Getting kinship families reading: 'BookTrust is a lifeline for children like me'
Published on: 27 February 2025
BookTrust and Kinship are working together to support kinship families to share books and stories.
Here's why this matters to Bennet, who works for Kinship, and whose love of books brought stability and comfort when it was most needed.
Bennet is an online training facilitator for charity Kinship. BookTrust and Kinship have worked in partnership and with kinship families to co-create approaches to embedding sharing books and stories into daily life, because it brings vital, holistic benefits to families.
Today, Bennet applies their lived experiences of growing up in kinship care to facilitating Kinship's online workshops – which offer learning support, information, and a sense of community to those navigating family life as kinship carers.
As a child, Bennet and their brother went to live with their aunt – following their parents' divorce, estrangement from their father, and the decline of their mother's mental health.
"My aunt reset her entire life to look after us - she really is the most stable element in my life," says Bennet. "We moved around a lot because of money. My mum got back on her feet, and then also I moved with her to different places. I don't think I lived in the same house for more than two years until I was in my thirties."
"My childhood was pretty unstable, with lots of emotional and physical upheaval. Feeling destabilised, not knowing where to go when you feel upset, not knowing who's going to hold space for you – people misunderstand the long-term impact these things can have on a kinship child. And on kinship carers as well, who are also in distress."
Books as a constant comfort – no matter what changes
The BookTrust and Kinship partnership means a lot to Bennet – whose deep love of reading comes from the stability and constancy that that books have always brought them, whatever else was changing around them.
"It's not an exaggeration to say that reading saved me when I was little," they say. "What BookTrust is doing is so important – a lifeline for children like me.
"Books became a place I could go to when everything around me was crazy. When I knew the stories, that predictability, it was like comfort food. When everything was going absolutely bonkers around me, I could just sit and read a certain story and already know exactly what was going to happen."
Bennet recalls one particularly special book from early in their childhood. "One book I had when I was very little was a thick cardboard children's book about a hippo doing ballet. The ballerina hippo had little sock puppet legs you put your fingers in and as you turned the page, you moved her little legs to make her dance.
"I remember a deep sensory feeling of comfort holding that book. It was a form of emotional regulation. It felt like: 'Everything's chaotic, everything's crazy. I don't feel good, but I'm going to pick up this book, move my fingers and it's going to be OK.'"
Why book ownership matters for a child in kinship care
"It was always magical when I could have a book of my own – a friend I didn't have to give back, that I could visit as often as I liked, whenever I liked," says Bennet. "We didn't have a lot of money, so buying books wasn't really an option. I had a few books, which were my treasures. But when money is tight, and it's a choice between eating or buying books, you choose food.
"At school, I was quite academic, and you'd get rewarded with book vouchers. I still have all the books that I bought with those.
"Having a book that's yours to keep is an anchor.
"I lived in so many places as a child and, even when I had to leave everything else behind – friends, connections, familiarity – the books always came with me, every single time. And they never stop being what they are.
"Every time I go back and re-read them, I'm filled with a sense of roots that I don't have in any other aspect of my life. It's this thread running through my life that is unbroken, when so many other threads are non-existent. Those stories aren't going anywhere; those characters aren't going anywhere."
Bennet adds: "When things are unsteady or erratic, when your whole life can blow up like a dandelion into 1,000 different pieces, and you don't have a say in how any of it goes, having something that doesn't change is really important. Books provided that for me."
Topics: Features, Testimonials
