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The Ineffable Significance of Kinship
Mark F. Testa Professor Emeritus University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The title of this essay draws inspiration from the scholarship of Edward Shils, who wrote about the ties that bind people together into a family, a community, and a whole society.1 When I first came across the phrase “ineffable significance” during my graduate school days in the 1970s, I immediately sensed its meaning. Still, I needed to look-up the definition. My hunch proved correct: “ineffable” adj. “too great to be expressed or described in words.” Always up for a new challenge, I ended up devoting much of my career to attempting just that—describing in words (and numbers) the ineffable significance of kinship for meeting people’s needs for connection, belongingness, and relational health.
As graduate students of my vintage were inclined to do, I began by taking the long evolutionary view. For 90 thousand of the 100 thousand years that behaviorally modern humans have inhabited this planet, feelings of intense in-group solidarity evolved within hunter-gatherer bands of close family and extended (fictive) kin of just a few dozen individuals. There was no wider society to which people pledged their civil allegiance—only three elementary ties that Shils identified as primordial affinity, personal trust, and sacred devotion united people together into shared identities of belongingness and solidarity.
A succession of societal changes, starting with the Agricultural Revolution, lifted-out social resources from their moorings in kinship and place. The process of societal transformation from band to tribe to chiefdom and later nation state accelerated with the Industrial Revolution and freed human resources for reinvestment as financial, social, and cultural capital in cooperative ventures across vast spans of space and time.2 Sociologists and social workers, who observed and responded to the changes, studied and experimented with whether the elementary forces of in-group solidarity could be unbundled and repurposed to serve the broader civic aims of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Sociologists view diversity, equity, and inclusion from a theoretical perspective that may seem tangential to the practical concerns of social workers, but the two viewpoints are compatible. Since its origins, the founders of sociology discerned in human history an evolutionary trend toward the adaptive upgrading of social and economic roles from the ascribed claims of kinship, place, and caste (diversity). The enhanced productivity that ensued opened up new vistas for achieving a fairer distribution of wealth among economic classes (equity). The incorporation of historically subordinated groups into fully enfranchised membership in the societal community appeared close at hand (inclusion). The proposition famously invoked by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. anticipated a hopeful path of progress: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Social workers were quick to join the march, and many sought to accelerate the pace. But after two World Wars and the steady erosion of the financial, social, and cultural capital of the families and communities left behind by the global spread of monopoly capital, the optimism that initially greeted the promise of modernity began to fade. The greater diversity, which resulted from the abolition of traditional hierarchies that limited the disposability of human resources by gender, race, religion, and sexual identity, delivered many more invitations to the dispossessed to join the “dance,” so to speak. But once admitted, many found much less of the dance floor available to them to maneuver and the music played not entirely to their tastes. Similarly, absolute levels of poverty plummeted worldwide, but income inequality reached unprecedented heights, which caused many to doubt whether economic justice was ever truly part of the grand scheme. Lastly, inclusion felt less like acceptance and more like assimilation on cultural terms dictated by the dominant groups in society.
Sociologists and social workers have struggled to understand the root causes of what many perceive as modern society’s detour off the main path of progress and on to side trails that curve back towards supremacy, oppression, and exclusion. There is not space in this essay to examine the different twists in the journey. Instead, I begin with my own personal story about the ineffable significance of kinship and fictive kin relations that can feel approximately as strong.
Primordial Kinship
In 2008, my wife and I visited the small Italian village from which my maternal grandfather emigrated to the United States in the 1910s. He was followed several years later by my grandmother and their two young daughters (my aunts). As a child, the village was known to me as the faraway place of Buonanotte, which means “Good Night” in Italian. We approached the small town of 198 inhabitants from the mountains above, parked our car, and walked the rest of the way to the small town square. Holding a copy of the family tree that my wife had assembled from letters and calls to relatives, we entered a small grocery store. I approached a woman at the counter. In my best broken Italian, I inquired whether she recognized any of the names on my list. She looked up, and replied unexpectedly with a Brooklyn accent, “I think we may be related.” She made a quick phone call; ten minutes later three women came strolling down the hill. Their faces beamed with anticipation. The eldest grabbed my cheeks and turned to her sisters, “He looks just like our father.” I too felt the connection and thought to myself, “So this is the ineffable significance that Shils had been talking about.”
The sisters invited us for lunch. According to the genealogical tree, they were my first cousins, once removed. I was able to fill in details missing from my copy of the family tree. The sisters were the daughters of my grandfather’s younger brother. Tradition dictated that the youngest son should stay behind to look after the parents while my grandfather and his older brother set off for America to find their fortune in the restaurant business. The brothers dutifully sent home money to the family. In spite of my unfamiliarity with this branch of the family tree, I nonetheless felt an unmistakable tug of primordial affinity when my cousin cradled my cheeks in her hands. They insisted we visit the rest of the family on the hill and then proceeded to shower us with gifts as we bid them arrivederci
Fictive Kinship
Behavioral scientists have quibbled over whether the feelings we associate with primordial kinship actually originate from some altruism-causing genes. Perhaps the feelings reflect simply the congenial sentiments that accompany the reciprocal exchange of goods and favors, which any recurring transactions will engender irrespective of relatedness. My experience in Buonanotte provided a crucial single-case test of the competing hypotheses. We had no interaction prior to my visit and no expectation that we would ever meet again. Yet, all three cousins exhibited a deep sense of connection that I also felt, which triggered their display of hospitality, generosity, and gratitude for our visit to the town of our ancestors.
Accepting the possibility that primordial affinity persists as a deeply embedded part of our genetic code in no way denies the reality of “fictive” kin relationships. They arise independently of primordial ties and can instill a similar sense of intense mutual attachment that blood relations often do. I have had several such experiences. One fictive kin relationship is my long-term association with Robert Johnson, who along with his two sisters, aunt, and mother became one of the first beneficiaries of the new subsidized guardianship program that I helped design for the state of Illinois in the late 1990s.
Subsidized Guardianship
In November 2008 following my visit to Italy, I entered a room in which a reception was being held in celebration of the President’s signing into law the Fostering Connections to Success Act. From across the room, I spotted a familiar-looking face. It turned out to be Robert’s mother, who was attending as a special guest of the sponsors along with Robert. As I approached her, I experienced a deep sense of connection similar to what I had felt in Italy. The difference was that whereas my Italian relatives and I bonded over our common decent, my bond with Robert and his mother derived from our shared commitment to a legal permanency option that enabled a family to remain a family without terminating parental rights.
The Fostering Connections Act established the Guardianship Assistance Program (GAP), which authorized payments to states to assist children who leave foster care to the permanent legal guardianship of relatives and fictive kin. It was modelled after the IV-E waiver demonstration that I had designed for Illinois and later replicated in Tennessee and Wisconsin.3 Together, we rejoiced over the creation of a federal entitlement that extended financial assistance to relative and fictive kin caregivers who assumed permanent legal guardianship of children who otherwise would have languished in long-term foster care.
Kinship Foster Care
I initially was drawn to the study of kinship foster care during a summer internship in 1975 at the Illinois Bureau of the Budget. A memorandum’s subject line caught my eye: Youakim. It referred to a class-action lawsuit that was making its way upward through layers of judicial appeal. It culminated in the 1979 Supreme Court ruling, Miller v. Youakim. Plaintiffs had challenged the legality of Illinois law, which barred blood relatives from becoming licensed foster parents. Licensing would have entitled relatives to receive the higher foster home boarding subsidy that strangers received after satisfying licensing requirements. Defendants argued that federal law had intended for relative caregivers to be assisted under the less generous Aid to Families with Dependent Children program available to birth parents. The Youakim decision ruled against the defendants. The Supreme Court found no intention on Congress’s part to deny federal foster care benefits to blood relatives for reasons of kinship alone. The ruling paved the way for the federal funding of a hybrid program— kinship foster care.
After finishing my internship, I went on to complete a two-year stint as a state budget examiner. I then returned to complete my graduate studies. My research interests now focused on child welfare and kinship care, partly for personal reasons. My father had lost his mother to the 1926 pandemic when he was 11 years old. His father was already struggling after being “black-balled” from local manufacturing jobs because of his role as a spokesperson for the New England Workers Association. Because of financial hardships, my grandfather placed his son informally with relatives. At age 15, my dad took matters into his own hands. He secured himself a permanent place with his uncle and aunt on his mother’s side. By today’s standards, my paternal grandfather would have been indicated for abandonment and neglect. Fortunately, my father found lasting permanence with members of his extended family. The major difference from nowadays is that there was no court involvement, no termination of parental rights, and no expectation that my great-aunt and uncle needed to adopt formally in order for this home to remain “truly permanent.”
Knowledge of my father’s travails and my own personal experience growing up only doors away from my paternal great-aunts gave me a different outlook on the modern extended family than what much of the sociological literature had been predicting. The prevailing narrative about the extended family being an antiquated institution in decline took a turn in the 1970s. New empirical evidence became available that challenged conventional wisdom. One of the pioneers in this reorientation was the sociologist, Eugene Litwak.
Questioning the No-More-Kin Thesis
Litwak noted that until the late 1940s, many sociologists had embraced the point of view that there was little need to study the extended family because it along with other primary groups were doomed.4 Taking slight liberties and substituting terms used in this essay, Litwak identified the following two theoretical foundations of conventional thinking at the time: First, bureaucratic formality and civil attachment were more effective than informal exchange and primordial attachment in achieving the valued outcomes of a modern society. Second, the continued adaptive upgrading of economic productive capacity assumed enabling conditions that were antithetical to primordial group solidarity, which inhibited differential geographical and occupational mobility.
Empirical evidence gathered over the past decades challenges the validity of the thesis that the extended family system is in decline. In spite of dire forecasts, extended families have retained much of their symbolic coherence. Moreover, the share of multigenerational homes in the U.S. has more than doubled, from 7% in 1971 to 18% in 2021.5 Building on this evidence base, my research efforts moved in two complementary directions. First, I explored the symbolic aspects of kinship care, which Shils characterized as attachments that family members share collectively as possessors of certain “significant relational” qualities.6 Second, I sought to identify the socio-structural correlates of the increasing prevalence of multigenerational households. These are households that contain two or more adult generations or a “skipped generation,” which consists of grandparents and their grandchildren younger than age 25.7 My research focused on this latter group of multigenerational households.
The Gift of Kinship Care
My scholarly endeavors to isolate empirically the relational qualities that make kinship care distinctive began with an investigation of its similarities and dissimilarities with other forms of altruism that Richard Titmus grouped under the heading of “gift relationships.”8 Even though he focused on voluntary blood donations, he recognized that foster care was another area of social policy in which gift transactions took place. However, he did not regard kinship foster care as belonging to this same category. Quoting from
Wilensky and Liebeaux, Titmus noted: “Modern social welfare has really to be thought of as help given to the stranger not to the person who by reason of personal bond commands it without asking.”9
I sympathize with Titmus’s inclination to separate kinship from stranger foster care. The distinction better aligned with the prevailing theory at the time that civil attachments were superior in unifying modern societies than the particularistic bonds of primary groups. By the time Kristen Slack and I published our paper, “The Gift of Kinship Foster Care,”10 the narrative that civil allegiances would entirely displace primordial attachments had lost much of its theoretical credibility. As I later wrote:
Qualities of Relational Permanence
It was in between the two publications cited above that I reacquainted myself with the work of Victor Pike and his colleagues on the Freeing Children for Permanent Placement Demonstration in Oregon.12 Its conceptual framework aligned neatly with the two-way flow of influence between older primordial and newer bureaucratic structures, which I thought needed reinforcement in order to conserve the bonding social capital essential to relational health and provide the bridging social capital facilitative of social and occupational mobility. The four relational qualities that Pike and his associates identified were: intent, continuity, belongingness, and respect.13
As explained in my 2005 law review article, “The Quality of Permanence,”14 the Oregon demonstration emphasized that a permanent home is not one that is certain to last forever, but one that is intended to last indefinitely. Continuity refers to the persistence of a relationship over time and with differential geographical mobility. The sense of belonging to a permanent family is rooted in cultural norms and has definitive legal status. Finally, membership in a permanent family conveys dignity and respect for both the child and the permanent family. One conspicuous deficiency of the Oregon model was its disregard for the dignity of birth parents in cases of involuntary termination of parental rights (TPR). The demonstration promoted TPR and adoption as the most appropriate options for securing definitive legal status for the successor parents when reunification efforts stopped. Even though the permanency framework that Congress subsequently codified in the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 recognized legal guardianship as a permanency goal, the unavailability of guardianship assistance payments similar to the assistance payments available to adoptive parents made the guardianship option, which did not require TPR, unaffordable for most kinship foster parents.15 Congress rectified the inequity in 2008 when it added GAP to the IV-E entitlement.16 It was at the reception celebrating the signing of the law that Robert, his mother, and I rejoiced over a new opportunity now available to thousands of families to receive the same type of assistance afforded Robert, his sisters, mother, and aunt to remain together as a family without requiring the legal severance of their existing family ties.
What the Future May Hold
Brain science informs us that the availability of a responsive caregiver to provide support and nurturance to a traumatized child, particularly a child traumatized by separation from primary caregivers, can diminish dramatically the alarm response or the dissociative response in the young child.17 Kinship care provides a reservoir of social capital that can be drawn upon immediately to meet a child’s need for belongingness, permanence, and love. Placement with strangers may eventually serve the same function, but it typically takes months, even years, for bridging social capital to congeal into the bonding social capital that is essential for relational health. Social capital is immediately accessible in most existing relationships in which the child is already familiar with the kinship caregiver, and is readily convertible into the permanency qualities of intent, belongingness, continuity, and respect without terminating parental rights.18
Technological innovation and economic insecurity have contributed to the permanence of extended family life in modern society. Innovative means of communications make it easier for families to stay in touch and maintain symbolic coherence in the absence of physical contact. Facetime and Zoom facilitate regular visual contact, and perhaps one day the Metaverse will make virtual living together possible. Precarious economic circumstances have made the isolated nuclear family an unsupportable ideal for many segments of the middle and working classes. Many nuclear families must turn to extended family members for help. Sometimes help arrives in the form of the exchange of financial gifts. Other times, the physical intercession of family members becomes necessary with and often without government assistance. Among the 18% of adults living in multigenerational households in 2020, one-third say family caregiving was the major reason for their residing with adult family members.19
No matter what the future may hold by way of technological innovations in communications or policy innovations in governmental programs, extended kinship is an important social capital asset that child welfare policymakers and practitioners must be intentional about conserving. Subsidized guardianship is an underutilized option that protects those assets.20 It preserves multiple kinship attachments, which can play a crucial healing role in children’s recovery from trauma and disruptions in relational permanence. Children should not be deprived of these assets except for urgent and compelling reasons.
Reverend Robert J. Johnson
WHAT THE FUTURE MAY HOLD
Reverend Robert J. Johnson
I first met Dr. Testa when I was 15 years old. It was several years after my aunt assumed legal guardianship of me and my sisters under the new guardianship program that Dr. Testa helped design. Before this, we were living in a foster home in a neighboring state. My mother, who struggled with mental health problems, worked tirelessly to bring us back to Illinois. When the guardianship program became available, my aunt agreed to step in and take over daily caregiving responsibilities without my mother’s losing her parental rights. I am thankful that our aunt did not need to adopt in order for us to leave foster care. Adoption would have meant losing our mom, which is something that we never wanted to happen. Guardianship gave my mother space to heal so she could remain a meaningful part of our lives. Looking back, Dr. Testa has been a mentor who has been looking after me for the last 18 years of my life. He called to congratulate me on my recent appearance on national TV highlighting the $25,000 in free gas giveaways that a local nonprofit and I organized on my last two birthdays. Giving back to the community pays forward the generosity shown to me, my sisters, mother, and aunt by a public program that enabled us to remain connected together as a family during difficult times.
References
1 Shils, E. (1975). Center and periphery: Essays in macrosociology. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.
2 Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press.
3 Testa, M. F. & White, K. R. (2014). Insuring the integrity and validity of social work interventions: The case of the subsidized guardianship waiver experiments. Journal of Evidence-Based Social Work 11(1-2), 157-172.
4 Litwak, E. & Szelenyi, I. (1969). Primary group structures and their functions: Kin, neighbors, and friends. American Sociological Review, 23(1), 465481.
5 Pew Research Center. (March 2022). Financial issues top the list of reasons U.S. adults live in multigenerational homes. Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project.
6 Shils, supra note 1, at 122.
7 Pew Research Center, supra note 5, at 3.
8 Titmus, R.M. (1971). The gift relationship: From human blood to social policy. New York: Vintage Books.
9 Wileensky, H. & Lebeaux, C. (1958). Industrial society and social welfare. New York: Russell Sage, p. 141.
10 Testa, M. & Shook, K.L. (2002). The gift of kinship foster care. Children and Youth Services Review, 24(1/2), 79-108.
11 Testa, M.F. & Poertner, J. (2010). Fostering accountability: Using evidence to guide and improve child welfare policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 47-48.
12 Emlen, A., Lehti, J., Downs, G., McKay, A., & Downs, S. (1978). Overcoming barriers to planning for children in foster care (DHEW No. (OHDS) 78-30138). U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Administration for Children, Youth, and Families, Children’s Bureau, National Center for Child Advocacy.
13 Id, at 10-11.
14 Testa, M. (2005). The quality of permanence—lasting or binding? Virginia Journal of Social Policy and Law, 12(3), 499534.
15 P. L. 96-272, § 475(1)(E).
16 P. L. 110-351, § 471(a)(28).
17 Perry, B., Pollard, R., Toi, B., Baker, W. & Viglante, D. (1995). Childhood trauma, the neurobiology of adaptation, and “use-dependent” development of the brain. Infant Mental Health, 16(4), 271291.
18 Whether a fifth quality of a legally binding commitment needs to be added is a topic I address elsewhere. See Testa, M. (2022) Disrupting the foster care to termination of parental rights pipeline: Making a case for kinship guardianship as the next best alternative for children who can’t be reunified with their parents. Family Integrity & Justice Quarterly, 1(1), 74-82.
19 The Pew Research Center, supra note 5, at 8.
20 For a fuller discussion of the benefits of and reasons for the underutilization of subsidized guardianship, see Testa, M. (2022). Disrupting the foster care to termination of parental rights pipeline: Making a case for kinship guardianship as the next best alternative for children who can’t be reunified with their parents. Family Integrity & Justice Quarterly, 1(1), 74-82.
