When the System Shifts, Who’s Catching the Kids?

This past weekend, I attended the Fairness for Children Raised by Relatives 2025 Gathering. It was a powerful few days. The kind of space where stories aren’t just told, they’re witnessed. Where the unspoken things finally have room to breathe.

During one of the presentations, a statistic was mentioned… and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. In fact, so much so, I couldn’t wait to check the source and then do some further research. According to B.C.’s Representative for Children and Youth, in my province (British Columbia Canada) over the past 15 years the number youth in care has dropped from 8,832 to 4,834 (-45%)

At first, that felt like progress. But then I saw the other line. The number of children placed with relatives has grown from 1,168 to 5,443. That’s a 365% increase.

And that’s where my breath caught. Because behind that stat are families like mine. Grandparents. Aunties. Older siblings. Stepping in, often without notice, to care for children we didn’t expect to raise.

Children don’t arrive in care unless something painful has happened. That pain, stemming from trauma in all forms, doesn’t disappear when they’re placed with kin.

Will they experience greater success in their life when removed from a bad situation – sometimes one after another – and placed into kinship care? Yes, stats confirm that children who raised by kin will almost always experience better outcomes in their lives. We also know that, whether the call came out of nowhere or whether we saw it coming for months or even years, the change is still massive. And the grief we caregivers feel? It’s layered.

• Grief for the childhood our grandkids didn’t get to have.
• Grief for the future we thought we’d stepped into.
• Grief for the in-between space where love and loss sit side by side.

After I came home from the weekend gathering, I kept thinking about what the good works of Fairness For Children Raised by Relatives… and other organizations who are advocating for the children and youth in my province. If fewer children are in government care, but more are being placed with relatives… who is supporting the relatives? NOTE: we have a long way to go.

So I wanted to dig deeper into the numbers … not just in Canada, but in similar countries around the world. I asked Kacey (my behind-the-scenes AI research partner) to conduct some deeper research. What are other countries seeing? Are more kids being placed with family? And the unanswered question: when that happens, is the support actually there?

Together we (AI and I) pulled together a report that looks at foster and kinship care in seven countries: Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and across Europe.

📄 You can read/download the full report here:
👉 Foster and Kinship Care Across Seven Countries

The findings were honest. And honestly, hard.

Everywhere, the trend is the same: more children are being placed with family. And everywhere, it seems, the resources to support those families fall short. Sometimes drastically.

In Canada, more than half the children in care are Indigenous. That’s not just a statistic. That’s a reflection of deep, generational harm from a time when European colonizers disrupted family traditions and structures that had been supporting children since time immemorial. And while today, more of those children are being placed with kin and kept within their culture (and less in foster care), many of the kin caregivers are left navigating generational trauma, poverty, and complex systems without clear guidance or enough support.

Placing a child with family, whether anticipated or not, is not a one-time fix. It’s the beginning of something. It takes love, yes. But it also takes backup. It takes community. It takes policy that understands what’s really happening in kitchens and living rooms across the country.

We can’t just move children out of a broken system and hope everything else will fall into place. Families need to be held too.

So if you’re reading this and you’re raising a grandchild, or supporting someone who is, please know:

• You are not invisible.
• You are not alone.
• And your love, while extraordinary, shouldn’t be expected to carry it all.

We need to keep speaking up. Keep asking the hard questions. Keep building spaces where our stories are heard, and where care doesn’t end when a child comes home. Because this isn’t just a shift in the system. It’s a shift in who’s holding it together.

And that deserves more than a quiet thank you. It deserves real support. And if you are just too tired and overwhelmed in the day-to-days of life, take care of yourself first. We’ll rally around and advocate on your behalf.

Shine on beautiful, brave and tenacious ones. Shine on! Please forward this to someone who needs to see this right now.

With heart, Mary
Grandparents Raising Tomorrow, together
www.grandfamilyworld.com