How to Engage Kinship Caregivers

Are you a professional working with kinship caregivers? You need to listen to this interview with Dr. Tyreasa Washington, is a nationally and internationally recognized scholar specializing in kinship care families (e.g., grandparents raising grandchildren). She is a Distinguished Senior Scholar for Child Welfare at Child Trends, the leading research organization in the United States focused solely on improving the lives of children, youth, and families.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Advantages of keeping children with extended family when their parents are not able to raise them.
• How do kids who are raised temporarily or permanently by relatives fare compared to kids placed with unknown foster parents?
• One of the biggest questions we receive from professionals is how to engage kinship caregivers. They tell us that they set up programs to support kinship caregivers, but few show up. This seems universal. Why does this happen?
• We also hear about institutional trauma-(law enforcement struggles/foster care system struggles- leads to lack of trust--not feeling safe in their community, not trusting DSS.) How does this impact kinship caregivers? How does it impact those of us trying to serve them?
• What types of support are the most helpful?
• What are some cultural differences you've observed in Black relatives raising children within the family, and how do these differences impact how professionals interact with kin raising children?
• What have you found in your research on the impact of caregiving on the health of kinship caregivers?
• Need for training for kinship caregivers.
• How can professionals support self-care with folks who are so busy just getting by?

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.
Unknown Speaker  0:00  
Welcome everyone to creating a family. Talk about foster, adoptive and kinship care. I'm Dawn Davenport. I am the director of a nonprofit creating a family.org, and I'm also the host of this show. And today we have two hosts, because we're being joined by Tracy Whitney. And as some of you have probably heard the reason we are being joined by Tracy is that I am retiring, and Tracy will be my replacement and will be the host of this show. You guys are in tremendous hands with Tracy. She's been with creating a family for nine years. She is our content manager. She is both my friend and she is also my colleague, and she is a person I go to a lot when I am struggling with parenting issues and things. She and I converse a lot about our own struggles, and you are going to be in such good hands with her. And I also want to before we jump into our guest I want to welcome our YouTube listeners. We are expanding into YouTube, and we are so happy to have you. And if you're not a YouTube listener, you may want to pop over to YouTube and search for creating a family and join us. You can see us in person, sipping our tea and laughing together. So don't forget that we are on YouTube. Now we're getting back into the meat of the show here. Today. We're going to be talking about how to engage kinship caregivers. We're going to be talking with Dr Tyreasa Washington. She is a national and internationally recognized leading scholar in the child welfare field. Her primary research interest is in kinship care families, which by that we mean primarily it's grandparents raising grandkids. It could be other kin as well other relatives, but the vast majority are grandparents raising grandkids, and how resources and policies affect these families. She is a distinguished senior scholar for child welfare at Child Trends, which is the leading research organization in the United States focused solely on improving the lives of children, youth and families. Welcome. Dr Washington, to creating a family. We are so happy to have you. I'm happy to be here. Tracy, do you want to start us off? Sure. Dr Washington, we would love for you to talk to us a little bit about the advantages of keeping kids with their extended family when their parents are not able to raise them. We in the business, so to speak, know the advantages. We support it and encourage it when we can. But for our listeners who may not be familiar with some of those advantages, let's talk about those. Sure. So several advantages. We've heard this directly from the caregivers. We've heard this from the children. We have heard it from practitioners and researcher that children in kinship care, they tend to have better behaviors, better mental health outcomes, and I'm comparing them to children who are also in out of home placement. So, and we could talk about that a little later, but when we think about kinship care families, I'm thinking in terms of the stability that kinship care families offer, thinking in terms of the family connections. So when you're in kinship care, you're more likely to have more contact with their birth parents, so it's still that family connection. And we also have research that talks about the fact, and as a matter of fact, I have two studies on that that talks about when children are when this high quality relationship with birth parents, those children tend to have better outcomes when they're in kinship care. So that relationship really does make a difference. It can be a stressful relationship, but also it's telling us that they need to sit at the table. Now, how we get them to the table is another story, but when birth parents are involved with their children within the kinship care family, again, those children tend to have higher academic confidence, social competence, better behaviors, those type things. Also, when children are placed with Kin, we're talking about stability. So those kids tend to stay in kinship care and not being moved around quite a bit. Unfortunately, we know some children who are in foster care, they tend to be in various foster homes, group homes, but when you're placed with Kin in general, we're talking about stability, also the importance of maintaining culture, right? So when you're placed with family, you get the opportunity, you know, that's a benefit. And also being in your community, so culture and community, that's another benefit of living with kinship care, or extended family members. And when I say kinship care, similar to the beginning most time is grandparents raising grandchildren, but it could be other relatives, aunts, uncles, and then a lot of cultures even extend that to God parents, extend it to church members. What we're talking about are people that are in the community, that have some type of connections, either with the family or just the community. And.

Unknown Speaker  5:00  
In general.

Unknown Speaker  5:02  
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Unknown Speaker  6:46  
Dr Washington, one of the biggest questions we receive from professionals is how to engage kinship caregivers. They tell us that they set up programs, they set up support groups, other programs and other resources for kinship caregivers, but few show up, and this seems to be almost universal. So why does this happen? Do you think

Unknown Speaker  7:10  
there's probably several reasons, but to be honest, I think we have to ask the caregivers, why is this happening? So we need to get to the caregivers. Lived experience is important, and talking to them probably is the best means to find out why they're not able to or they choose not to come to some programs. I would also think that this is a group that a great portion of them have social economic problems so and we'll talk a little bit about that, because I'm not talking just about money, I'm talking about housing. I'm talking about transportation. So all that would have bearing on how much they are willing to engage. It's also the fact that I don't know if some some kinship caregivers know that those programs are for them. So we talked, we're going to talk a little bit about formal, informal. And informal are those children who are not supervised by the child welfare system versus when children are placed in the child welfare system is called formal, and they may be a little clearer on engaging in programs. The one who are informal, the informal folks may not even know that they qualify for this. And I would think, or I know, that informal caregivers and informal families are more challenging to reach. So we as practitioners, researchers, programs, community members, advocates, we have to figure out how to get this to this population, which, when we talk about we have some research that says that kinship care families, there's about 2.5 million, right? And we have other research saying that it's about 2.6 million. We have research as well, especially generations united, they're ones who really talk about the fact that for every formal child that's in the child welfare system or formal kinship care, for everyone, there's about 18 that are outside, right? 18 children. So let me just, let me interrupt and just say that is state dependent. And there are some states where that statistic would be for every child in child welfare, there are over 100 kids in informal and then some less. I think you were giving the national statistic, but Right? It's a big darn deal. I mean, they're the number of informal kinship caregivers. IE, the child welfare system is not involved greatly in every state outranks the number of kids who are connected with child welfare. That's such an important part, you know. And I appreciated what you said about we need to ask the kinship caregivers themselves. We have a kinship Advisory Committee. And it's funny, you say that, because that was up on our last meeting a couple of weeks ago, I asked that specific question, and our group is a mixed group between formal and informal, child welfare involved and not. And the number one answer we got, overwhelmingly the number one answer was, we are just.

Unknown Speaker  10:00  
So busy. We are so busy. But I thought your point was so well taken that we really do need to make a distinction between formal and informal, in that the informal don't even hear about it, and it's how do you reach the informal? Because they're not they don't have a connection point. They don't have a Nexus. That you could say, Okay, anyway, these people were not planning on raising kids at this stage, and are often balancing more than one child. But even if balancing one, they're balancing, you know, all the stuff that the rest of us do at a usually an older age. So anyway, and I just want to throw this in, because this was a little shocking to me, but then maybe should not have been. I have recently engaged with some organizations that the workers so the practitioners really didn't understand the definition of kinship care. So that was surprising to me. Interesting. Yes, I'm like, if they don't necessarily know what kinship care is, and they didn't quite understand some of the benefits of kinship care, versus those who are not placing kinship care that are in out of home care. I'm like, Well, what are these families thinking? So, going back to what I said earlier, I'm not sure that certain families even realize because we have people that don't use the term kinship care, right? Most people don't that only those of us in the field use that term. It's a weird term, yes, yes, yes. They don't use that term. They have no idea. So, so if you put a poster up that says kinship care, likely they'll they'll walk past it. And I can even say when I'm doing my research and recruiting, I even though I have that word in there, I make sure I put in parentheses what this is, and when I'm due to want to make sure that you kind of make that distinction in what we mean. So yeah, yeah. I'm so glad you raised that we had, at one point, billboards trying to attract people to come to support groups, and we said grandparents, you were preaching to the choir. I'm so glad you say that we use terms in this field, and kinship care is one of them, and all the I'm surprised professionals didn't know that's that's worrisome surprise too. Yeah, yeah, especially if they're child welfare. But grandparents don't know. They would say I'm not a kinship caregiver. Or I read something once where it was an article, I mean, it was something that was some resources that were directed to kinship caregivers, and it talked about the resident child, and I'm like, resident child. Nobody calls their grandkid a resident child. It's my grandkid or my nephew, or it just seemed like It's like they wouldn't even know it was meant for them. Dr Washington, do you also think that part of the difficulty we have with engaging and getting grandparents and other relatives who are raising these kids to receive the support that we organizations, either public or private like our organization, is because of what I've heard called institutional trauma that the bad experiences in the past with institutions, be they law enforcement or the foster care system or things like that, and they just don't trust them. Yeah? So, so there's another reason. Don't let me forget that, but I'll come back to it. Yeah, there certainly is a distrust, especially among communities of color with various systems, right? So I can only imagine if a caregiver, provider, that's an informal for them to show up to basically say, my birth child has issues, right, and issues, and whether it's substance use, well, those are some of the challenges. Of course, we know that kinship care can also happen for more positive reasons, folks going off to school, you know, maybe a young, younger person who got pregnant but then decided to go to school. So it can be various reasons, but unfortunately, at this date and time, most of them are because of challenges, and they may not want to report their child for whatever reason or feeling like that's what they're doing by engaging right? So they're outing their child. Sometimes they could be outing their selves about and feeling a certain kind of way, like I'm not sure what I did wrong, that my child may be in prison, may have substance issues, so I'm going a little to the left, but I think all that is important, but when you talk about systems for sure, right? Because we know that. And we'll just say black families, for example, they have a lot of contact with the child welfare system, because we have medical staff, we have people in the community, to be quite honest, to feel that, oh, something's going on. So you know, knowing the majority of black folks probably know someone who the child welfare system has impacted them, whether it is them getting a quick call or screening or they have to come in for treatment or whatever it is. So I think that that definitely has something to do with the reasons they're not engaged, because just not knowing what penalty will happen, or just like you said, have a negative experience.

Unknown Speaker  15:00  
In the past, and to be quite honest, those are some valid concerns that they definitely should have and can have, because when you go in, you know, I can't really tell you what's going to happen. Um, but there's some organizations definitely that are more supportive, that try to do more preventive work, and that caregivers would definitely benefit from engaging with.

Unknown Speaker  15:22  
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Unknown Speaker  15:53  
from your research, what type of supports are most helpful for relatives who are raising their grandkids or other relative kid? Yeah, sure. And in the past, Don you and I have talked about this a little bit, so this is definitely my research. I think more practitioners are seeing it, folks like who are in your organization, that there's a misconception that kinship care providers want money, right? So if you give me $500

Unknown Speaker  16:25  
a month, $1,500 a month, 2000 that that's what they want. But what they're saying is this child has come to my house. I have a one bedroom apartment. My grandchild has come to my house. Only have a two bedroom apartment, but yet, I have four grandchildren who have came. So a lot of the issues that we're having, or they're coming to say, I need new housing, or just stable housing in general. So they have housing issues, they also are talking about, which we talked a little bit about, the beginning. So this a scale that I use, is a Family Resource scale. So it's not just about money itself, but it has to do with respite care. Do you have enough sleep? Do you have enough clothes? Are you having enough food? So that's another thing. We're hearing that food is an issue, right? So I want to make it clear, and again, here's another one that we've heard a lot from caregivers, and I've seen as a practitioner too, that families wanting their children to participate in after school programs, or wanting their children to have tutoring services, or wanting their children to have activities during the summer and being able to get them there with transportation. So hopefully, I'm clearly saying it's just not money, but it's really going to be services, support and more tangible things other than money. Someone attending an IEP with them, school meetings with them. Those are some of the needs that they have. Several years ago, we did six listening sessions of kinship caregivers, primarily grandparents and great grandparents, but a few aunts and uncles through two rural counties, and one less rural than the other. And then we've also done one with and Native American tribe. One of the things we were assessing is what were the needs that they have identified, and actually financial was not raised at all. Those were not the issues that they that they brought up in order finding resources, support groups and understanding legal options were the top three followed very closely by parenting support. So just wanted to support what you were saying that that is a misperception, definitely, definitely, yeah, and you alluded to it earlier, but one of the things I think that we need to be sensitive to as as providers and professionals is the fact that there's a lot of stuff going on inside of the potential caregiver, shame, guilt, fear of the system, feeling torn. I know I need some of the support from the system, but if I go to the system, what's the long, short term and long term fallout for myself and my family? What's my community going to think and sometimes those things are hurdles they can get over, depending on the needs of the children that they're, you know, supporting, and sometimes those are hurdles that they don't even know exist within them without somebody to come alongside of them and say, hey, it sounds to me like maybe you've got some questions about what's available to you. Can I help you find some resources to support you in your family? And just adding to that about there may be some internal issues or challenging the caregivers having, and don't even realize that's why I'm withdrawing or not engaging, right? And what I have found with caregivers too, is they really don't understand their stress level. And what I mean.

Unknown Speaker  20:00  
About that is that we

Unknown Speaker  20:02  
did a study, right, and we

Unknown Speaker  20:05  
had self reported instrument that was self reported stress levels, and you would ask them those questions, and they scored lower, right? They scored, you know, pretty low. There was some that were in the middle, whatnot. But when we actually did a biomarker, right, which is collecting the hair samples there. And it really showed that this, their stress level was clearly higher than what they're reporting. So again, internalizing and thinking, Okay, I'm not really stressed. I'm just doing what I'm supposed to be doing, quote, unquote, as the, you know, as the grandparent and whatnot, and what I see it is probably most likely long term chronic stress there almost have been stressed their whole lives, especially communities of color. And right now I'm specifically talking about black individuals that they've had to deal with systematic racism. They've had to deal with fallouts from systematic racism, such as inadequate housing, right? Certainly biases we're in the store. But, and I'm going to say we, because you can clearly see, from the podcast, I'm a black female, I'm not sure on the audio, just thinking that this, this is okay, this is the way, you know, we got to, you know, making a way out of no way, right? And not really realizing how stressed they are, but biomarkers are saying something different. So just going along with Tracy saying internally, things are happening that the caregivers, providers don't really know that's happening, and we just saw a clear example of it with that.

Unknown Speaker  21:37  
I think there's something also generational about that, where they are not necessarily of the generation that is going to lay it all out there on the table and talk about their feelings or talk about they're going to just do what needs to be done. Definitely. Yeah, I'm just a grandmother doing what a grandmom to do. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And then also, to be honest, I think we don't even realize how stressed we are. The majority of folks in the US don't, you know how they say stress the silent killer, but I can, with certainty, say that they're going to have more stress than most folks, just because, unfortunately, low socioeconomic status wasn't understanding or not even knowing how long the child would be in care with them, and, you know, just the age so, you know, we're all talking on the same page stresses. And I want to say this because this is important, and it might was going to come out later, but there's also research that that's showing that kinship care providers have high stress levels, right? And then the other piece of it that at this point that I'm looking at, well, now I'm looking more so at the health outcomes of kinship caregivers, stress being one of them, but in looking at the children outcomes, what we do know is the lower caregiver stress levels are, the better children's academic confidence are. Better behavior, right? Better mental health outcomes, better social skills. So it's a benefit to both the caregiver for their stress to be lower and for the children for their stress to be lower. So low stress is just better all you know, all around so we want to pay attention to that. We want to definitely pay attention, right? That's so good. Dr, Walsh, let me jump in there. I'm going to shift things, because I'm going to pick something up that was at the end we were going to talk about, but it's just perfect. It's a great segue. I know you're doing research on the impact of kinship caregiving, primarily grandparents raising their grandkids, on the health of the kinship caregiver, and I've had a peek at some of your research, or you, and I've talked about it, and it's fascinating. So what are you finding? And I think you've already alluded to the fact that stress is likely the culprit, but you're you're getting very specific as to what you're seeing long term and short term with these caregivers. So so two things, and we're going to talk more about a future study I'm going to do, right, but just immediately, even what's coming into my mind is that how caregivers often neglect their medical needs when they're caring for children, regardless if it's a time factor, I'm not sure. But we actually have interviews that they are saying their grandchildren are now reminding them to take their medicine. Their grandchildren are concerned with their stress level. Like Grandma, you used to get your nails done, why don't you get your nails done anymore? So it's unfortunately so many of them are not taking care of themselves or doing things that could help reduce their stress level and help with their medical outcomes is that the children are even seeing it now. They're reporting it directly to and saying that they may not even have the money for a copay. They may not have transportation to get to the doctor. They may not even have time to get there. So now we're having both individuals or both groups over here, the children who are concerned, then we have the caregivers to.

Unknown Speaker  25:00  
Is reporting it. So we really want to be concerned about their mental health. We want to be concerned about their physical health, because they are definitely doing an I call it a unselfish act, right of taking care of their grandchildren. And this is an act that benefits us all over, right? So it's going to benefit the system. It is definitely saving their money. I have other thoughts about that, but we'll talk about that in a minute. Then, you know, it's kind of like it's a benefit for the community, right? It's a benefit for the extended family. So we want to take that into account. So because we have so much research and just practitioners and even your program in general, that we're advocating for children to be placed with Kin. But we also have to remember that they have the supports that they have resources. Departments of social services are now placing more and more children with Kin. The Biden administration just did an executive order that we should provide support to kinship care providers. So just long story short is that we are not just encouraging we are making executive orders, so now we need to think about how we can support them so that they don't have those immediate health outcomes that are negative, or the long term outcomes that are negative. And you asked specifically about some research I'm doing. So I have this study that was funded by the National Institute of Health. And basically what we're looking at is more this conceptual framework, and that we're saying stress, we know have short term effects, and some of those short term effects may be cardiovascular disease, because stress can possibly lead to cardiovascular disease. We also have research saying that stress can also lead to Alzheimer's disease, right? And this is newer research that we have in the medical field, and we also the research is also saying that cardiovascular disease can lead to Alzheimer's and when we're dealing with a population, and we really haven't talked about this much, but there's an over representation of blacks who are in kinship care. There's over representation of Native Americans who are in kinship care. In some areas, it could be Latino families as well. So unfortunately, these individuals usually have a disproportionate amount of the racial groups that suffer from these cardiovascular disease. So these things are making it I guess what I would just say, it's, it's a compounding effect, and they're having these risks for it, because I try to look more at strength and resources and promote the factors that can try to prevent negative outcomes. We're looking at some things that can modify behaviors, so modify behaviors that contribute to this, and also we're looking at behaviors in general that they're already doing that could be helping with this. So it's very difficult for someone to be 40 and 50 as a kinship care provider. So we're really relying on medical research. We're really relying on things that we know right now, as far as their stress level, and they're even reporting. Unfortunately, some of them do have some cardiovascular issues. So I always say that we know children who are out of home care, they tend to do better when their place. We can, they tend to have better outcomes. But we also want the caregivers to have better outcomes, so we definitely want to be concerned with both groups. Yeah, absolutely. That's excellent. And I would, I would suspect that in addition to cardiovascular and Alzheimer's, they're probably going to find things like diabetes and the outcomes of unmanaged diabetes and things like that. Just anecdotally, from the kinship community that I've been touching base with. She is a moderator our facilitator for a kinship support group. So yeah,

Unknown Speaker  28:40  
and depending on who you talk to, some people include diabetes in that cardiovascular right? You know some people do, yeah, yeah. So you touched on a little bit when you mentioned the over representation of some of the minority groups in kinship care. And I wonder if there's any particular cultural differences that you've observed in black relatives raising children within their family, and how those differences may impact how professionals can interact with them while they're raising those kin children. Well, I can't really say differences, and while I'm saying that is because I haven't necessarily done a comparison study, right? So I have done studies that include all races and nationalities, and my expertise area is with African American kinship care families. But as far as looking at both of them and comparing them, not so much, but I can talk specifically about African American families and the cultural differences. So I think with a lot of fields that we find out that families tend to respond to people who are similar races with them, so linking them to practitioners even to in the community, right? So we talked earlier about them maybe having some fears of formal systems.

Unknown Speaker  30:00  
We probably also not probably, but we do need to get this information out here to communities, to churches, to people that are just actually trusted. So when I think about differences, it's not so much that I'm comparing them, but I'm thinking in terms of what tends to work with individuals in the black community. And what I found is that is more so community supports that they're looking for, and to be quite honest, even extended family supports there are definitely looking for. So those are some different, I wouldn't say differences, but those are some things that I've seen. The examples that I want to give are geared more towards the black community, but they may be for other races and cultures. So for example, with the black community, and what I mean by community, we're talking about churches, right? We're talking about coaches and mentors in the community, and those coaches is usually the ones that come from the community that they trust and that would engage with the families. We also have extended family members who who step up. So we, for example, we have a grandma, but grandma brother may step in to take the children to activities, right? And we even have their other children with which I have, and I got a real quick story for you. So was interviewing a caregiver, and the caregiver was saying how isolated she was and how she didn't have any help. And as we're doing this interview, someone is coming from the back of the house, and it's her son, and her son is having her medication. The son is actually fixing food for the children. But when we talk about internalizing things, she didn't even realize that I'm getting support from my son. And talk to other folks that said, like and again, I said about brothers, so this is the children's great uncle, so they're getting support that way. So I think that's another way, definitely, to help them engage is by utilizing extended family and practitioners. Practitioners, we've seen this quite a bit, but practitioners who are similar races to the communities they're working with. That's another way to engage them, and thinking of niqua, right? So even we have Native Americans who it's federal law that they are supposed to be placed like that's the option really, basically, that they're striving for Native Americans to be placed with other Native Americans. So that's again, showing how culture is important and how we should engage culture. And do engage cultures that that hopefully the children have better outcomes. And let me just interject to say niqua is the acronym for the National Indian Child Welfare Association.

Unknown Speaker  32:36  
Yeah, gotcha

Unknown Speaker  32:39  
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Unknown Speaker  33:07  
This is so helpful. We know that there are impacts on health, and your research is certainly illuminating. That one question I have that I struggle with right now is that starting in we've had been supposed to be doing this for a long time, and that is focusing on placing children. The hierarchy is supposed to be preventing the kids from being removed, and if the children have to be removed, to place them with extended family, and if, only if that's not possible, to replace them outside the extended family. And that was really formalized in 2018

Unknown Speaker  33:43  
with the Family First Act. It's been supposed to be happening for a lot longer, but now so there's the point being, there's been a huge emphasis in child welfare to place children with Kin, and yet at the same time, there has now been a movement towards taking away any of the trainings and supports for these families. And I feel like we're really setting these families up for for failure, and that's something that we at creating a family, are spending time trying to think about, what is it that a kinship provider, what is it that grandparents need to succeed, because these kids have all, not all, but the vast majority have come from trauma. They have got to have some of the symptoms of that, and they're often behavioral symptoms. And many of these children were also exposed prenatally to alcohol and drugs, which also has a host of learning and behavioral issues. So as a result, I worry that we're setting these families up because we're not then stepping in and saying, and here are some, here are some things that you can do to help. These are some of the things that you can expect. These are some of the ways that we have to, we have to approach these kids differently. I don't think there's a question in all of that. I think I was on the soapbox. But.

Unknown Speaker  35:00  
But

Unknown Speaker  35:02  
what are your thoughts on that? Let me just I'll find a question. I'll force a question that's fine. Um, actually, when you're saying that, be quite honest. That's really making me and system what the whole interview is about, right? Engaging these families, giving them the tools that they can be successful. So really, to me, this is what the entire interview about, as well as it's presenting research and information about families and and whatnot, about why this is a great alternative, opposed to what I would call more of the traditional out of home care that we provide children. But in answering that question or going along again, I just think it's the same stuff we talked about, but first I would would say, once again, talk to them about what they think they need in order to succeed, right? And you don't just have to talk to the caregivers. We're right now saying how important it is to think about the community, right and to include them with engagement. So maybe the folks at the church are even seeing some things that the caregiver doesn't necessarily understand, that they would need in order to be successful, right? Maybe, and I'm going to put some of this back on practitioners, right? They are supposed to have, or hopefully they have this. I don't know if you would call it an expertise or great knowledge, and what families need in order to prosper. Because although we're talking about kinship care families that are unique, they also may have some of the similar characteristics that practitioners work with in general. So even challenging them, right to kind of you tell us, what is that you think family needs? What are you already providing them? What can you wish that you could provide them? So we can spread this information again. This is all about people who want to advocate for children. It's always say Child Welfare advocators, child welfare stakeholders. And going back to what Don and I were saying earlier, what can help them succeed is housing. What can help them succeed is the type of support with individuals going to, for example, IEP meetings, and it might not even be that, but to advocate for the gifted children who are with kinship caregivers, like, what can we do to continue? You know, is it tutoring that we want to do to what can we do to support these gifted children? Right? Because they may not have those resources. We know there are programs like civil Learning Center, they may not have money to train them for testing for the SAT or train them for testing for state. So we have these brilliant children that may not have been trained or have been provided skills by whoever. I'm not sure if the school system the community that they understand how to test right? So I think making sure that we are offering some of those services and and we know that children, especially young children, we want daycare. So that's another issue we heard, and we didn't talk too much about that. So we know that a lot of children's success relies on the kind of how they were set up. I think it's zero than three. Now, I'm not an early childhood person, but I do know those early years are very fundamental and shaping children's future. So I think they need excellent daycare. I think they need summer programs so that the children are able to socialize and to learn how to work with each other and learn how to collaborate, right? And just having that exposure for social skills. And the truth of it is, the more you do, the more you get to network. So if these children are in these kind of programs, they're going to find out about other programs. They're going to meet with other families. That can be a strength. I'm thinking in terms of even my community that I was born and raised in, which is on the coast. And I'm just thinking in terms of how families came together. They helped to support each other, and they used their strength. So we had teachers who were in the community, they talked to the families. If we had folks who did plumbing very well, they would go to each other house, right? So it could be anything. It could be folks who garden, and they're sharing that. So again, I'm just kind of putting that on this networking piece and

Unknown Speaker  39:03  
encouraging kinship providers to get involved, kind of is that first step getting them over that hurdle to connect. Dawn had a little bit of her soapbox going on a couple minutes ago, but I'm going to circle back to my soapbox, if we may. All of these things that we've just talked about are fantastic, but the one thing that Don mentioned earlier that kinship caregivers have a hard time with is time. How do they find time? And my soapbox is self care. I feel like it is just one of the most important things I've had experience with, having to improve my self care skills. So I wondered if you could please talk a little bit about how professionals can support kinship caregivers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, to engage in self care in meaningful ways that refuel them and refresh them and nourish them, but are implementable.

Unknown Speaker  40:00  
In their very busy and sometimes limited resource lives when they're bringing in these extra kids. Yeah. So one thing I'm thinking of because we have found that peer support groups tend to work, and also what I found is that kinship care providers, they actually don't want to be isolated. They want to talk. They do want to engage, but you have to find them and find what things will help them to engage. I think a couple of things. And this is some of this is coming from conversations that I've had, is that learning how to do self care in the environment of what you've been given. And what I mean by that is that we have to be realistic. So you have a lot of people right now talking about, if your stress is not reducing your stress, it's alleviating it, I don't know if that's possible. If the children like I don't know if it's possible for a lot of I'm 75 raising three school aged kids, yeah, I'm going to be stressed. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So I don't think that is a good approach. I think we have to think in terms of what works best, like individualize it. And I'll give you an example. You're talking about time. So what can a practitioner do? Right? And that's the piece we just talked about, making time for them. What is making time for them look like it might mean that they have to find the funds for them to do these after school programs. They have to find the funds for them to do the summer program that, in itself, would provide caregivers an opportunity just that time, just that space. Now, how they choose to do self care? I'm not sure they may remember what they used to do, right? And certainly, people can always get introduced to new things, and being in that peer support group may be one of the ways that they find out about new things, and people interest change, right? And they find out what works with it, but it's really a trial and error. But the number one thing, what I think you just really brought up, is that it's the time factor. We got to give them time, and once we figure out how to get them time, I think we can figure out the other piece. And truth be told, I think that would be very, very helpful. That probably would be one of the best, if not the best. But again, we're talking about, is this going to happen or not? So you ask, what the best way for practitioners? So I'm encouraging practitioners to the do that. But also, if you don't get that time sometime, you can create the time by getting up early in the morning, by staying up later at night. Because I have heard some caregivers talk about that, that this is my self time, regardless if they're, you know, meditating, if they're reading the Bible. And some people enjoy cooking, so they might even do cooking it at that time. And what I'm really trying to get at is that we can support it, encourage it, practitioners to provide examples of what they can be doing, even if we can't do that day camp, we can't do that half the school tutoring, but what is it that they can do in a house? And I think practitioners even just providing them examples is a good thing. And like you said, you're just coming about self care. We probably, we've been saying for years that folks in the community are stressed. So it can kind of be that thing where you're working on yourself, and you might be giving them ideas or suggestions that you find that work for you, but even, to be honest, having that conversation with caregivers, because remember, I told you, they're not even realize how stressed they are right, right. Let's just have that conversation with them about self care. Yeah, we can kind of figure out the next step. Yeah, what makes you feel rested? And do you need help downloading an app to

Unknown Speaker  43:33  
help arranging, you know, do you need a scholarship for summer camp so that you can have a week of, you know, four hour days where you get a break for those four hours. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And you brought in a huge piece when we talk about technology. So that is perfect. What else can kinship caregivers do, or practitioners do help them with technology? Again, what that means? I don't know, but I do know that they sometimes have classes that are free of charge at community centers that can, you know, so it's providing them information is and when I say information, also some resources. So what does that mean? How do you get there? Who can do the child care while you're there? So really, it's not just providing it, but also helping them to think through it. So all the stuff, yes, I'm going to get give you this recommendation. In order to do the recommendation, what do you need? Okay, you need childcare. There's some people that have the money to get stipends for childcare, but if not, let's talk about what relative can help, right? Let's talk about what other kinship care providers that you know from these groups. So I think, as a practitioner, a lot of times, we can take our time make suggestions, but also really having a conversation with the kinship care provider so that they can tell us what it is that they need, and then we could figure out how to support it or get them what we need the best that we can. I guess it shows too that that i.

Unknown Speaker  45:00  
Was a practitioner for years. I always tell people I'm really, really young, but I practiced before I went to go get my PhD. So I'm thinking of realistic situations that I came across, and even with some of the work I do right now that I come across, you know, yeah, yeah. Well, thank you so much, Dr tyresa Washington for talking with us about how to engage kinship caregivers, as I say, it's a universal question. We hear a lot from professionals, and we truly appreciate your your expertise. So thank you. Okay, my pleasure. And congratulations, Tracy, for your new position and Don We will miss you. I know you're leaving us in good hands, but we definitely will miss you, and I'm going to assume that you're still going to be around a little bit, still talking about this topic, and, you know, passionate about it with child welfare, various topics. So I know, I know that I will see you on the scenes again. You will yes and our new executive director when that person is hired. So thank you. Thank you so much. Have a good one. I appreciate the opportunity to get this information out there. Thank you all right. Bye, bye.