Kids Celebrate Kinship Families

September is a month for celebrating the relationship between a child and their kinship care taker.

Kinship care takers are those aunts, grandparents, or other family members that foster a child who can’t stay with their parents due to mental health, abuse, incarceration, or other issues. Kinship Coordinator Patrick Donavan said that taking a child to a relative’s home helps the child cope with the trauma of leaving their parents.

“It’s never a good thing to have to take a child from mom or dad given the situation so it’s never a good feeling but it definitely makes you feel better knowing that when they sleep at night it’s a house they’ve probably been in before and they’re going to wake up next to an aunt or a cousin or a grandparent as opposed to somebody that they don’t know,” said Donavan.

Paper dolls are hung on the walls of the Colony Square Mall to represent the 900 children living with a kinship parent in Muskingum County. These children have left home and started a new life with their relatives.

“If we weren’t raising awareness, you know a lot of the members of the community have no idea what goes on out there and assume that any time a child comes to the attention of children services they’re going into foster care,” said Donavan. “This kind of lets them know there are alternatives for those children and that the outcomes can really be positive.”

You can see the homemade paper dolls at the food court entrance of mall through the end of this month.