Supporting Children Impacted by Parental Addiction: A Toolkit for Kinship Caregivers

Kinship caregiving has become increasingly common in the United States, specifically due to parental substance use disorder. These kinship caregivers (KC) have unique needs that are largely unmet. Often, there is no comprehensive resource for KCs specific to their community. KC’s greatest needs are financial, legal, and mental health assistance, as well as educational information about care of children for the kinship caregivers. The objective of this project was to develop a KC resource toolkit to meet priority needs within the community. The project design utilized an EBP framework and followed a community-based participatory research approach. Project leads worked with a local non-profit organization (NPO) in a mid-sized midwestern city to inform the project from September 2021 to June 2022. Consultation with social work, addiction medicine, and law enforcement professionals as well as kinship caregivers with lived experience who were also partners within the NPO were completed throughout the process of creating the resource toolkit. Using evidence-based information, the toolkit was created with continuous input from professionals as well as persons with lived experience, over a period of six months. Project leads, working in collaboration with the NPO and professionals within the community, attempted to recruit kinship caregivers from within community settings. The Caregiver Toolkit Survey (CTS) was developed to measure usefulness of the KC toolkit as perceived by KC. The CTS was administered at baseline and distributed to KC for completion 2 – 4 weeks after baseline. A second survey was developed and administered to professional stakeholders to obtain professional perspectives on the usefulness of the toolkit. Data was collected between March 15, 2022, and May 15, 2022. The main findings indicate that professionals all agreed or strongly agreed that the toolkit will help caregivers understand the needs of children impacted by parental SUD. The results of the surveys will assist in modifying the toolkit for future use within the community. This project offers a starting point for others who wish to create an evidence-based toolkit for KC