Children who are living with their grandparents are likely in their grandparents’ care due to some form of abuse, neglect, trauma, substance abuse or their parents’ incarceration. Bellflower Center’s Kinship Care Home Visiting Program gives grandparents the opportunity to learn new skills for raising grandchildren in their care and helps them access other community support while the caregivers and children explore their own feelings and learn to manage the stress of the new situation. The children in these families are provided with age-appropriate activities to express their feelings and reduce the effects of trauma.

This program helps these grandparents and other caregivers to reduce stress, understand the behaviors of the children and provide a healthy, nurturing environment in which the children can grow and develop into healthy adults. The client set goals, objectives and a time schedule for completing goals. Each family receives an estimated sixteen home visits. The program is also open to other kinship caregivers, such as a person raising her sister’s children.

The Goals of the Kinship Care Home Visiting Program are to:

--Determine the needs of the caregivers and children in the household;

--Help caregivers understand the special needs of the children in their care, and how to effectively respond to those needs;

--Help caregivers alleviate their own stress in raising the children, as well as in dealing with the parents of the children;

--Provide an outlet for the children to understand and express their feelings, reducing the effects of trauma they have experienced; and

--Provide the family with an awareness and connection to appropriate community services.

The Kinship Care program remains the first and only such program in our area that focuses on ensuring that children in kinship care are kept safe and free from the threat of abuse, while helping them and their caregivers deal with the traumas they have survived, be it separation, witness to violence, neglect or physical or sexual abuse, breaking the cycle of such abuse for future generations.