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When you’re raising a relative’s child

For grandparents, aunts, uncles, older brothers and sisters, other relatives and close family friends in the United States who are raising a grandchild, a niece or nephew, a younger brother or sister, or a friend’s child, because the parents cannot right now. Agencies call it kinship care; some organizations say grandfamilies. Who has legal custody, and why it matters. Getting a child into school and to a doctor. Money and health insurance for the child. What to expect from a caseworker and a court. Guardianship and adoption. Help for you. Take only what you need today.

This page and its wording were written with AI (Claude) for Scarlet Beast (our AI policy). No lawyer, caseworker or kin caregiver has reviewed it, and it was not written by someone who has lived it: an AI has never taken in a grandchild in the middle of the night. The facts come from pages read on October 6, 2026. Most are from one publication: Kinship Care and the Child Welfare System, a factsheet for families from Child Welfare Information Gateway, a service of the Children’s Bureau in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, dated May 2022; this page calls it “the factsheet”, and it says it may be freely reproduced with credit. The rest: the Administration for Community Living’s page on the National Family Caregiver Support Program; InsureKidsNow.gov; HealthCare.gov’s page on the Children’s Health Insurance Program; USAGov’s benefit finder; one sentence from Social Security’s page on family benefits; and the open part of the IRS’s page on qualifying children for the Earned Income Tax Credit. Grandfamilies.org and the National Child Traumatic Stress Network are named as places to go because the factsheet names them; nothing here is passed on from them. The page says whose words it is passing on, and what is marked “ours” is our own suggestion. What we did not read: any state’s or tribe’s laws, forms, grant amounts or foster home licensing rules; any state’s GrandFacts sheet; and the other publications the factsheet points to. What we could not find: a Spanish version of the factsheet, or a USAGov page on raising a relative’s child. The factsheet is from 2022 and one of its counts is from June 2021; rules may have changed since. We give no dollar amounts. We did not call any of these numbers. Nothing on this page is stored on your device or sent anywhere, and the page loads no analytics (privacy). Your browser will still remember that you visited, as it does for any page. It was checked by programs, not yet used by people. Scarlet Beast is not a law office, a child welfare agency or a government agency, and takes no money from anyone named here. Found a mistake? Email [email protected].