A major study from the University of Bristol and children’s grant-giving charity, Buttle UK has provided the most comprehensive picture to date of informal kinship care — children cared for informally by relatives and friends because their parents are no longer able to look after them.
The majority of kinship care arrangements are informal; that is, they are made outside the ambit of child welfare agencies and carers have no automatic entitlement to support.
Until now this has been largely a ‘hidden population’ about whom there were few hard facts. The findings demonstrate the true cost of informal kinship care and the huge challenges that this group of people face.
The report is the second of a two-part Big Lottery-funded study undertaken by the University of Bristol in partnership with Buttle UK. In June 2011 the University of Bristol published the first part of this major study — the first ever attempt to quantify informal kinship care in the UK — showing that under the 2001 Census 173,200 children — one in 77 children — were being brought up by grandparents and other relatives (This number is now likely to have risen).
Drug and alcohol problems feature heavily in the background of the parents in this new research, causing a child’s move into informal kinship care – which is often sudden and crisis-driven. Findings show that just over two-thirds of these children are abandoned by parents who are affected by alcohol or drug misuse, including nearly a quarter who are misusing both.
Exposure to domestic violence and parental mental illness was also common. These parents’ chaotic lives put their children at risk and led to parental indifference (64%) and to active rejection (26%) of their children. Relatives and friends stepped in to care for them.
Despite the often difficult circumstances of the carers, the research shows that these informal kinship arrangements provide stability for the children. The children are doing well, have strong attachments to their carers and have good levels of academic attainment, particularly when compared to children in the formal care system. Many children have high educational aspirations with half planning to go to college and almost two fifths aiming for university.
