Adfam at 40 – Craig Knowles: supporting kinship carers in Nottinghamshire
2024 marks a special year for Adfam as we celebrate our 40th year. Throughout 2024, we have been reflecting on the past 40 years, the progress that has been made in supporting families affected by substance misuse, as well as looking to the future. Through a series of articles over the course of the year, Adfam has spoken to a range of key individuals active in supporting families through substance misuse.
For our latest edition of ‘Adfam at 40’, we speak with Craig Knowles, Kinship Family Recovery Worker from Hetty’s. Hetty’s is a grassroots charity that provides emotional help and support for families affected by a loved one’s alcohol or drug use living in Nottinghamshire.
Supporting kinship carers
Craig has been working with Hetty’s for 21 years. He got involved initially due to having his own lived experience of parental alcohol use, and began volunteering for the Hetty’s support line, before becoming involved in specific support for kinship carers. At the time, there was no support at all for kinship carers in Nottinghamshire, and Craig built a specialist service from scratch to support family members caring for children affected by parental substance issues.
“I think I had something to give in terms of life experience and also just, my heart’s really big and I like to give”.
What makes the issues faced by kinship carers so different, according to Craig, is the many layers of grief they can face. The experiences of kinship carers are shaped by these many layers of grief and shame which come from being affected by someone else’s drug and alcohol use, all whilst becoming the main carer for a child affected by parental substance use. This means that kinship carers must prioritise that child and are often forced to step back from their own son or daughter.
Due to this incredibly difficult experience, much of the support for kinship carers centres on balancing the carer’s own needs with the needs of the child in their care. This also includes supporting their own children to take parental responsibility, and to support them without enabling or colluding with them.
Kinship care can often bring up issues of loss and identity and with kinship carers taking on the role of parents, this can become confusing for the children involved. The dysregulation that comes with a child being separated from birth parents can lead to attachment issues and developmental trauma. For kinship carers, this means that they must learn to be a parent again through a therapeutic lens. This parenting style and education may be very different to the parenting style they used with their own children, which can be particularly difficult to support.
Recent progress in kinship care
After many years working in the sector, Craig has seen a number of changes. Significantly, in recent years there has been a growth in knowledge and understanding around kinship carers, and an appetite to support them, pushed through by various groups such as the Kinship Care Alliance and All-Party Parliamentary Group on Kinship Care, and by Adfam from a substance-specific perspective. Awareness has also been raised through sharing stories of kinship care told by celebrities and on TV, meaning that there is much more information about kinship care out there.
Craig is also proud of the progress he’s made within the sector in advocating for specific support for men. With very few men working in the family sector, it has been a challenge. However, he has been able to push for a number of brilliant initiatives, including male groups for mental health support alongside projects like bike repairs and a WhatsApp group for male kinship carers. Bring able to provide such specific support for men in the sector is important since there has been a lack of such support elsewhere.
Difficult realities
Despite this important progress, there is still a long way to go. Significant discrepancies remain in terms of support for kinship carers and different types of kinship carers have completely different experiences of support. Support is much more accessible to special guardianship carers, for example, compared to kinship carers in a private or informal arrangements, which is frequently the case where substance use is a factor, where carers often look after children completely on their own.
It is only due to the incredible work of local support organisations that kinship carers in private or informal arrangements can access the support they need. In Nottinghamshire, through Hetty’s kinship carers have access to a specialist kinship support service so that they can access the support they need and are set up to succeed.
However, due to this reliance on local organisations like Hetty’s, many local authorities lack strong links to kinship support services, which means many kinship carers must bring up the children in their care without any outside support. This can be incredibly difficult, particularly when combined with the considerable financial cost involved with raising children. Caring for more children can also mean that child benefit payments are reduced, as the child in their care is considered a second child. Craig stresses how vital it is that benefits follow the child to ensure they have the support they need.
The same lack of support for kinship carers can also be seen within the court system: kinship carers often find it hard to access legal aid and face further complexities for example when courts insist on mediation where it is not appropriate.
Looking to the future
When asked to look to the future and how he would like to see things in five years’ time, Craig jokes that, in five years’ time, he would like to be unemployed! Expanding on this further Craig explains how he wants to see a future in which kinship carers do not need to rely on charity. He hopes to see national policy which provides the support needed for kinship carers from statutory services, rather than relying on the exceptionally hard work done by charities. It is vital that families, who so often fall through the gaps in services, are properly and adequately supported.
“We work exceptionally hard all the time to be able to keep doing the vital work that we do for free, to pick up families that fall through gaps in statutory services”.
For more information about Hetty’s and the support they provide to families and kinship carers affected by a loved one’s drug or alcohol use visit: https://www.hettys.org.uk/