Kinship Care Week: Celebrating the Silent Army Who Step Up for Children

During Kinship Care Week (5 to 11 October 2026), I want to talk about the people I sometimes think of as a silent army.

Grandparents. Aunts and uncles. Brothers and sisters. Other relatives and close family friends.

People who, when a child they love can no longer safely remain with their birth parents, say one enormously important word:

Yes.

Yes, they can come to me.

Yes, I will keep them safe.

Yes, I will turn my life upside down if that is what it takes to stop this child losing everything familiar to them.

There is something heroic about that.

But I sometimes worry that calling kinship carers heroes makes what happens next sound easier than it really is.

Because most kinship carers haven't spent months preparing for this moment.

They haven't applied for the role. They haven't planned their lives around becoming carers. They haven't necessarily received training about childhood trauma, attachment, neglect or the effects that abuse and instability can have on a child's behaviour.

Often, there isn't even time to think.

One day you are a grandparent, aunt, uncle, sibling or family friend.

Then suddenly, you are responsible for raising a child.

Thrown in at the deep end

Your home changes.

Your relationships change.

Your finances can change.

Your plans for the future change.

The dynamics of your entire family can change.

And at the centre of all that upheaval is a child who has experienced upheaval of their own.

A child who needs safety, consistency and love, but who may also be frightened, confused, angry or traumatised by everything that has happened.

You quickly discover that love, as important as it is, doesn't magically give you the knowledge you need.

We aren't automatically educators, therapists or trauma specialists because we become kinship carers.

Yet suddenly we are expected to understand behaviours we have never encountered before and somehow know what to do.

And while trying to create stability for that child, we can also be dealing with chaos coming from elsewhere.

The conflict nobody prepares you for

This is one of the realities of kinship care that can be incredibly difficult to talk about.

Sometimes the child's birth parents are angry with the very people who have stepped forward to care for their child.

Instead of seeing a relative who is trying to prevent their child entering foster care, they may see someone they can blame.

Someone who has "taken" or "stolen" their child.

That anger can spill into the kinship carer's home and wider family.

There can be accusations, threats, intimidation, aggression and attempts to interfere with family life.

And behind all of this is something painfully important:

the child is watching.

The adults may be fighting over blame, responsibility and what has happened, while the child is trying to understand where they belong and whether the people around them are going to disappear too.

Kinship carers can find themselves having to protect a child's relationship with their birth family while simultaneously protecting that child, and sometimes their own household, from the consequences of the adults' behaviour.

That is an extraordinarily difficult line to walk.

You can lose people too

There is another loss that receives far too little attention.

Sometimes becoming a kinship carer changes your relationships with your wider family.

People may not understand why you stepped in.

Some may believe the child should simply be returned to their parents.

Some may blame you for the fact that hasn't happened.

Others may not understand why your priorities, availability and boundaries suddenly have to change.

Relationships can become strained.

Some disappear altogether.

So while you are helping a child deal with loss, you can quietly be experiencing losses of your own.

That is one of the cruel contradictions of kinship care.

You step forward because you want to keep a family together, yet doing so can fracture parts of your own family.

We were among the lucky ones

Eventually, we received help and support.

And I will always recognise how important that was.

But it didn't come at the beginning.

For us, it took five years.

Five years of learning as we went.

Five years of trying to understand.

Five years of finding ways through situations for which we had never been prepared.

That is why Kinship Care Week matters to me.

It is an opportunity to celebrate kinship carers, absolutely.

But celebration isn't enough.

We shouldn't applaud people for surviving without support and then continue leaving the next family to do exactly the same thing.

Kinship carers need information from the beginning.

They need practical help.

They need financial support.

They need someone to explain trauma and help them understand what may be happening beneath a child's behaviour.

They need help navigating relationships with birth parents.

They need somewhere to turn when those relationships become threatening or destabilising.

And sometimes they simply need somebody who understands to say:

We see what you are carrying.

To the silent army

So, during Kinship Care Week, I want to recognise the grandparents who became parents again when they thought that chapter of their lives had finished.

The relatives who rearranged bedrooms overnight.

The people who cancelled plans, changed jobs, stretched finances and altered their futures.

The carers who sat awake wondering whether they were doing the right thing.

The people who absorbed anger that wasn't theirs.

The families who lost relationships while trying to preserve one for a child.

The people who knew very little about trauma but learned because a child needed them to.

And the kinship carers who are exhausted, frightened or overwhelmed but still get up the following morning and provide the stability that child needs.

You may never have planned to become a carer.

You may never have been trained for it.

You may not even think there is anything heroic about what you have done.

But when a child needed somebody to step forward, you stepped forward.

That deserves far more than one week of recognition.

It deserves recognition, understanding and meaningful support every single day of the year.

About me

I am a married mother of four children. One of those four children is our granddaughter, for whom we are SGO (legal guardians)/kinship carers. I run a small business and enjoy writing, so I blog. My blog focuses on my family life as well as my experiences of living with chronic illnesses and disabilities such as ME/CFS, spinal stenosis, chronic pain, and fibromyalgia. Oh, and I am only in my mid-40s.