After more than 20 years of being a kinship carer, I thought I would try to sum up what I think it is. Not in a neat definition. Kinship care doesn’t really do neat. More in the way you might try to describe the weather in a place you’ve lived for decades, you know it intimately, you’ve been soaked, warmed, and occasionally blown sideways by it, but putting it into words still feels slightly inadequate. So here goes.

Kinship care is rarely planned.

No one wakes up one morning and thinks, “You know what would really round out my retirement / midlife / already chaotic parenting journey? Raising children again under complex circumstances, with limited information, and a school app I don’t understand.”

Yet, across the country, grandparents, aunties, uncles, older siblings, and extended family members are doing exactly that. Quietly. Steadily. Often with a kind of exhausted humour that deserves both recognition and a standing ovation.

Kinship care doesn’t arrive with a neat handbook. It arrives with a phone call. Or a knock at the door. Or a moment where someone realises: if I don’t step in, who will?  Then,  just like that, life rearranges itself.

Beds are found. Routines are reshaped. Careers are re-evaluated. Cupboards are restocked with cereal that disappears at alarming speed. Technology becomes both essential and deeply confusing. (“Why does the school send messages through five different apps?” is a common and entirely reasonable question.) But underneath all of this practical reshuffling, something much deeper is happening. Something that often goes unnoticed in formal systems of care. Kinship care is about belonging.

Not the polished, Instagram version of belonging. The real version. The kind that is a bit messy, a bit loud, occasionally frustrating, and deeply rooted. It’s the kind of belonging where a child doesn’t have to explain their story from the beginning. Where their history, however complex, is already held within the family fabric. Where they are not just placed but known. That doesn’t mean it’s easy.

Kinship carers are often navigating multiple layers at once. They are holding children who may have experienced trauma, loss, or instability, and doing so in ways that require constant patience, emotional availability, and a kind of quiet steadiness that rarely gets acknowledged. They are managing relationships with birth parents that can be complicated, emotional, and sometimes painful, relationships that may carry love, loyalty, grief, and tension all at once, often shifting from one moment to the next without warning.

At the same time, they are negotiating systems that were not designed with them in mind. Forms, processes, meetings, and expectations that assume time, energy, and expertise that they have had to learn on the run. They are often translating between the language of bureaucracy and the lived reality of family life, trying to make sense of decisions that feel distant from the everyday work of caring for a child and they are doing all of this while also trying to remember where they put their reading glasses or car keys, whether the appointment was today or yesterday, and why there are suddenly no clean towels again even though they swear they just did a wash.

There is a particular kind of humour that lives in kinship care. It doesn’t come from trying to make light of hard things, but from the sheer oddity of life when it loops back on itself in unexpected ways. It shows up in the small, absurd moments that you could never fully explain to someone who hasn’t lived it.

Like explaining to your friends that you now attend school assemblies again, decades after you thought that chapter of your life was firmly closed. Standing at the back of a hall, politely clapping at songs you didn’t know existed, wondering how you ended up here while also quietly worrying whether you’ve packed the right snack for afterwards.

Or discovering that your carefully curated music taste is now considered “ancient history” by someone who still needs help tying their shoelaces.

Or the slow realisation that you are once again having conversations about homework, bedtime routines, and whether cereal counts as dinner (it does, sometimes, and that’s okay, even if you promised yourself in earlier life stages that you would never “let things get to cereal for dinner”).

It is the kind of domestic negotiation that feels both completely familiar and entirely unexpected at the same time and somewhere in all of that is laughter. Not because it isn’t serious, but because if you didn’t laugh at the circularity of it all, you might spend a lot of time just sitting there thinking, how did I end up back here?

This humour matters. It is not trivial. It is part of how people cope, connect, and keep going. But kinship care is not just a story of resilience. It is also a story of relational depth. Because what kinship carers offer is not just safety. It is continuity. Identity. Connection to culture, family, and history. It is the quiet, powerful message: you are one of us, and you always have been. For children who have experienced disruption, this matters profoundly.

In a world that may have felt unpredictable or unsafe, kinship care offers something different. Not perfection. Not certainty. But familiarity. The smell of a house that feels known. The sound of a voice that has always been there. The presence of someone who remembers who you were before everything changed and this is where kinship care challenges the way we often think about “good care.”

Systems tend to focus on safety, stability, and outcomes. These are important. Essential, even. But kinship care reminds us that care is also about something less measurable and far more human: the feeling of belonging. Belonging is not built through programs or policies. It is built in moments.

• In being called by a nickname that only your family uses.
• In eating the same meal you’ve eaten your whole life, even if it’s slightly overcooked.
• In someone knowing how you like your tea without asking.
• In being included, even when you’re difficult, moody, or trying very hard to pretend you don’t care.

Belonging says: you don’t have to earn your place here. You already have it.

Of course, kinship care is not without its challenges. It can be financially stressful. Emotionally complex. Physically demanding. Many carers are navigating systems that can feel confusing or rigid. They may feel invisible in conversations about care, despite being at the heart of it and there are days, many days, when it is simply hard.

Days when patience runs thin. When the past feels very present. When the gap between what a child needs and what a carer feels able to give seems uncomfortably wide.

On those days, kinship care is not a neat story about love conquering all. It is something more honest than that.

It is showing up anyway. It is making the lunch. Attending the meeting. Sitting in the silence. Trying again tomorrow. It is, in many ways, the most ordinary kind of extraordinary work and perhaps that is the key message at the centre of kinship care: belonging does not come from getting everything right. It comes from staying.

From being there, consistently, over time. From holding a place for someone, even when things are uncertain. From saying, in a hundred small ways, you are part of this family, no matter what.

Kinship care may not always look polished. It may involve mismatched routines, improvised solutions, and the occasional dinner that raises nutritional questions. But what it offers is something that cannot be easily replicated elsewhere.

• Connection that is already rooted.
• Identity that is already shared.
• A place where a child does not have to start from scratch.

In the end, that is what so many children and young people need most. Not just to be safe. But to feel, deeply and without question, that they belong.