Kinship disconnect
I did not grow up thinking of myself as someone who had been in the child welfare system, despite briefly being in an overnight foster care home. There were no caseworkers checking in regularly, no clear labels, no language that explained why my life looked the way it did. From the outside, it appeared that family members had stepped in during a difficult time.
Only much later did I learn the term “kinship care.” I was in my twenties before I encountered it in any meaningful way. Until then, I did not understand that being raised outside one’s parents’ home due to court decisions or family conflict is not simply a private family matter — it is a recognized category with specific risks, needs, and, ideally, supports.
Those supports never materialized for me, partly because no one identified my situation as one that required them.
My mother was hospitalized when I was very young, and my father was also eventually removed from my life through court decisions that were made through manipulated information.
No one described it as loss, though. It was framed as necessary, appropriate, settled.
I think of it as being “removed in plain sight.” I had been relocated from my own life. Without acknowledgment of that reality, there is no framework for support. You are expected to function like nothing unusual has happened.
Learning about kinship care as an adult was disorienting. It meant that what I had experienced was neither rare nor fully understood by the people around me at the time. It also meant that there were resources, communities, and protections that might have existed but never reached me because no one applied the appropriate label.
Systems tend to respond to categories, not nuances. If you are not identified correctly, you can fall between jurisdictions, programs, and expectations. In my case, that meant growing up without the kinds of educational, psychological, and social supports that many children in similar circumstances receive today, imperfect though those systems still are.
It also meant trying to interpret court decisions that had reshaped my life.
For a long time, I assumed my experience was simply a private family story. Only later did I understand it as a systemic one. Institutionalization, custody rulings, and kinship arrangements are not isolated events, especially for a child of immigrants; they are part of a broader framework governing how society responds to crisis, conflict, and vulnerability.
That framework can stabilize situations, but it can also produce unintended neglect. When responsibility is distributed across institutions and relatives, accountability can become diffuse. Everyone assumes someone else is providing the necessary emotional care. Sometimes no one is. There’s a phrase I learned in a business management course “If everyone is responsible, no one is.”
Recognizing this has not changed the past, but it has changed how I interpret it. What felt like a personal failing or an inexplicable childhood now appears as the result of structural decisions. That perspective does not erase the pain, but it removes the false assumption that I should have navigated it better as a child.
It also clarifies why certain experiences — instability, hyper-independence, difficulty trusting systems — persist into adulthood for many people raised outside their parents’ care. These are not personality quirks; they are adaptations.
I do not share this to relitigate old conflicts or assign blame to specific individuals. Families make decisions under pressure, often with incomplete information. Institutions operate according to rules that cannot capture every human context. But acknowledging the systemic dimension matters because it expands the conversation beyond personal narratives of resilience or dysfunction.
Children removed from their parents, even for reasons adults consider justified, are not blank slates placed into neutral environments. They are individuals experiencing rupture. Without intentional support, that rupture shapes development in ways that may only become visible years later.
For me, understanding the concept of kinship care provided language for something I had lived without naming. Language does not solve everything, but it makes recognition possible. Recognition, in turn, makes self-advocacy possible.
It also reframes the story from one of isolation to one of belonging to a larger group of people whose experiences are often overlooked because they do not fit cleanly into public narratives about adoption, foster care, or traditional family structures.
It explains not only what happened, but why it was so difficult to articulate for so long.
Some stories are not hidden. They are simply never translated into language the person living them can use.
