A child arrived. Nobody handed you a manual.
Maybe it was a phone call at an hour when phones aren't supposed to ring. Maybe a caseworker on the porch and a child holding a trash bag. Either way, there is someone in your house who wasn't there last month, and within seventy-two hours you need answers to questions nobody prepared you for.
Can I enroll him in school without custody? Will a doctor treat her if I can't sign? Do I need guardianship, or would that be a mistake? Is there any money to help?
There is. Most kinship caregivers never find out.
More than two million children in the United States are being raised by grandparents, aunts, uncles, and family friends. Almost none of them planned for it, and most were handed a phone number and left to work it out alone.
This is the manual that should have come with the child.
Written in plain English by a former senior operations and research analyst inside a state child welfare agency, The First 90 Days of Kinship Care moves through the first three months in the order the questions actually arrive:
- The six documents to gather this week, and how to get them when the parent won't hand them over
- How to enroll a child in school with no custody paperwork, and the federal protection most caregivers have never heard of
- What an emergency room can and cannot do without your signature
- The four legal pathways compared honestly: what each one gives you, and what it takes away
- The monthly cash benefit that in most states is calculated on the child's circumstances rather than the caregiver's, and that most eligible families never receive
- Why so many relatives caring for children in state custody are paid nothing, and the one question that determines whether that changes
- The decision made in the first months that quietly controls whether you qualify for help years later
- Who everyone in the courtroom is, and how to be heard as a relative
Built to be used, not just read
The book closes with a toolkit meant to be photocopied and carried: a first-72-hours checklist, a document tracker, a caregiver log, a contact sheet, the exact questions to ask at a school, a benefits office, or an agency, and a glossary of the words people will use around you without explaining. Support groups, kinship navigator programs, and legal aid offices are expressly free to copy those pages and hand them out.
Who it's for
Grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, and family friends raising a child they did not expect, whether the arrangement began informally, through a child welfare agency, or somewhere in between.
Written for the people the system consistently forgets, by someone who watched it forget them.
This book provides general educational information, not legal, medical, tax, or benefits advice. Laws and program rules vary by state and change over time.
