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When my brother and his wife needed to keep their daughter, Candi, safe from state intervention while they addressed their addictions, I volunteered since she had already been in a group home once. She鈥檇 just turned 13 when the four of us stood at the counter of the county clerk鈥檚 office, signing paperwork to make me her temporary legal guardian.

My life was enriched by my niece鈥檚 daily love and perspective. Taking responsibility for her made me feel closer to my family; I鈥檇 been separated from my family by adoption, and had only reconnected with them a decade ago. Still, I often struggled to remember I loved Candi鈥檚 parents and to honor them as whole people instead of stereotyping them as addicts. 

In the United States, family separation is often an occasion for assigning blame to individual people, but larger forces are at work. Systemic misogyny and class oppression, sexual violence, and disease have put my white, working-class family at risk for five generations, forcing us to find ways to keep our children. In April 1941, my then 18-year-old grandmother, pregnant with her third child, married a man who knew he wasn鈥檛 that child鈥檚 father. The marriage allowed her to keep that child; her first two had been relinquished for adoption because she was young, unmarried, poor, and powerless. My mother, 14 when she was raped and became pregnant with me, couldn鈥檛 find a way to keep me. Some adult in her life signed papers letting me go.

Now, nearly two decades after taking Candi in, it鈥檚 clear we all did the best we could, keeping Candi鈥攁nd many other relatives before me鈥攆rom being displaced. No matter what age a child is, family separation is an adverse childhood experience that can cause , leaving children vulnerable to outcomes ranging from to . 鈥淚t鈥檚 complex trauma because it鈥檚 not a one-time event,鈥� says Lina Vanegas, a social worker who was born in Bogota, Colombia, in 1976 and sold to a white couple in the Midwest. 鈥淚t sets us up for a trauma trajectory 鈥� and it鈥檚 intergenerational.鈥� 

The first way to stop this trauma is to , which is especially important for Black children in the U.S., who in 2023 comprised . Those prevention techniques include training social workers to . It鈥檚 difficult to determine how often children are removed solely because of impoverishment, but one 2021 study shows that in circumstances of poverty. Families with limited means may lack access, for example, to transportation, making it difficult for them to keep medical appointments. If a child misses a medical appointment in that situation, is parental neglect the cause, or a lack of resources to secure transportation?

Stopping family separation also includes respecting cultural differences, as seen through the , intended to stop the forced assimilation of Indigenous children in the U.S. by placing them with Native families rather than in white adoptive homes. Kinship care promotes the cultural preservation ideal because it minimizes the trauma of removal, increases the likelihood of permanency, and . Comparisons of kinship care and foster care show that children in the former arrangement are . When extended families take the responsibility of caring for children, they can ensure that children stay connected to their families by offering up family stories about themselves, their parents, and their ancestors.

Black families have historically relied on informal kinship care, as Dorothy E. Roberts notes in her 2001 Chicago-Kent Law Review article, 鈥溾�� However, these arrangements have been stigmatized in the U.S. 鈥淭he Black community鈥檚 cultural tradition of sharing parenting responsibilities among kin has been mistaken as parental neglect,鈥� Roberts writes. 鈥淏ecause mothers who depend on kinship care do not fit the middle-class norm of a primary caregiver supported by her husband and paid childcare, they seem to have abrogated their duty toward their children.鈥�

But several recent studies, including Alia鈥檚 2019 study, 鈥渆,鈥� demonstrate that children living with addicted parents, children in kinship care, and children living in abusive family homes all have better outcomes than children separated from their families. The evidence was so overwhelming that it inspired the , signed into law in February 2018, which prioritizes keeping children safely with their families rather than removing them from their homes. By implementing the priorities of the act, the Administration for Children and Families found that the number of children in foster care in the U.S. decreased from an estimated 407,000 in 2020 to 391,000 in 2021. 

For me, care for my niece brought me full circle from being an abandoned child to joining a familial lineage of stepping in to prevent state intervention. However, families are complicated. I don鈥檛 have any 鈥渉appily ever after鈥� endings to share about children in my family who evaded the foster care system and are now CEOs of major corporations. Like every other family on Earth, we are complex and flawed. But thanks to kinship care, we鈥檙e still connected. We鈥檙e still a family.

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Michele Sharpe is an adopted person, a high school dropout, and a former trial attorney who lives in North Florida. Her work appears in The New York Times, Witness, and elsewhere. Learn more at michelesharpe.com.聽

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