Kin-First and Child-First: A Response to AEI

How we got here #

The debate over “kin-first” child welfare has moved quickly in recent years. In 2023, the Administration for Children and Families issued a final rule allowing states to adopt separate licensing or approval standards for relatives and kin (Administration for Children and Families [ACF], 2023). National organizations subsequently developed recommended kin-specific foster home approval standards (Kin-Specific Foster Home Approval, 2025). In May 2026, ACF updated its National Model Foster Family Home Licensing Standards in light of the new kin-specific licensing framework (Children’s Bureau, 2026). That same month, Sarah Font and Emily Putnam-Hornstein published “The False Promise of ‘Kin-First’ Foster Care” in City Journal (Font & Putnam-Hornstein, 2026). Naomi Schaefer Riley (2026) followed in July with “Safety Before Kinship.” On September 8, the American Enterprise Institute released Font’s brief, Let’s Prioritize Children’s Best Interests in Our Kinship Care Policies, signed by more than 30 researchers, former agency leaders, and advocates (Font, 2026).

Today, September 16, AEI hosted a panel, “Rethinking ‘Kin-First’: Placing Children’s Interests at the Center of Foster Care Policy” (American Enterprise Institute [AEI], 2026). Riley moderated a discussion among Font, Putnam-Hornstein, Sixto Cancel of Think of Us, and Krista Thomas of Chapin Hall. By the end, Putnam-Hornstein observed that the panelists had been talking past each other. I agree with that assessment.

I come to this debate from several directions at once. For 15 years I led Foster Kinship, Nevada’s statewide kinship navigator program, which served nearly 26,000 children and 13,000 families living with relatives inside and outside the child welfare system. My research at UNLV examines how state child welfare law shapes where children in nonparental care end up (Caliendo, 2019, 2023). And I have lived it as a foster parent turned adoptive parent, and as an aunt who cared for a child through kinship diversion.

From where I sit, the critics and the advocates are both right about important things, and each sees something the other misses. I want to explain why they talk past each other, where I agree with the critics, where I disagree, and what child-first policy should look like for every child living apart from their parents, including the many who never enter foster care.

Two visions of the same child #

Both sides want children to be safe, stable, and loved. They start from different assumptions about people and institutions, and each sees something the other misses.

Thomas Sowell’s idea of a “conflict of visions” helps explain the kin-first debate. Both sides want children to be safe, stable, and loved, but they start from different assumptions about people and institutions. Understanding those assumptions helps more than choosing a side.

In A Conflict of Visions, Sowell (1987) describes two frameworks that shape how people think about social problems before any evidence is weighed.

The critics of kin-first, including the AEI brief and its signatories (Font, 2026), reason mostly from the constrained vision. The leading kin-first advocates reason mostly from the unconstrained vision. I have spent my career working from both, and I see strengths and blind spots in each.

The constrained vision: strengths and blind spots

Its strengths. It takes incentives seriously. The AEI brief is right that agencies face workload and budget pressures, that parents may steer agencies toward lenient relatives, and that payments can change behavior (Font, 2026). It insists on rules that hold even when individual judgment fails, and it asks for evidence before change. That caution protects children when well-meaning reforms go wrong.

Its blind spots. It can treat human limits as permanent, which is how the observation that maltreatment “can run in families” (Font, 2026, p. 2) becomes a reason to doubt a grandmother who has spent years breaking that cycle. It applies its skepticism unevenly: the incentives facing relatives and agencies are examined closely, while those facing non-relative foster parents, and the harms of stranger care, draw far less attention. And it tends to treat the status quo as the safe default, even though the status quo includes decades of unlicensed kin placements and a practice of diversion that may occur tens or potentially hundreds of thousands of times each year without being counted (Gupta-Kagan, 2020).

Sowell’s constrained vision also prizes institutions that evolved over generations, carrying knowledge no planner possesses, over institutions designed by experts (Sowell, 1987). The family is the oldest of those institutions. Foster care is a designed system of state-selected strangers. By that logic, a constrained thinker should question the state’s ability to replace family at least as much as a family’s ability to care for its own.

The unconstrained vision: strengths and blind spots

Its strengths. It starts from what children and families can become. It takes healing and resilience seriously, centers what young people say they want, and questions a system that has separated children from family largely out of habit. It has also produced concrete gains: payment parity, kin-specific licensing, and navigator programs.

Its blind spots. It can assume that a good vision will be carried out as intended. It can let the kin label stand in for an assessment of the particular caregiver. It also sometimes overstates what the research shows, which is the credibility problem the critics raised today.

Implementation: where the visions differ most

The biggest difference between the two visions concerns what happens once kin-first policy reaches caseworkers in the field.

The unconstrained view tends to be optimistic that kin-first will be implemented as designed: caseworkers will search thoroughly, assess carefully, choose the best relative, and connect the family to support. The constrained view expects something else. Political scientist Michael Lipsky’s Street-Level Bureaucracy showed that frontline workers such as caseworkers become de facto policymakers. Facing huge caseloads, ambiguous goals, and inadequate resources, they ration services and routinize decisions, and policy as practiced drifts away from policy as written (Lipsky, 1980/2010).

In kinship care, I have seen that drift follow a familiar pattern.

I have seen both columns in practice, and research on kinship diversion shows that caseworkers under pressure often take the easier route (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2013; Malm & Allen, 2016). Advocates should acknowledge that concern. However, the usual constrained remedy, raising barriers for kin, does not stop the drift. It moves children toward unlicensed placement or diversion, where agencies have the most to gain and oversight is weakest.

A shared path forward

The unconstrained vision offers the goal: children growing up connected to the people who love them. The constrained vision offers the tools to reach it in practice: rules, incentives, measurement, and accountability. A shared path would draw on both:

• Plan around real caseworker conditions. Set caseloads, time, and supervision so a thorough search and careful assessment are realistic within a normal workload.
• Change the cost incentives. Remove the financial and workload advantages of unlicensed placement, diversion, and quick guardianship, so agencies are not rewarded for the least supported option.
• Assess each caregiver and support the family. Evaluate each caregiver on their own record and capacity, then give licensed and diverted kin the training and resources the work requires.
• Measure results. Adopt shared definitions and transparent reporting, so everyone can see whether the policy is working as intended.
• Use one standard for every placement type. Apply the same scrutiny, and the same caution about the evidence, to kin care, non-relative foster care, and diversion.

Taking up the invitation to talk about values #

On today’s panel (AEI, 2026), Sarah Font said she does not object to kinship care itself. Her objection is to national organizations claiming the evidence for kinship care is strong when, in her view, it is weak. She added that she has no problem with a conversation about kinship care grounded in values. I accept that invitation.

I agree that the academic research is not rigorous enough. Most studies compare “kin” to “non-kin” as if each were a single thing. They rarely ask the questions practitioners and caregivers face every day:

I have been making this critique since my 2019 dissertation, State Law and Child Welfare Policy Role in Nonparental Family Composition. My review of the literature (Caliendo, 2019) found:

• Studies lumped distinct groups together. Most research defined children simply as “in foster care” or “in kinship care,” or compared public with private kinship care. Research that lumps distinct groups together can mask differences that are critical to improving outcomes. A child may fare better on some measures and worse on others depending on the type of care (Caliendo, 2019).
• Licensure was almost never studied. Very few studies compared licensed and unlicensed kinship foster care. The ones that did found it mattered. In an Illinois study, Nieto, Fuller, and Testa (2009) found that unlicensed kinship placements “are at a 14% higher risk of an indicated maltreatment report compared to non-kin licensed foster care spells,” while “children in kinship licensed spells are 33% less likely to experience maltreatment in care compared to licensed non-kin foster care spells” (p. 11). Rolock and colleagues (2009, as cited in Caliendo, 2019) found a similar pattern for stability: kin caregivers in stable cases were more likely to be licensed (56%) than kin caregivers in cases where children moved (19%). These findings suggest that licensing kin can improve both safety and stability.
• Diverted children were nearly absent. Studies of children diverted into voluntary kinship care were the scarcest of all. Because private and diverted families are not captured in child welfare data, researchers folded them into one “informal” category (Caliendo, 2019).
• Existing frameworks were incomplete. Even the most thoughtful typology of the time, Berrick and Hernandez’s (2016) framework of state-mandated, state-mediated, and state-independent care, left out traditional foster care and did not separate licensed from unlicensed kin. No framework described the full range of nonparental care, so I proposed five family types: private kinship care, diverted kinship care, unlicensed kinship foster care, licensed kinship foster care, and non-relative foster care (Caliendo, 2019).
• The federal data itself was miscoded. In 2015 AFCARS data, many children coded as living in non-relative foster homes received no foster care payment, even though every state pays licensed foster parents. The Children’s Bureau suggested these were likely fictive kin miscoded as non-relatives. Recoding them shifted the national picture from 46 percent traditional and 28 percent kinship foster care to 36 percent and 38 percent. Studies comparing kin and non-kin outcomes may have been comparing groups that were not what their labels said (Caliendo, 2019, Appendix E).

In my 2023 Big Ideas chapter for First Focus on Children, “Preventing Foster Care or Shifting the Burden?”, I added that the paucity of research is partly a data problem (Caliendo, 2023): administrative data does not exist for much of the nonparental care population, and there is resistance to tracking diverted kinship care at all. The same chapter found that when research does look at subgroups, the picture is mixed. Children in kinship foster care have the same or better safety, stability, and well-being as children in traditional foster care (Benedict et al., 1996; Jonson-Reid, 2002; Koh & Testa, 2011; Winokur et al., 2014). Findings on other outcomes are less favorable or mixed. One national study found a negative effect of kin placement on reading scores and mixed results on math and cognitive skills (Font, 2014), and a systematic review found that children in kinship care were less likely to be adopted, though more likely to exit to guardianship, with no difference in reunification (Winokur et al., 2014). Unlicensed kinship care is less stable and less safe than both (Nieto et al., 2009; Rolock et al., 2009, as cited in Caliendo, 2019).

We have a long way to go, and on the weaknesses of the research, the critics and I agree more than today’s panel suggested.

So I would encourage academics and researchers who are raising concerns about a kin-first policy environment to go a step further and outline the research agenda they would find credible. So far, their writing has explained what is wrong with the evidence but not what evidence would satisfy them. Neither the AEI brief (Font, 2026) nor Font and Putnam-Hornstein’s (2026) City Journal essay proposes a research agenda. On the panel (AEI, 2026), Sarah Font pointed toward long-term longitudinal studies of adult outcomes, supported by state leadership. Her own work offers a model to build on: a study with Kierra Sattler and Toria Herd (Sattler et al., 2023) followed Wisconsin children into adulthood. Initial placement type was not directly associated with incarceration or teen parenthood; however, placement type was associated with several experiences during care, such as placement moves, time in care, and new maltreatment investigations, some of which mediated associations with adult outcomes. That finding suggests that how the system manages a placement may matter as much as who the caregiver is. I would add granular administrative data, the populations outside foster care that no one is counting, and the voices of young people and caregivers. Practitioners and kinship families would welcome working with researchers on this, so the research reflects what they see every day.

Children cannot wait for those studies to be finished, so the values conversation should happen now and in the open: what children tell us they want, what families are willing to do for their own, and what we owe the relatives and parents doing that work.

What transparency should mean

Sarah Font also called for transparency from child welfare agencies, and I agree. Her brief (Font, 2026) asks agencies to publicly report approved placements where a household member has a criminal record or is on a child abuse registry, the justification for each approval, and maltreatment in care by setting and by whether standards were modified. I support those measures. Transparency also needs the same detail I am asking for in the research agenda: shared definitions, a defined set of data, and reporting that covers every child separated from a parent, not only those in state custody.

Shared definitions. Today the same word means different things from state to state, and “kin” and “licensed” are among the least consistent. Without common definitions, any comparison across states or placement types is unreliable.

Data agencies should collect and report:

1. Every separation. The number of children who moved out of a parent’s home because of agency involvement, whether by removal or diversion, with the type of arrangement from the definitions above.
2. Who the caregiver is. Relationship type, prior relationship with the child, licensure status, and which standards were waived and why.
3. Background findings. Placements where a household member has a criminal or child abuse history, the type and age of the finding, and the justification for approval, as the brief recommends, reported for kin and non-kin homes alike.
4. Supports provided. Payments, training, navigator services, Medicaid, TANF, and legal help, by placement type, including for diverted families.
5. Parent services. Whether parents had a case plan, services, legal representation, and a path to reunification, by placement type.
6. Outcomes for every group. Maltreatment in care, placement moves and their reasons, re-entry, reunification, guardianship, adoption, and time to permanency, reported by placement type and licensure status.
7. Child and caregiver voice. What children and caregivers report about safety, belonging, and needs, collected regularly and not only through caregiver reports.

Reporting: publish it at least annually, in the same format across states, broken out by placement type, race and ethnicity, and region, so policymakers and researchers can compare like with like. The Hidden Foster Care Transparency Act would begin this work for diverted children (Hidden Foster Care Transparency Act, 2025).

This kind of reporting would give the critics the accountability they are asking for and give advocates evidence about where kinship care works and where families need more support.

Certainty is rare in social science, and policy cannot wait for it

Even with better data, it will be hard to prove what causes better outcomes for children in different placements. Social scientists have written about this problem for years:

• Limits of randomized trials. Economist Angus Deaton and philosopher Nancy Cartwright argue that randomization “does not equalize everything other than the treatment” (Deaton & Cartwright, 2018, p. 2), and that trial results require justification before they can be extended to other groups. They call for combining trials with other methods and theory, rather than relying on one design.
• Overstating certainty. Economist Charles Manski’s Public Policy in an Uncertain World warns against “incredible certitude,” the habit of presenting policy findings as more precise than the evidence allows (Manski, 2013). As he put it, if you want people to believe what you know, you have to be upfront about what you don’t (Northwestern Institute for Policy Research, 2017).
• Ethical limits in child welfare. Children cannot be randomly assigned to live with grandparents or strangers. When the Bucharest Early Intervention Project randomized institutionalized children to foster care or continued institutional care, bioethicist Joseph Fins asked “how much rigor is worth a child’s life?” (Fins, 2013).

These cautions apply to both sides. Advocates should be careful about what they claim the evidence shows, and critics should not treat a lack of proof of benefit as proof of harm. The AEI brief itself concedes that weak evidence does not rule out benefits of kin placement that are “difficult to measure” (Font, 2026, p. 3).

Policy and practice continue while researchers work. Every day, caseworkers, judges, and families decide where children will live. Keeping the current system is also a decision made under uncertainty, and the current system has never proven that stranger care, unlicensed kin care, or diversion serves children better. I believe we should act on the best available evidence, practice wisdom, and the voices of children and families, while measuring what happens and adjusting as we learn. We cannot let the lack of evidence stop us.

Where we agree #

I agree with much of Font’s brief and with many of the concerns its signatories and today’s panelists raised. Several of the brief’s core recommendations are ones I have made for more than a decade:

• Align placement standards with licensing standards. In 2014 I argued in Fostering Families Today (“Placement versus Licensure: The Dilemma for Formal Kinship Care”) that if a home is safe enough for placement, it should be supported and paid; if it is not safe enough to license, a child should not be placed there (Caliendo, 2014). The brief makes the same point (Font, 2026).
• The best kin placement, not the first. The brief calls on states to weigh all potential relatives and select the most appropriate one (Font, 2026). I have long argued for exactly this.
• The kinship research base is weak. My dissertation and my Big Ideas (2023) paper both describe the flaws in how kinship care is studied and propose a new framework for that research (Caliendo, 2019, 2023). A single “kin versus non-kin” comparison leaves out too much.
• “Fictive kin” needs a sharper definition. Not all kin are the same. Foster Kinship’s own program data (unpublished) showed a much higher disruption rate for fictive kin placements than for placements with blood relatives.
• Quick guardianships can shortchange children. My work on kinship diversion and fast-tracked guardianships documents what happens when agencies take the path of least resistance and leave children, caregivers, and parents without safeguards (Caliendo, 2023).
• Transparency. Public reporting on who is approved, under what standards, and with what results would strengthen every placement type (Font, 2026).
• The model guidance was not strong enough. I agree that the recommended kin-specific approval standards and the updated federal model licensing guidance left important questions unanswered (Children’s Bureau, 2026; Kin-Specific Foster Home Approval, 2025).

We share a goal: children who are safe, stable, and connected to people who love them. Where we differ is mainly in how we get there.

What kin-first advocates say #

The leading kin-first organizations argue from values and equity as much as from outcome data, and most pair lower barriers with more support rather than less scrutiny. Their statements reflect the unconstrained vision, and they also leave more room for agreement than the AEI brief suggests.

I see two patterns. First, these organizations frame the waiver of non-safety standards as the reform, while the AEI brief (Font, 2026) argues that the line between safety and non-safety has drifted to include criminal history, finances, and training. That disagreement is real, and it concerns implementation rather than whether safety matters. Second, every one of these organizations ties kin-first to more support and more structure for families. None of them supports placing a child with the first relative found and then stepping back.

Where I push back #

Most of the problems the critics describe are longstanding practice problems that predate kin-first. Several of their proposed remedies rest on assumptions about families that I do not share, and they would push more children into arrangements no one is counting or studying.

1. These safety concerns are not new. Kin-specific licensing made them more visible.

The brief treats kin-specific licensing as the start of a new, lower track for relatives (Font, 2026). The two-track system is more than four decades old. In Miller v. Youakim (1979), the Supreme Court held that Illinois could not exclude children placed with relatives from federal foster care payments, so long as the relative’s home met the state’s foster care licensing standards. The ruling opened licensure and payment to relatives whose homes met those standards. In my analysis, the resulting distinction contributed in practice to a two-tier system of kin: relatives who met every licensing standard built for strangers, and a much larger group who were approved for placement but never licensed or paid.

For decades, states have placed children with relatives the state judged safe enough to hold a child but never supported to become licensed. Today roughly half of kinship foster care placements are still unlicensed, a figure the AEI brief itself cites from federal AFCARS data (Font, 2026). If unlicensed placement is a safety risk, it has been one for decades. Unlicensed kin placements also reduced the public cost associated with foster care maintenance payments (Font, 2026). The concern has become much louder now that states are moving to license and pay those same caregivers.

Licensing relatives who already meet the placement standard does not make those children less safe. The safety question I raised in 2014 still stands (Caliendo, 2014): why placement standards were ever allowed to sit below licensing standards in the first place.

2. The evidence standard is applied to only one side

I agree the kinship research is weak, and that sorting children into “kin” and “non-kin” buckets is not good enough. But the same weaknesses apply to research on non-relative foster care, and no one proposes that stranger care prove itself beyond doubt before a child is placed there. When the panel was asked what research would satisfy the critics, the answer was long-term longitudinal studies of adult functioning (AEI, 2026). Those take decades. Children are living with kin now. We cannot wait for academia to settle its methods before acting for them.

That is why the values conversation Sarah Font welcomed matters. When the evidence is thin on both sides, values are a legitimate basis for decisions that have to be made now.

3. Individual tragedies are used in place of data

The critics ask for methodological rigor, yet their examples are the worst cases, such as media reports of child deaths in kinship homes (Font, 2026). Sixto Cancel named this directly on the panel (AEI, 2026). Every child death in any placement requires accountability. But building policy around the worst kinship cases, without discussing harm to children in non-relative foster homes, is not a rigorous comparison. As the panel discussion noted, the studies comparing maltreatment in kin and non-kin care are thin and, in some states, decades old (AEI, 2026). We do not know the true comparative rates, and that uncertainty applies to both kinds of care.

I raised this in 2023: because rigorous subgroup research is missing, anecdotal cases of one type of care succeeding or failing are routinely used to support arguments that people already held (Caliendo, 2023). That criticism applies to advocates and critics alike.

4. Bias can hide behind “the evidence isn’t strong enough”

I heard bias on the panel today, framed in neutral terms that made it easy to miss. “The evidence isn’t strong enough” and “we are only prioritizing child safety” are reasonable statements on their own. They can also shield an assumption that goes unsaid.

That assumption was said out loud when Emily Putnam-Hornstein described abuse as generational, suggesting that grandparents, aunts, and uncles may be unsuitable for placement because of that family history (AEI, 2026). The brief makes the same move in writing, noting that mental illness, substance use, and maltreatment “can run in families” (Font, 2026, p. 2). This is the “apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” belief that kinship families and their advocates have spent decades fighting. The brief anticipates this criticism and dismisses it (Font, 2026, p. 2), but the panel discussion showed it was fair.

Taken as a screening principle, this view would disqualify a grandmother because her adult child struggles, along with every sibling of that parent. That view discounts healing, recovery, and the ability of families to break cycles. I have watched thousands of kinship caregivers do exactly that, often because they lived through what their grandchildren are now facing.

It is also applied selectively. No one suggests that a foster parent’s family history should be presumed against them. Individual assessment, which the brief rightly calls for (Font, 2026), should mean looking at the person being assessed rather than their family tree. Treating kinship itself as a risk factor reflects an assumption about families, even when it is described as a safety standard.

5. Not all kin are the same, and not all kin need the same things

The critics are right that “kin” has become too broad a label. Foster Kinship’s program data (unpublished) showed markedly higher disruption for fictive kin than for blood relatives. The better response is to study and support these groups differently while continuing to place children with kin. A grandparent raising a toddler, an aunt taking in a teenager, and a family friend stepping in during a crisis need different assessments and different supports.

Krista Thomas raised a related point worth building on (AEI, 2026): relatives who do not yet know the child. A relative who is a stranger to the child may still carry a real connection to the family. Agencies could treat these relatives as a reasonable source of foster homes that keep children connected to their family and culture.

6. Two places where I share the critics’ concern

• Financial stability. Placing children with caregivers who have not paid rent in a year, or who live week to week in a motel, can lock poor placement decisions into policy. Payment parity should support households that are already stable; it cannot create stability on its own.
• Training. Raising a child separated from their parents is hard, trauma-informed work. The kinship families I have served ask for training, and many believe it should be required. Training should be designed for kin rather than waived.

7. Foster parents have biases and interests too

The brief examines the incentives facing relatives and agencies in detail (Font, 2026). It does not examine the incentives facing non-relative foster parents, many of whom are not reunification partners and will fight to keep and adopt a child. If self-interest is a concern, it should be examined for every adult in the system.

8. The questions themselves show we are not yet kin-first

Many of the scenarios raised today, such as a relative surfacing after a child has bonded with a foster family, happen because agencies did not do the work at the front end. A true kin-first practice finds family early and finds the best family early. Late disruptions show that kin-first has not been fully implemented. They do not show that the approach has failed.

9. States can read the research

The brief suggests that national advocacy organizations have shaped how states understand the evidence (Font, 2026). That underestimates state officials and agency leaders, who weigh research, budgets, community input, and their own data. The panel itself concluded that better research will depend on state leadership (AEI, 2026). State leaders should get more credit for that capacity.

10. Practice failures and policy failures

The core tension is between the kin-first vision and how it is carried out on the ground. Kin-first gives agencies wider latitude to decide what is best for a child. The legitimate worry is that frontline practice will take the easy way out, and the kinship diversion research confirms that it often does (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2013; Armendariz, 2023). The solution is better practice, supervision, and accountability while keeping the goal. Kin-first has also made long-standing problems more visible. Those of us who have worked directly with kinship families have seen these concerns for years.

Where the children are right now #

Today’s debate framed kinship care as a foster care issue. Most children raised by relatives never enter foster care at all, and the critics’ concerns apply to them even more. Generations United estimates that for every child raised by kin inside foster care, 19 are raised by kin outside it (Generations United, n.d.). If the authors are worried about what happens to children inside the system, the children outside it deserve even more of their attention.

Hidden foster care

Many of those children did not move in with relatives because of a private family decision. A child protective services agency investigated, decided the child could not stay home, and arranged for a relative to take the child without opening a foster care case. This is kinship diversion, which Gupta-Kagan (2020) named “America’s hidden foster care system”. He estimated that such agency-arranged transfers happen tens or potentially hundreds of thousands of times each year (Gupta-Kagan, 2020).

• In a national sample of nearly 6,000 maltreatment reports (2009 to 2011), diversion to kin accounted for nearly half of all out-of-home placements (Walsh, 2013).
• Diverted families are less likely than kinship or non-relative foster families to receive TANF or help obtaining Medicaid, immunizations, and dental care, and more likely to report financial struggle (Casanueva et al., 2023).
• Child Trends examined kinship diversion in three states. In one of those states, diverted children of color subsequently entered foster care at about 2.1 times the rate of White children, and Black children at about 3.2 times the rate (Malm et al., 2019).
• The federal government does not require states to count these children (Armendariz, 2023). We do not know how many there are, where they are, or how they are doing.

Our earlier work on hidden foster care

At a Generations United conference, Foster Kinship Deputy Director Leah Dods and I presented on the “rights gap” between children in formal kinship foster care and children diverted into hidden foster care (Caliendo & Dods, 2025). We described a two-tiered system for children in crisis: same kids, same crisis, same trauma, and completely different access to support depending on which door they walked through. Whether a caseworker files a court petition or simply makes a phone call can decide whether a child has support or is essentially forgotten.

The Nevada numbers we presented, drawn from a 2024 Nevada Division of Child and Family Services memo (Nevada Division of Child and Family Services [DCFS], 2024; Caliendo & Dods, 2025), show that diversion is one of the main ways children end up with relatives.

Nevada has nearly three times as many children in hidden kinship arrangements as in formal kinship foster care (Nevada DCFS, 2024). Nationally, an older estimate suggested that roughly 400,000 children may have been living in child-welfare-facilitated kinship arrangements outside foster care at a point in time (Ehrle et al., 2003, as cited in Caliendo, 2019), although no federal system currently produces a reliable national count (Gupta-Kagan, 2020). We also noted that in Clark County, administrative data from the Foster Kinship evaluation dataset show that 25 to 30 percent of children who enter foster care leave within 30 days (Clark County Department of Family Services, n.d.). That pattern raises the question of how many diverted children needed to be separated at all (Caliendo & Dods, 2025).

I have also lived it. After a CPS report, I became the caregiver for a young relative through a kinship diversion. There was no dependency case, no formal placement, and no resources: only the report, and then me responsible for a child’s safety. I had all the responsibility and all the fear, and none of the help. No one from the system checked to see whether the child was safe. The child has since been safely reunified with a safe parent, which is the goal every diversion should have. My family reached it without the court oversight, services, or support a formal case would have provided.

As we said then: reducing foster care numbers without reducing parental separation is not progress. It is a shell game, and the children moved into the affordable, invisible shadows are the ones with the least access to their rights. In kinship care, love is assumed, but rights are not.

Perverse incentives in diversion

The AEI brief rightly warns about incentives that let agencies take the path of least resistance: lower caseloads, lower costs, and fewer permanency timelines in kinship foster care (Font, 2026). Diversion carries the same incentives, and they are stronger. The table below summarizes the safeguards each arrangement typically provides (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2013; Armendariz, 2023; Gupta-Kagan, 2020).

Anyone concerned about placements chosen for agency convenience should look closely at diversion. My dissertation found that states’ stated preference for relative placement was associated with fewer children in kinship foster care, likely because caseworkers treat finding a willing relative as satisfying the preference without opening a case (Caliendo, 2019). Raising the bar for licensed kin, or swinging policy back toward traditional foster care, will not move these children into licensed homes. It is more likely to push more of them out of the system into arrangements with no oversight, payment, services, or court involvement, and no count of how many there are.

Federal and national attention

In September 2025, Senators John Cornyn and Jon Ossoff introduced the Hidden Foster Care Transparency Act, which would require states to report data on these arrangements to HHS, following Texas’s example (Office of Senator John Cornyn, 2025). On September 17, 2026, the University of Baltimore School of Law’s Center for Families, Children and the Courts (CFCC) hosts its 2026 symposium, “Family Separation Without Process: Shining a Light on Hidden Foster Care,” which examines what hidden foster care is, the rights and standards it violates, and a vision for supported and lawful kinship diversion (University of Baltimore School of Law, 2026). A kin-first debate that leaves out these children misses most of the children living with relatives.

Child-first for all children in nonparental care

Child-first has to mean every child living without their parents, not only the children in state custody.

Child-first has to mean every child living without their parents, not only the children in state custody. Millions of children already live with kin. The practical question is whether we support the relatives raising them and the parents working to get them back.

For relative caregivers:

• Kinship navigator programs that connect families to benefits, legal help, and support groups
• Child-only TANF, SNAP, and Medicaid enrollment without unnecessary barriers
• Legal tools such as custody, guardianship, and consent authority for school and medical care
• Training and respite built for kinship caregivers
• Due process and informed choice for families when an agency proposes diversion, including the option of licensure
• Help managing dangerous parental situations without a court order or caseworker behind them. Diverted caregivers are often left alone to enforce a safety plan, supervise contact, and refuse an impaired, violent, or threatening parent who may still hold full legal custody. They need clear legal authority, protective orders when warranted, safety planning, and someone to call.

For parents:

• A clear, written path to reunification, with the conditions for the child’s return spelled out
• Access to substance use treatment, mental health care, housing, and domestic violence services
• Legal representation and a way to challenge an arrangement that was never reviewed by a court
• Family time that is safe, predictable, and supported, rather than negotiated case by case between a parent and a relative
• A defined endpoint, so a “temporary” diversion does not become an indefinite separation with no plan to reunify and no plan for permanency
• Peer parent support, like Foster Kinship’s peer parent program, that uses the same navigator model to help parents reunify and stay stable afterward

For the systems that serve them:

• Count every child separated from a parent by government action, not only children formally removed. If we do not count them, we can keep looking away.
• Assess children in nonparental care by their needs, not by whether a court case was opened.
• Give families plain-language information at the moment of diversion, such as Foster Kinship’s Diversion Guide, so consent is informed.
• Fund kinship navigator programs as essential infrastructure in every state, not as charity or an optional add-on. Foster Kinship’s Navigator Program, which serves families across legal capacity, financial stability, community connection, and emotional support, is rated a Promising program by the Title IV-E Prevention Services Clearinghouse, based on a study showing a favorable effect on placement stability (Title IV-E Prevention Services Clearinghouse, 2023).
• Finance families outside the system creatively: raise child-only TANF and drop child support cooperation requirements for kin, and use opioid settlement funds, Title IV-E and IV-B, and Community Development Block Grants (Caliendo & Dods, 2025).
• Guarantee Medicaid coverage, including mental health and trauma care, for every child in nonparental care.

Both of these gaps need attention. In formal foster care, parents have a case plan, a lawyer, and a judge; caregivers have a caseworker to call when a parent shows up impaired or threatening. In hidden foster care, parents often have no route back and caregivers carry the safety risk alone. Child-first policy should start with these families.

Common ground: from kin-first to best-kin, child-first #

The two visions can meet in a policy that finds family early, chooses the best family rather than the first, holds every placement to the same standard, and reaches every child in nonparental care, not only those in state custody. Because so many children already live with kin, the work ahead is to improve current efforts toward what Sixto Cancel called a child well-being system (AEI, 2026), rather than to dismantle them.

A shared agenda both visions could support:

1. One standard for placement and licensure. If a home is safe enough to place a child, it is safe enough to license and pay. If not, the child should not be placed there. Waivers are case-by-case and documented.
2. Front-loaded, thorough family finding. Identify and assess all potential kin at entry, select the best fit, and protect stable placements from late disruption.
3. Differentiated assessment and support. Separate grandparents, other relatives, fictive kin, and relatives new to the child in both practice and research, with supports matched to each.
4. Kin-designed training that is required. Build training around the realities of kinship care, including trauma, parent contact, and family dynamics.
5. Count and study diversion. Require states to report children diverted to kin, give families due process and informed choice, and track these children’s safety, stability, and permanency.
6. Transparency across all placement types. Adopt shared definitions and report maltreatment in care, waivers granted, supports provided, and outcomes for every placement type, including diverted children.
7. Guardrails on quick exits. Ensure guardianship and diversion are chosen for the child’s interests, not to close cases faster.
8. A research agenda that informs action now. Pair long-term studies with state administrative data, youth voice, and caregiver input, so current decisions can use better information over time.

Sowell’s (1987) framework suggests that neither vision is enough on its own. The constrained vision helps policy hold up in daily practice, and the unconstrained vision keeps the focus on children’s lives and relationships. Good kinship policy needs both.

About Kinship Policy Lab #

Kinship Policy Lab is a policy research organization dedicated to understanding the systems that shape nonparental family formation and to improving outcomes for children, parents, and kinship caregivers.

Ali Caliendo, Ph.D., Founder, Kinship Policy Lab. For more information, get in touch.