September is National Kinship Care Month. More than two million grandparents in the United States are raising their grandchildren, most of them outside any system that pays or checks on them. Here is what help exists, how to ask for it, and the part of this that no program was built to reach.
The caregiver nobody planned to be
About 2.5 million children in this country are growing up in kinship families: raised by a grandparent, aunt, older sibling, or family friend. For every child the foster system places with a relative, nineteen more are being raised by relatives on their own — with no government support, monetary or otherwise, and often with no legal paper that says they can sign a school form.
Generations United, which has tracked these families for more than a decade, put out its latest report in October 2025 under a title that does the arithmetic: The Costs of Caregiving. The study found that kinship caregivers save taxpayers at least $10.5 billion a year by keeping children out of foster care. Most of them stepped in with no warning, on a fixed income, and paid for it out of their retirement.
If that is you, you already know the numbers do not describe the day. The day is a nine-year-old who wakes up at 3 a.m. because they still have nightmares. It is a parent-teacher conference where the teacher says “Mom” and waits for you to correct her. It is the school pickup line full of people twenty-five years younger than you, and the sore knee that reminds you of it, every time the child wants to play.
The grief nobody sends a card for
Every kinship family starts with something that went wrong in the middle generation. Addiction is the most common reason. Prison, mental illness, a death, a parent who is alive and not able. Whatever the reason, the child in your kitchen is proof of it, every morning.
That is the part that separates this from ordinary grandparenting. You are raising a child while grieving the person who was supposed to. Sometimes that person is dead. Often they are alive, and calling, and making promises, and you have to decide each time whether the promise is safe to pass along to a child who still believes it. You can love your daughter and refuse to let her in the house. You can be furious with her and still lie awake worrying about where she’s sleeping tonight. The people around you tend to hear only one of those at a time.
Then there is the other grief, the quieter one, for the life you had scheduled. Retirement, a spare room, the version of grandparenting where at the end of the weekend you hand them back. Nobody chose this and almost nobody says so out loud, because saying it sounds like you resent the child, and you don’t. You resent the situation. Those are different, and you are allowed to feel the second one.
What you can ask for
Start with the question that decides everything else: is the child in the foster system, or not? The answer changes what you qualify for.
If the child was placed with you through child welfare, ask to be licensed as a kinship foster home. A federal rule that took effect in 2023 lets states license relatives under their own, simpler standards, and once you are licensed you are owed the same monthly payment a stranger foster parent would get. A growing list of states has adopted it, Michigan and Colorado among them. Caseworkers do not always volunteer this. Ask directly, and ask what the difference in payment is between an informal placement and a licensed one.
If the child is with you informally, with no agency involved, you can still apply for a TANF child-only grant in most states. The money is modest, but it is based on the child’s need, and your own income usually does not count against it. Ask your local benefits office for the child-only application by name.
Every state has some form of kinship navigator, a person or program whose job is to know what exists in your state and walk you through it. The Grandfamilies and Kinship Support Network keeps a directory at gksnetwork.org, and it answers questions from individual caregivers, not only from agencies. If you are 55 or older, your Area Agency on Aging runs the National Family Caregiver Support Program, and grandparents raising children are written into it. That is where respite money and support groups usually live.
Two cautions. Legal standing matters before it is urgent: a school enrollment form, a dentist, an emergency room, each will eventually ask who you are to this child, so look into guardianship or a power of attorney before you need it at midnight. And the payment you fought for will not make the situation feel fair. It buys groceries and a little breathing room. It does not buy back your daughter.
What the programs do not reach
Read the list above again and notice who it is for. The child. Every dollar, every navigator, every licensing rule is designed to keep the child safe and housed, and it is right that they are. The caregiver is supported so that the child can be. What happens to you, inside, is nobody’s line item.
Kinship caregivers report chronic stress, depression and high blood pressure at rates the Generations United report describes plainly. Less measured is the shame, the isolation from friends whose lives moved on, and the sense that you failed once as a parent and are being given, at sixty-two, one chance to do it right. Many kinship caregivers were raised in hard houses themselves. The child’s trauma and your own can share an address.
That is the part Caregiver Connections was built for.
Kinship Care Month is a good time to find out what you are owed. Get the child licensed, or the grant filed, or the guardianship started. And when the paperwork is done, remember that you are the other person in this house who needs looking after.
