ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with some thoughts about the portrayal of kinship care and the language used to describe it and explores some of the issues that arise in work with this client group. In work with kinship families, as with adoption and fostering and LGBT families, and, indeed, working across class, cultural, and ethnic difference, this consideration is the bedrock of sensitive, ethical practice. The language surrounding kinship care is evolving; the term kin suggests a relationship by descent or consanguinity. The statistics regarding numbers of children living in kinship care are unsatisfactory. As one of the processes that kinship care families usually have to negotiate is that of creating a family language that can incorporate the naming and complexity of kinship relationships. In kinship families, the relationships might not fit in a straightforward way with the somewhat normative representations used in the construction of genograms.
