Kinship Caring: Findings from an Arts-Based Participatory Study Exploring Stories of Family Practices

Kinship care in England refers to families bringing up a relative or friend's child, a practice often seen as an alternative service to non-related foster care. Reasons for children’s move into kinship care are varied and include parental substance misuse and mental ill health meaning children have often experienced similar adversity to children growing up in foster care. The known benefits for children living in kinship care has led to the government’s pledge to better support kinship care families, for example by investing in multi-disciplinary teams, including health practitioners, to deliver Early Help intervention. However, the increasing turn to kinship care has led to mostly positivist research that seeks to verify children’s safety and their overall outcomes by assessing the kinship carers’ parenting quality and their emotional bond with children. This has created a narrow understanding about how kinship carers experience brining up their relative’s children and their stories about everyday family life.

As part of a doctoral study, twelve kinship carers living in Northeast England engaged in an arts-based participatory study to share their stories of kinship caring. The participants used a blend of story-generating tools, including painting, poetry, photovoice, and songwriting. The stories were collated into a book resource and disseminated during a public event. The data were thematically analyzed, drawing on sociological family studies theories of family practices and display.

The findings highlight the importance of paying attention to emotionality within the kinship carers' daily tasks. This was evident in many areas, especially pre-kinship care work, acts of family surveillance, and acts of being watched by welfare services. The study concludes that arts-based participatory storytelling can open new ways of seeing and thinking about kinship-caring families.