By Erica L. Green, Photo by Chet Strange for the New York Times, The New York Times, October 13, 2022
The Biden administration proposes spending $20 billion over a decade to help some of the most vulnerable families in the country, including relatives suddenly thrust into child rearing.
WASHINGTON — Maria Elena Thomas and her husband were ready for a simpler life after they retired in 2015, sold their home in Colorado and settled on the southeastern coast of Spain.
“People would ask, ‘When are you going to come back?’” Ms. Thomas recalled in a recent interview. “We would say, ‘When somebody needs us.’”
The call came five years later. A child welfare worker in Colorado informed Ms. Thomas that her two grandchildren, then 17 months and two months old, had been placed in foster care because their mother — the girlfriend of Ms. Thomas’s son — had severely neglected them. Ms. Thomas’s son, who had been arrested on misdemeanor charges, was in jail at the time.
The Thomases, alarmed that their grandchildren were living with strangers, returned from Europe, scrambled to rent a home and took over care of the babies. “We worked hard all of our lives to be able to retire,” said Ms. Thomas, 61, who had been an elementary school principal. “But we could not bear the thought of these kids being in the foster system.”
The Thomases are among thousands of families across the country thrust into the deep end of the child welfare bureaucracy, often abruptly, with little to no guidance or resources to make an unforeseen transition to child rearing. President Biden’s budget this year proposes to add $20 billion over a decade to help such families navigate the child welfare system.
Specifically, the administration wants to increase the number of foster children who live with relatives, known as “kinship care,” by reimbursing states at a higher rate if they place children with family members instead of in group homes or institutions. The administration also proposes more money for programs that help such families, and to expand a tax credit to include people who take legal guardianship of young family members.
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