Abstract
Among recent developments in family law, the most prevalent issue on legislative agendas has been Kincare as an alternative to non-relative foster care when maltreated children cannot remain with parents. Long an available option legally but traditionally regarded with skepticism by child protection workers, Kincare is now idealized. A steady stream of state legislative bills aims to encourage or command child protection and foster care agencies to place maltreated children in the home of relatives or friends of their parents whenever one is available, ostensibly based on an assumption that this is categorically better for children than living with unrelated foster parents.
That assumption has romantic appeal. But the reality of Kincare’s benefits and pitfalls is far more complex. Moreover, motivations other than child welfare are driving Kincare advocacy. The best explanation for the recent fervor points to two aims. An immediate aim is to undermine federal child-welfare mandates that advocates for poor and minority-race parents and communities have long condemned—principally, foster care time limits and the prohibition on race-matching in adoption. A longer-term objective for some is a return to racial separatism in private life.
[...]
This Article is a corrective to the false assumptions on which the Kincare campaign rides and a child-centered pushback against adult-focused and group-protective ideological agendas.
This abstract has been taken from the author's introduction.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2025
Publication Information
19 Florida International University Law Review 1-69 (2025)
Repository Citation
Dwyer, James G., "The Kincare Craze in Child Protection: Romanticism, Subterfuge, and Racial Separatism" (2025). Faculty Publications. 2256.
https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/facpubs/2256
