in the care of such individuals; they just need to use state, not federal, dollars. The same guidance reminds agencies that federal background check requirements don’t extend to any adults in the home other than the applicant caregiver.
Under President Biden, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) encouraged states to require no more than minimum standards to license kinship foster homes. Current ACF leadership has issued similar instruction. Relaxing standards allows unlicensed kinship foster parents (a majority of kinship caregivers in many states) to become licensed and thus eligible to receive foster-care maintenance payments. Federal guidance characterizes these payments as a progressive income redistribution to kin from “communities in which long-term systemic factors such as poverty hamper families from making intergenerational progress.” Efforts to leverage federal funding to pay relatives for care services with little screening and oversight have already proved harmful in other contexts, as recent Medicaid fraud investigations reveal.
The public may be surprised to learn that the definition of “kin” also includes those who self-identify as relatives, ex-spouses of third cousins, or anyone with a relationship with the child’s parent. For example, New Mexico applied “kin” status to a 22-year-old Good Samaritan who happened upon a teenager living on the street.
When tragedies foreseeably follow lax placement policies, few realize that the children often died in poorly vetted kinship-care homes rather than traditional foster homes. After the estate of toddler Hope Jones received a $6.5 million settlement following her death at the hands of a foster mother who had a “history of aggravated assault,” the plaintiff’s press release didn’t mention that the foster mother was the 21-year-old cousin of Hope’s father. The Minnesota lawmakers who sought to raise the bar for placing black children in foster care—especially non-kin foster care—titled one version of their bill the “Layla Jackson Law” as a “tribute to a 17-month-old Black infant who was killed by her white foster parent.” That child was killed by “fictive kin” caregivers approved by her biological mother, but it was no doubt politically expedient to let the public believe that the foster parent was a non-relative.
A primary justification for placing with kin is a strong prior relationship with the child. Yet, neither law nor practice requires such a relationship. Ironically, some proponents of kinship care use the derogatory term “stranger care” to refer to non-relative foster parents, eliding the reality that kin can also be strangers to a child. Officials placed A’layah Joyner of Georgia with relatives whom she reportedly had never met. She was killed by her foster parent’s boyfriend, who had a long history of domestic abuse and other crimes.
Placement with “kin,” no matter how distant or troubled, has become the default for overburdened agencies. As part of kin-first culture, the American Bar Association recommends a “kinship firewall,” in which agency leadership must individually approve every non-kinship placement. This means that a caseworker doesn’t need to offer any justification to place a child with distant relatives or relatives with criminal and child abuse records—but must seek special approval to bypass those relatives. And once placed, agencies can quickly move these children into “relative guardianships”—in which monthly payments continue, but state oversight ends.
Kinship care is the right choice for many children, but it should not be a benchmark of success. Children’s well-being is the standard that matters.