This Kinship Care Week (6-12 October), we have been celebrating the amazing role played in children’s lives and society by our dedicated kinship carers.
These carers – also known as connected persons or family and friend carers – are raising a child or young person in Portsmouth whose parents have been unable to look after them, either on a short or long-term basis.
They include relatives like grandparents, aunts/uncles or siblings, or other adults who have a connection to the child/ren such as a neighbour or close family friend.
Whether it is a formal or informal arrangement, Kinship Care allows children to feel cared for and loved in a secure and nurturing home by someone they already have a connection with, and the opportunity to remain within their extended family network.
Kinship Care Week – which has a theme of #ThisIsKinshipCare for 2024 – has provided us with a great opportunity to highlight and celebrate the vital role that kinship carers play in caring for children in need.
Visit the website for Kinship, the charity for family and friends who step up to raise a child, to listen to kinship care podcasts or watch their kinship animation films from the children’s and carer’s viewpoints, which speak of the joy, the warmth, the humour, and the love, as well as acknowledging the challenges of being a kinship family.
