Intergenerational Healing & Kin Care: Transforming Family Dynamics Through Child Welfare

Kinship care has the potential to prompt intergenerational healing in a way that could disrupt future involvement in child welfare systems and concurrently fortify the overall health and structural integrity of families. This offers a promising avenue for transformative change in the realm of child welfare providing family support. In an ideal world, child welfare […]

Formation of Resilience: Healing Trauma with Healthy Attachment and Bonding

Humans are born with an innate need to feel valued and loved. Though undefinable, love is primary to successful mental, spiritual and physical growth and development. The loving interactions between newborns and primary caretakers set the stage for all future development. As such, it is essential to understand just how important the attachment and bonding […]

A New Watchdog in Minnesota

Growing up with four older siblings and an adoptive mom and dad, Misty Coonce played the role of mediator and protector at her home in Hastings, Minnesota. Sometimes she’d take the blame for her siblings’ minor misdeeds. Other times, Coonce, now 39, would simply hear them out when they felt unseen or would mediate squabbles […]

Making Sense of Meltdowns: How Learning About Sensory Processing Changed … Everything

I remember getting a phone call from my 4-year-old son’s preschool teacher. In her nicest voice, she told me we needed to set up a meeting. Uh-oh. “I don’t understand,” she said, as we sat on tiny chairs around a bright blue table. “I asked all the kids to draw a house, and he just […]

Kinship Grandparenting: Finding Your Allies

Kinship caregiving is the full-time care of a child by relatives such as grandparents, great-grandparents, adult siblings, aunts, uncles and stepparents; or other invested community members such as close family friends, tribal members and godparents.Grandparents, and sometimes great-grandparents, are in a unique position to provide connection to other relatives, family traditions, cultural identity, multigenerational storytelling, […]

Grieving, Grateful: How Kinship Families Learn to Thrive

Melody Clay was living in Atlanta when she learned her brother William’s five children were in foster care across the country in Washington. “I didn’t want my family torn apart. Even if you can’t be in your home, you can be with your siblings,” she said regarding her scattered relatives. On Oct. 12, 2018, Clay […]

Care For Kinship Caregivers

When Olivia, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, fell behind on a few months’ rent and utilities, she found a “30 Day Pay or Vacate” notice on her door about owing nearly $8,000. The single mother of three had recently taken in her niece DeLila, whose name has also been changed, when […]