Articles
Healing from Trauma/Neglect/Abuse
Do You Need Help with Your Relative Child’s Tantrums, Rages, and Meltdowns?
Does this sound familiar? Your grandchild starts yelling, crying, or storming off in the middle of the grocery store. Your heart starts racing, and you feel like all eyes are on you! Do you need better tools to handle your grandchild's or other relative child’s...
Fun Ways to Create a Secure Attachment with Young Relative Children
While raising this young toddler or school-aged child in your home, you have a special opportunity to help them feel safe, loved, and strong. One of the best gifts you can give them is a secure attachment. This bond tells your grandchild (or nephew or cousin): “You...
When Siblings Harm Each Other
In this community, we value “family” as much bigger than just parents and children. This is one of the most common reasons that grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other relatives step in to help raise a child when the parents can’t. The strength of kinship care helps...
Impacts of Prenatal Exposure to Alcohol and Drugs
Helping Kids with ADHD Boost Their Mental Health
Many of the children you are raising have experienced painful losses or abuse. Others were exposed during pregnancy to alcohol or drugs. Still, others have both of those challenges in their history and are living with the impacts today. Those impacts may show up in...
Practical Help for Raising a Child with Prenatal Exposure or FASD
You love this funny, busy, and spunky kid who has moved into your home. Yes, they keep you on your toes and you feel new levels of tired that you haven’t felt in years. But it's pure joy when they conquer a new skill or find their voice. You are committed to...
Adapting Your Parenting for a Child with Prenatal Substance Exposure
Raising a grandchild or other loved one with prenatal exposure to alcohol or drugs can be a frustrating and overwhelming challenge. You might be biased, but your grandchild has incredible strengths and talents. However, figuring out how to unlock those and set this...
Challenging Behaviors
Potty Training Your Relative Child, Part 1
Taking care of children who have experienced loss, chaos, or exposure to alcohol or drugs before birth can be a big job, especially when it comes to potty training. These children may face extra challenges to conquer potty training, but with understanding, patience,...
Outdoor Activities with Your Relative Child To Build Crucial Skills
Across the state, Spring is springing up everywhere! Sending the kids outside to play relieves many grandparents and family caregivers. After all, many of us would agree that Winter means too much time inside for our kids, on screens, in their rooms, or getting on...
How to Support a Child with Executive Function Delays
You may hear from your grandchild's teacher or your nephew's pediatrician about their "executive function skills," you might wonder, "What exactly does that mean?" Executive function is the set of neurological processes that helps us organize and supervise our...
ADHD
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Disrupting Birth Order
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Helping A Child Heal from Sexual Abuse
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School Issues for Foster & Kinship Kids
Advocating for Your Grandchild at School
If you’re raising a grandchild, do you know when and how to speak up for them at school? Maybe your grandchild (or nephew or niece) struggles academically or often gets in trouble for challenging behaviors. This can make it especially hard to talk with their teachers....
Tips to Set Up Your Grandchild for Success in School
Your grandchild's (or niece's or nephew's) school experience will likely be very different from yours in some ways and similar in others. Some of us have happy school memories, like a favorite teacher, childhood best friend, or a fun field trip. Others have unhappy...
Technology/Internet and Our Kids
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Self-Care for Kinship and Foster Parents
How to Build Your Family’s Resilience
We all want the children we love to be able to face hard times and cope with them successfully. The ability to “bounce back” from life’s challenges can be part of a child’s naturally wired temperament. However, other kids may need help learning how to develop their...
Raising This Child Matters!
Occasionally, it’s good for your mental and emotional health to pause and consider what you are doing and why it matters. Kinship caregivers play a unique and vital role in a child’s healing and overall well-being. Do you stop to think about why and how to be sure you...
Understanding and Preventing Blocked Care
Raising a family member's child is a challenging responsibility. This child brings joy and laughter to your life. But they also struggle with the losses they've endured. Their behaviors may be challenging to manage. This child might have learning needs or emotional...
Relationship with Child’s Parent
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Working Together For the Good of the Child In Your Care
Enjoying the Holidays When Raising a Relative’s Child
The holiday season is in full swing, with messages of joy, family togetherness, and bright, colorful celebrations of many different cultures and faith traditions. When raising a grandchild, nephew, or other relative child, the holiday season can be pretty stressful to...
Why Raising Your Grandchild Matters
When raising your grandchild or another loved one's child, it's easy to get lost in the weight of daily work. You are overseeing homework, monitoring screen time, holding the reins of this child’s daily schedule, and much more. However, sometimes, it helps to remember...
Building Healthy Communication with Your Tween and Teen Grandchild
It's a heavy responsibility to raise a young person who comes to your home after losing their parents or experiencing abuse and neglect. You want them to find healing and learn life skills to carry them into adulthood. You want to teach them skills to set them up for...
Raising Adolescents (tweens/teens)
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Supporting Healthy Relationships/Attachment
Recognizing Signs of Depression and Anxiety in Tweens and Teens
Raising a tween or teen relative in your home can feel very different from caring for a younger child. Bodies are changing, emotions can feel bigger, and independence starts to matter more. For relative caregivers — grandparents, aunts, uncles, older siblings, or...
Recognizing Signs of Depression and Anxiety in School-Aged Children
Sometimes, the children in your care may feel sad or worried because of leaving their familiar setting, their parents’ struggles, or relationships at home, school, or with friends. Those feelings can be quite developmentally normal. But when sadness or worry lasts a...
Practical Tips for Supporting a Relative Caregiving Family
When a relative child comes into care unexpectedly, whether you’re an auntie, uncle, cousin, grandparent, or other relative, it can turn life upside down. In Cherokee families, stepping in for children is not new. We have always believed children belong to the whole...
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This website was supported with funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families’ Children’s Bureau through the Improving Child Welfare Through Investing in Family grant #HHS-2021-ACF-ACYF-CW-1921. The purpose of this grant is to provide an array of kinship preparation services and ongoing kinship supports, and provide shared parenting to build trusting relationships between all out-of-home caregivers and parents of children/youth in foster care to ensure parents and families remain actively involved in normal child-rearing activities.
This website is supported by Grant Number 90CW1149 (HHS-2021-ACF-ACYF-CW-1921) from the Children’s Bureau within the Administration for Children and Families, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Neither the Administration for Children and Families nor any of its components operate, control, are responsible for, or necessarily endorse this website (including, without limitation, its content, technical infrastructure, and policies, and any services or tools provided). The opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Administration for Children and Families and the Children’s Bureau.