State policy now says children who can’t safely live with their parents do best when they can remain with other family members.
By Kelly Burch-Granite State News Collaborative
Patrick Sweeney’s mornings are busy. He wakes up his 10-year-old granddaughter Kiarah before the sun, and both leave home at about 5:20 — Sweeney to walk a mile and a half to work, and Kiarah to spend time with a babysitter before school starts.
Afternoons are when the duo can spend quality time together in their Lincoln apartment.
“We do everything together: We read, play board games, play Hangman,” Sweeney said.
Kiarah Sweeney and her grandfather, Patrick Sweeney, pose for a portrait in the skylight of her room in Lincoln, N.H. on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025. The Sweeneys’ third floor apartment has views of town and the mountains beyond.
It’s not the life that Sweeney, 63, imagined four years ago, before he took custody of Kiarah. Sweeney had raised his seven children and was preparing to retire from his career as a roofer and painter. That’s when one of his sons, a police officer, called to say that Sweeney’s other son, who struggles with substance abuse, was living on the streets with Kiarah.
Sweeney persuaded Kiarah’s dad to bring her for a visit, and immediately filed for custody. A judge granted the petition, and Sweeney has been parenting Kiarah ever since, trading his would-be Florida retirement for discussions about puberty and working two jobs to make ends meet as a single parent.
“This is my life, and this is what I want to do, and it’s what I’m going to do, but it’s hard,” Sweeney said, his voice cracking. “It’s definitely hard.”
Despite the challenges, research shows that kids who can’t safely live with their parents, often because of substance misuse, do best when they live with family.
Children placed with family have better mental health outcomes, fewer behavioral issues, and experience fewer moves and school changes than children in foster care with strangers, according to the American Bar Association.
Kiarah Sweeney and her grandfather, Patrick Sweeney, pose for a portrait in the living room of their Lincoln, N.H. home on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025.
Over the past few years, New Hampshire has been making a concerted effort to get more children into these kinship placements and to support families like Sweeney’s to make the placements successful.
“We are really thinking about how to internalize that kin-first culture,” said Marie Noonan, director of the state Department for Children, Youth and Families.
That’s resulted in a shift for Granite State kids. In 2019, just 26 percent of children who came into the foster care system were placed with kin; by last year, that number had jumped to 79 percent, according to state data.
Yet not all kinship placements have involvement from the state agency, commonly called DCYF. Far more placements are informal, where families decide to step in to protect a child. Overall, about 7,000 grandparents in New Hampshire are raising their grandchildren, and about 24,000 children live in homes where a relative other than a parent is the head of household, according to state data.
A statewide Kinship Navigation Program, administered through the state’s family resources centers, aims to support all kinship caregivers — formal and informal — by connecting them with financial, social and educational resources.
Kiarah Sweeney shares a story she wrote and illustrated in Lincoln, N.H. on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025.
Keeping kids with family whenever possible is “the priority,” said Kristin Conlin, kinship program specialist with DCYF.
“It’s necessary, and it has to happen,” she said. “It’s really important.”
A new process for keeping kids with family
Conlin’s position, created in December 2022, is part of the state’s effort to increase kinship placements. Creating that job “enabled us to really look at how we implement practices and policies” to keep children in kinship families and empower those caregivers, Noonan said.
In addition, the state began contracting with A Second Chance, a national organization that helps place children with kin and provides resources to kinship caregivers. That contract began in the summer of 2023 and became fully operational in June 2024.
Now, when a child comes into contact with DCYF, the child’s caseworker and A Second Chance begin working immediately to identify possible kinship placements, should the child need to be removed from their parents’ custody.
Kiarah Sweeney works on a drawing in Lincoln, N.H. on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025.
“The workers strongly believe that children should be with relatives or kin, and because of that they’re engaging parents from the get-go around who’s in their family system, who could take [the children] temporarily while [parents] work on whatever the issue is that brought the child into care,” Conlin said.
The state has also made policy changes, such as reducing the amount of state training required for kinship caregivers before a child can be placed in their home, Noonan said.
Finding a kinship placement is only the first step, however. Families need financial and emotional resources to be able to parent that child successfully, especially since many children in the system have trauma.
That’s where the state’s Kinship Navigation Program comes in. The program, a partnership between the N.H. Children’s Trust and the state’s family resource centers, aims to provide resources to help families address the financial, social and emotional challenges of raising a child.
“A tremendous amount of resources are necessary and a tremendous amount of parenting strategies are necessary,” said Nathan Fink, senior director of advancement with the Children’s Trust.
Many caregivers, like Sweeney, have never interacted with the social welfare system before, and sometimes don’t know where to turn. Too often, they carry the financial burden of caregiving themselves, said Lindsay Allsop, director of impact with the Children’s Trust. That can be especially problematic for grandparents on a limited income.
Patrick Sweeney and his granddaughter, Kiarah, hang out before dinner at their home in Lincoln, N.H. on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025.
“They’re depleting retirement savings and are denied certain benefits,” she said. “They need resources [and] our navigators can really help connect them to programs that they’re eligible for.”
Finding resources to support kin caregivers
Sweeney eventually connected with Megan Woods, a kinship navigator at Whole Village Family Resource Center in Plymouth. She helped him find a range of other resources, including a senior center bus that gives him a ride to the grocery store, health insurance for him and Kiarah, a state case worker, SNAP benefits and fuel assistance.
“I never knew these resources were there,” Sweeney said. “I have to take advantage of everything I can to try to save us.”
Woods works with about 10 families, spread over a 19-town area. Similar programs exist across the state. In addition to explaining financial benefits, Woods hosts family nights where kids and kinship caregivers can share a meal together, and she teaches parenting classes. After six months to a year with the navigation program, she says, most caregivers have a much better understanding of the resources available to them.
In the midst of cooking dinner, Kiarah Sweeney and her grandfather, Patrick Sweeney, stand for a photo in their Lincoln, N.H. kitchen on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025.
“That’s one of my favorite parts – when they can empower themselves after us being in there,” Woods said.
Other kinship navigators are constantly sharing new resources, Woods said. Yet she doesn’t have every tool she needs for kinship families. Transportation is a major challenge for many rural caregivers, she said. Sweeney, for example, hasn’t been able to participate in caregiver support groups because he doesn’t have a car to make the drive to the family resource center in Plymouth.
Leaders at the Children’s Trust would like to see even more investment in the kinship program to close gaps like that one.
“There are so many different pockets of money that could be braided together to support kinship navigation,” said Allsop.
She would like to see kinship placements — both formal and informal — automatically enrolled in every state benefit they’re eligible for, including SNAP food benefits, cash assistance and Medicaid.
Patrick Sweeney cooks dinner in the kitchen of his Lincoln, N.H. apartment on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025.
Kinship caregivers, she said, are often breaking a generational cycle of trauma and substance misuse. That in itself can save the government money long-term and should be supported, she argued.
While the state is making strides, Allsop says, “we’re still in Band-Aid territory, not system-building territory.”
Caregivers, she said, “need stable, long-term financial support in order to do it right.”
Sweeney said he doesn’t know what he would do without the resources the Kinship Navigation Program has connected him with, and without his local community in Lincoln.
“As hard as it is for us just to get by, I’m so grateful,” he said.
Those supports have allowed him to focus on Kiarah, who he says is flourishing. These days she plays basketball, she snowboards, and she’s reading at an eighth-grade level. But her kindness and grace are what Sweeney is most proud of.
“When she smiles at me and tells me, ‘I love you, Grandpa,’ that will keep me going forever,” he said.
These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.