Millions of children in the U.S. are not being raised by their parents, but by grandparents,

aunts, uncles, siblings, and other relatives.

These kinship families are often formed in a moment of crisis.

Parent dies, goes to jail, loses housing, struggles with addiction or becomes otherwise

unable to care for a child. USA Today investigative reporter, Jamie Fraser, has spent the past year

reporting on kinship families and how well they function. What she found was a system that praises

relatives for stepping up, but one that often left them without the resources for food, housing, and health care to be successful.

Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Tuesday, May 26, 2026.

Jamie joins me now to talk about her series, Caring for Ken. It's so good to speak with you, Jamie.

Thanks for having me, and I appreciate it.

Jamie, how common are kinship families in the U.S.?

On any given day, there are about 3 million kids in the U.S. who are living with relatives instead of their parents. And that includes about 130,000 kids who are in government foster care. Putting that in numbers that are a little more tangible for us, that's about 1 in 20 kids, so one in a classroom maybe. In some black and

indigenous communities, it's as many as one in four kids who will be raised by a relative

for at least part of their childhood. Your reporting follows individual families and communities

across the country, but it also tells a much bigger national story. What made

you want to spend a year looking into kinship care? A mix of things. I've covered a lot of stories

over the years that are at the intersection of health care and courts and family social policies. And a lot of times the hero, right, was a

grandma or an aunt who like swooped in to save the family and keep it together. That was like

really stark in foster care because you would often see relative stepping up to keep the kids and the family,

but then they didn't get the same supports or training that stranger foster parents did.

And that is because of shifting child welfare policies and shifting federal policies and state policies around our broader safety net in general. And so I wanted to understand

more about this. Like, why is it happening? And what are the best ways with policy, with our culture,

...