When Skyler Taylor finally rejoined his grandmother and siblings after two years in foster care, he was a withdrawn, quiet boy.

Just a year with his family has transformed him into the kind of kid who greets his grandmother with “Good morning, Mammaw, it’s a happy day.” The autistic and previously nonverbal 8-year-old can now tell people what he wants to eat and focuses better in school.

“His vocabulary is 100% better. People can understand what he needs, his likes and dislikes,” said Faith Staubs, who lives in Washington County and took custody of Skyler while his mother recovers from substance use disorder. “He has just flourished.”

Staubs and her grandson benefited from a law Maryland passed last year that said, when safe, child welfare officials should place children separated from their parents with family or other loved ones rather than foster parents they don’t know. Those trusted adults, known as kinship caregivers, can include godparents, coaches and family friends — people a kid may call “auntie” or “tío” despite not being related to them at all.

“A lot of research has shown that when children can be placed in kinship care, with blood relatives or with family by choice, that it minimizes their trauma and reduces a lot of risks,” said Becky Rice, director of out-of-home care with Maryland’s Department of Human Services.

Child welfare officials remove children from their parents’ homes when they’ve been abused or neglected. Staying with relatives can help kids adjust to their new normal, prevent them from bouncing around to different foster homes and increase the likelihood that they’ll one day be reunited with their parents, research shows.

At the end of October this year, 31% of kids in the foster care system were placed with loved ones, up from 25% a year earlier. Principal Deputy Secretary of the Department of Human Services Carnitra White said she wants to see that number at 50%.

Around 10 other states are meeting that goal already, said Ana Beltran, director of the Grandfamilies and Kinship Support Network at Generations United. Maryland lags behind the national average of 39%. Those numbers only include kids removed by child welfare officials and not the thousands more children unofficially living with non-parental family members.

Maryland has come under fire lately for not protecting kids in foster care. In October, the Department of Human Services violated its directive prohibiting foster children from staying overnight in unlicensed facilities, like hotels and office buildings, less than a week after it was issued. The prior month, a 16-year-old foster child died in a Baltimore hotel room. A scathing audit found Maryland didn’t keep kids out of homes where registered sex offenders live, and the department has failed to keep accurate records of children who died from suspected abuse and neglect.

Even under Maryland’s new foster care law, some have struggled to reconnect with family members. Still, advocates like Beltran commended Maryland’s progress.

Today, 86% of kinship caregivers are licensed, compared to 25% last December, Department of Human Services officials said. Licensed family members have their homes inspected annually and agree to frequent face-to-face check-ins, measures that allow them to receive about $900 a month to help cover the cost of raising a child.

Thanks to a 2023 federal law, Maryland was able to loosen requirements for adults taking in children they already love. Most notably, Maryland no longer requires those caregivers to complete the same 27 hours of training that non-related foster parents do before getting licensed.

“If you make the license contingent on training, then the payment to that child and family is going to be delayed,” Beltran said.

Maryland offers but doesn’t mandate training for kinship caregivers.

Baltimore City, where nearly 40% of Maryland’s foster kids live, was the first to use a kin-first approach. Starting in fall 2023, officials gave families stipends immediately after taking kids in while they worked on getting licensed. City officials also started offering in-house fingerprinting so families wouldn’t have to travel far to knock out that requirement.

Now about 38% of Baltimore foster children live with family or loved ones, up from about 32% in January 2023.

Nearly 93% of kinship caregivers in Baltimore are licensed, and a process that used to drag from 6 months to 3 years is down to under 90 days, said Tracie Cook-Thomas. She works at the KinCare Center on East Biddle Street helping families with things like signing kids up for school, getting the furniture they suddenly need or going to family court.

The center offers support groups, which Beltran said are essential for people who may be stepping into a parenting role far later or earlier in life than they expected. Staubs has been to baseball games and trampoline parks to meet other foster care parents, which she said has made the journey easier for her and Skyler.

“I’m not the only person that has ever went through this,” Staubs said.

Staubs also said the behavior and trauma classes offered to her as a kinship caregiver have helped her raise Skyler.

“You can’t just get your grandchild or niece, nephew, bring them into your home and think everything is going to work out great, because the children have been through trauma. They have been through being left,” she said.

Skyler gets to FaceTime his mom, Amber Mills, every night. Mills said her addiction and guilt deepened when Skyler went to live with strangers and she’s deeply grateful that her mother dropped everything “so that my son wouldn’t be lost in the foster care system.”

“It was very hard to live with myself some days, trying to think of what he was going through,” said Mills, who said she plans to get a year of sobriety under her belt before co-parenting with Staubs. “He has grown so much in the time she has gotten him. ... He’s just a bright, beautiful light.”