I come from a family consisting of cousins that were raised by family members that were not their birth parents. Cousins that refer to women who did not give birth to them as ‘mom’ or ‘mama’, and consider siblings who were already members of a nuclear family my adopted cousins were brought into only as their sister or brother. In many Black households across the United States, it is not at all uncommon to see what is described as “kinship families” where children are raised by extended family members, often without going through the state procedure of adoption.
Black children being raised by kinship families or “grandfamilies” are often the beneficiaries of a communal form of child-rearing that is rooted in African village traditions. And though these family dynamics are often the result of a birth parent’s inability to adequately care for a child in the beginning stages of their lives, the kinship or grandfamily dynamic is one that allows children to stay connected to their lineage as opposed to possibly being a stranger inside a family dynamic that is totally foreign to who they are.
