Actor Christian Bale’s $22 million Together California foster care village is a great step for foster families in California. Bale’s village provides free housing and counseling, and caregivers get a daily stipend to pay for groceries and children’s expenses.
All that is laudable, but it’s only a start. Nationwide, nearly 2.4 million children are being raised by their relatives, outside formal foster care.
Amy Stambach
As a researcher studying children and communities in Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia, I follow how families manage the consequences of addiction. That work requires looking closely at relatives who step in when parents cannot provide daily care. The most urgent need for these families is obvious: To best support relatives who care for family members’ children, states must provide them with daily stipends and resources, just as traditional foster providers receive.
When relatives take care of their family’s children, that arrangement is called “kinship care.” Kinship care describes a foster care arrangement that is not always recognized by state systems. Many family members provide care without assistance from child welfare programs. A December 2025 Government Accountability Office report found that for every child in state-supported kinship care, about 18 were outside it.
“Many family members provide care without assistance from child welfare programs.”
Opioid addiction is one reason relatives step in. A child may need another adult to provide daily care while a parent receives treatment — or permanently, after a parent’s death. Children need alternative caregivers for other reasons, too, but the connection to opioid addiction is documented.
A 2024 study examined 2 million Medicaid-enrolled children affected by parental opioid use. Foster care involvement among those children rose from 1.5% in 2014 to 4.7% in 2020. Those figures describe formal foster care, but they leave out the scale of informal care by relatives.
For relatives taking in a child, expenses begin immediately, and families operating through kinship care are more likely than other families to live in poverty. A caregiver may need child care so they themselves can keep on working, or they may need additional space and furniture to make room for relatives’ children. Food and school supplies are recurring costs that can go on for years.
Some states are beginning to address kinship care. West Virginia just opened its Kinship Hub, which allows relatives to find online information about services for them and the children. Other states provide payments. Ohio’s Kinship Support Program offers financial assistance for the first six months to caregivers who are not certified foster parents. Florida, Texas and Indiana offer similar programs.
But in these and other cases, the child must be registered with a state-licensed children’s agency, and many relatives do not agree to this. Not because they do not care for the child, but because they do not consider the child to be a ward of the state. Or, alternatively, they do not want to go through the stressful process of completing home inspections and foster parent training hours to become licensed caregivers. Many face structural barriers like no or unreliable transportation, or they lack funds needed to repair or expand their homes to a standard required by caseworkers.
All these barriers and stipulations should be questioned. States could establish eligibility based on financial need, and child welfare agencies could make the application process accessible through platforms like the Kinship Hub already helping relatives find services.
To be sure, states must verify caregiving arrangements and ensure children receiving support are safe. Extending payments to kinship families would require clear eligibility rules and safeguards against misuse, something states could do through a separate application process that verifies who is raising the child and assesses the household needs.
In order to best meet the needs of children, we must support families who take care of their relatives’ children. Relatives need a way to qualify for assistance while maintaining a family arrangement outside formal foster care.
Amy Stambach is an anthropologist and adjunct in residence in the Department of Environment, Development and Health at American University. Her work has appeared in The Conversation, Times Higher Education and The Hill.