The Motives of Foster Parents, Their Family and Work Circumstances

British Journal of Social Work (2001) 31, 235–248

The Motives of Foster Parents, Their Family and Work Circumstances Gunvor Andersson Gunvor Andersson is a Ph.D. in psychology and professor in social work at the School of Social Work, Lund University, Sweden. Most of her research concerns child welfare and children in out-of-home placements. She also teaches social work at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. Correspondence to Dr Gunvor Andersson, School of Social Work, Lund University, Box 23, 221 00 LUND, Sweden. E-mail: Gunvor.Andersson,@soch.lu.se

Summary In foster care research the focus is generally placed on the children, not on the parents who perform the foster care. In this article the focus is on foster parents of 10–11 year-old children. They were interviewed about their motives for becoming foster parents, which were linked to their family and work circumstances. Among the 21 foster families in the study, four different but equally frequent reasons or motives for taking care of foster children from the very beginning could be distinguished: relatives who feel responsibility for a certain child; couples who want children and do not think they can have children of their own; families where the mother wants to be at home taking care of biological as well as foster children instead of having unskilled employed work outside the home; and parents with grown-up children who want to fill the ‘empty nest’ by becoming foster parents—combined with a family business at home or close to home. Changing family and work patterns in Sweden do not seem to have influenced foster families as much as families in general. The worth of acquiring more knowledge about the families involved in foster care of children and young people in order to improve foster care and reduce breakdowns of care is discussed.

In foster care research—at least in Sweden—the focus is generally placed on the children, not on the parents who perform the foster care. There are many expectations tied to their ability to give abused and neglected children, or children from imperfect homes, a safe and loving second home for shorter or longer periods of time. They are supposed to work to solve the child’s possible emotional and behavioural problems, co-operate with the natural family and facilitate contact between the children and their parents, and create a normal everyday life for the child. Several research reports show that foster parents do not always succeed. Foster children still

 2001 British Association of Social Workers

236 Gunvor Andersson

have problems, contacts with the natural parents are not carried out as planned, and breakdowns of foster care placements occur. The local social services agencies are criticized for not giving foster parents the support and education they need and sometimes for making errors in the recruitment of foster parents (Riksdagsskrivelse 1992/93: 16). To be able to give foster parents support and education, it would seem to be a good idea to know more about foster parents and their circumstances and motives. However, there are few such studies in Sweden. The research project ‘Is there a difference in being a foster child?’1 was no exception in the sense that it focused on children, i.e. the 10–11 year-old foster children from five local social services agencies (Andersson, 1998a, 1998b). However, the foster parents were interviewed too, and among many other things provided information about their own professional backgrounds and how they came to start taking care of foster children, as well as about their family and work situations. This article is about these themes. Studies about foster parents usually point out two sorts of motives for taking care of foster children, that is unconscious and conscious motives or inner and outer motives, psychological as well as socio-economical. Dando and Minty (1987) show that there are frequently not only more conscious and ‘public’ reasons for wishing to take a child into one’s home, but also other, underlying and less understood motives. Vinterhed (1985), a Swedish researcher, points out that today’s foster parents usually belong to the lower middle class or the ‘ambitious’ working class, and that taking care of a foster child can be an economic solution for a mother of small children who wants to be at home, that it is the same motive as for being a childminder. However, the author says, there are also psychological motives concerning a strengthening of the parent role, with foster children confirming their ability as parents. Foster parents are often characterized by social workers and researchers as ‘emotional surplus persons’ who have much to give an unhappy and neglected child. Additionally, in her analysis of the attitudes of 85 foster parents towards their foster children, Vinterhed (1985) also looked for what foster children give to the foster parents. In this article I focus on the perspective of the foster parents, their conscious reasons for fostering, and not on the other ‘layer’—the underlying and less understood motives (cf. Dando and Minty, 1987). All of the foster parents interviewed were assessed by the child welfare authorities to be competent foster parents and deemed fit to take care of a particular child in my research group. Except for their love for children or for a particular child, their motives for fostering are linked to their family and work situations. Before presenting the study and its results, I include an overview of child welfare and foster care in Sweden and of a few studies on foster parents. By foster parents is meant ‘traditional’or unacquainted foster parents as well as foster parents who are relatives or who are otherwise acquainted with the child. For the purpose of the study, emergency homes and ‘contracted’ foster homes for short-term foster care, where parents paid for being on duty even if there is not child in residence, are excluded. 1

The research project is supported by the Swedish Council for Social Research (SFR).

The Motives of Foster Parents 237

Child Welfare and Foster Care in Sweden In Sweden there is no special Children Act because children are included in the Social Services Act. This is the primary law, a goal-oriented enabling act that is based on voluntary efforts and stipulates general guidelines for the municipalities concerning their social services obligations. According to section 12 of the Social Services Act, the social committee in each of the 289 municipalities should endeavour to ensure that children and young people grow up in secure and beneficial conditions. The social committee is supposed to be especially observant of the development of children and young people who have shown signs of developing in an unfavourable direction, and, in close co-operation with the families, is supposed to provide these children and young people with the protection and support they need (Andersson, 1992, 1993). If out-of-home care is necessary, foster care is preferable to residential care. According to the latest amendments to the Act (1997), a child should, if possible, be placed with a relative or some other closely connected adult. Another amendment to the law is the requirement that consideration of the child’s best interest should be particularly emphasized (in accordance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1990). The child’s own opinion should be clarified as much as possible and allowance should be made for the child’s wishes, with regard to his or her age and maturity. The Social Services Act is supplemented by the Care of Young Persons Act, which regulates the circumstances under which the authorities may take children into compulsory care, if intervention is judged to be necessary and the parents (or young people over 15 years of age) do not consent. A decision to take a child into compulsory care according to this Act is issued by the county administration court following an application by the municipal social welfare committee. (For an overview of child welfare in Sweden, see Hessle and Vinnerljung, 1999.) According to the statistics for children and young people subjected to measures under the Social Services Act and the Care of Young Persons Act, about 16,000 children and young people 0–20 years old (6.8 in 1000) were in care with placement outside their own home at some time during 1998. About 12,000 of them received care according to the voluntary Social Services Act and about 4,500 received care according to the compulsory Care of Young Persons Act. Foster homes were the most common form of placement. Three-quarters of all children subject to ongoing care with placement on 1 November 1998 were placed in foster homes, and barely a quarter of them were in institutions. About half of them were boys and nearly half of them were girls, independent of the type of care. The proportion of children in out-of-home care has not changed very much during the last decade (National Board of Health and Welfare, 1999). As Gilbert (1997) points out, Sweden has a family services orientation rather than a child protection orientation, although mandatory reporting of suspected child abuse exists. The impression of Weightman and Weightman (1995) is that Swedish culture provides far higher levels of legitimation for state intervention than those that exist in England, even if controversy concerning compulsory intervention in families is present (Gould, 1988). With few exceptions parents maintain custody of their chil-


dren, even if they are in long-term foster care according to the compulsory Care of Young Persons Act. As Barth (1992) has noted, child welfare services in Sweden are not time-limited, and the birth parents’ right to be involved with their children in foster care are nearly unlimited. There is nothing like the permanency planning in the United States or in England and Wales, and adoption against the will of the parents is not possible. According to Swedish law, the need for care is checked twice a year, even in long-term foster care, and no mention is made of permanent out-of-home care. An enlarged possibility of transferring custody of a child in longterm foster care from parents to foster parents was discussed in a report by the National Board of Health and Welfare (SoS-report 1995: 8) as a ‘Swedish model’ of permanence in foster care. The wording of the recently revised law (Government Bill 1996/97: 124) confirms, however, that the government has declined to take such a step. Foster parents are recruited by child welfare workers at the local social services agency. People can contact the agency, answer an advertisement from the agency, or be contacted by a social worker who knows of the family through recommendations. As Madge (1994, p. 63) writes, the long tradition of fostering in Sweden can aid recruitment and be done by word of mouth, through either social workers or existing foster parents. There is no systematic or research-based knowledge in Sweden about the recruitment of foster parents or how many prospective foster parents are subject to a ‘traditional’ investigation for deciding their fitness as foster parents, or about how many are interviewed according to the more comprehensive and psychological in-depth model, called Ka¨lvesten interviews (after the Swede who worked out the model in the 1970s). Since 1994 some municipalities have begun experiments with PRIDE (Parent Resources for Information, Development and Education), a method for the recruitment and education of foster parents that has its origin in the Netherlands (there it is called STAB) and introduced in Sweden via the United States (see Sundell and Thunell, 1997). In the 1980s a controversial issue in Sweden was whether the emphasis in foster care should be on permanence and on regarding foster parents as psychological parents (Goldstein et al., 1973), or if it should be on maintaining parental contact and ultimate reunion (Fanshel and Shinn, 1978). The research group in the ‘Children in Crisis’ project (based on Fanshel’s model) has contributed to the legal and professional anchoring of a ‘relation orientation’ in foster care in Sweden, implementing object-relations theory by stressing the relationship with the family of origin and working for reunion (Bo¨rjeson and Håkanson, 1990; Cederstro¨m, 1990; Hessle, 1988; Lindeń, 1998; Vinterhed, 1985). Even if the intention of reunion is not fulfilled and children often stay in long-term foster care, there is research-based as well as practice-based consensus about the importance for the child of keeping in contact with his or her natural family (Millham et al., 1986; Triseliotis et al., 1995).

Studies of Foster Parents In their study, Dando and Minty (1987) found that most of the 80 foster parents interviewed were from the working class, that very few foster mothers had a job


outside the home, that the majority of fathers had full-time employment and that there was a high degree of marital stability. In a large-scale study of 2,694 foster families in Great Britain, Bebbington and Miles (1990) found that traditional working class was not over-represented, as in some earlier studies, and that the socio-economic status of the foster families was similar to the national average, although child-related occupations were more frequent. Three-quarters of the twoparent foster families had one parent in full-time employment and the other in parttime employment or not working at all. This should be compared with the fact that both parents have full-time employment in half of the two-parent families in the general population in the UK, the authors point out. The foster families had more children than average, compared with families with women of similar age and marital status in the population. The type of families which foster has changed remarkably little in the last 30 years and it is striking to see how conventional the majority of foster families continues to be, the authors conclude. Survey studies from the Nordic countries (Havik, 1996; Nygaard Christoffersen, 1988; Wåhlander, 1990) showed the same tendencies: foster families, more often than families in general, live in the countryside, and if they are living in a city they are more likely to be relatives of the foster child. Two parents are more common in foster families than in families with children in general, and single foster parents are slightly more common for related foster children. Most of the foster parents are employed outside the home. The foster mothers, however, more often work part-time than mothers in general. In the Swedish study (Wåhlander, 1990) 88 per cent of the foster mothers had full time or part-time work, in the Norwegian study (Havik, 1996) the figure was 66 per cent, and in the Danish study (Nygaard Christoffersen, 1988) the proportion was in between. Among foster parents, two types of work are over-represented: employment in service or nursing occupations and selfemployment in small-scale firms or farming. Most foster parents have children of their own, either living at home or having left home. In the Swedish study, for example, 56 per cent of the foster parents had children of their own living at home. In the Norwegian study almost half of the foster parents had children of their own living at home, and only a quarter had no children of their own. Most of the foster parents have a ‘normal’ age difference from the foster child, compared to other parents, with younger as well as older foster parents more common among relatives. About a fifth of the foster families are relatives: 22 per cent in the Swedish study, 18 per cent in the Danish study, and 17 per cent in the Norwegian study. Most foster families have only one foster child: 77 per cent in the Norwegian study, 73 per cent in the Swedish study, and 57 per cent in the Danish study. Looking at these characteristics of foster families provides a picture both of the families choosing to take care of foster children and of the preferences of the social workers recruiting foster families. How these characteristics are related to the outcome of foster care is neither the aim of the Nordic studies mentioned nor the focus of my study. However, in their study of 61 new families of adoptive or foster children in their middle childhood, Quinton et al. (1998) did not find that the social class of the ‘new’ families or the age and education of the mothers was related to outcome of care. Maybe, the attitude of the foster parents (their degree of empathy)


has a greater impact for the outcome of the placement (Lindeń, 1998), although outcome variables are not called into question in this article.

Methods The research group consisted of all the children from five local social welfare agencies who, at the time of the interviews (the second part of 1995 and the first part of 1996), were 10–11 years old and were living in foster homes. Children in emergency fostering and children with severe learning disabilities were not included. Of the 31 children in the research group, three were not allowed by their parents to take part in the project, three foster parents declined on behalf of their foster children, and three children declined on their own behalf. In all, 22 children (twelve boys and ten girls) living in 21 foster families were interviewed. They came from four (rural and urban) municipalities but lived in foster homes in 14 different municipalities (as a rule at most an hour’s drive from the birth family). These four municipalities ranged from 30,000 to just above 100,000 inhabitants and had different population structures. The fact that no big cities were included helps to explain why the children as well as their parents—with few exceptions—were born in Sweden, and why language and religion were not burning questions. The age of the children in the study also influenced the fact that first and second generation immigrants were not overrepresented. Only in the age group 13–17 is a marked overrepresentation in out-ofhome care found (SoS-report 1998: 5). The children were interviewed three times at intervals of a few weeks (Andersson, 1998a), and the main focus of the study was to understand the perspective of the children concerning their relationships to members of the foster family and the natural family (Andersson, 1998b) and concerning everyday life at home, in school and during their leisure time. I saw the children twice before interviewing the foster parents during my third visit to the foster home. According to information supplied by foster parents and children, the predominant reason for placing the children in foster care was the parents’ severe addiction to alcohol or drugs. About a quarter of the children were placed in foster care because of the parents’ mental illness and/or learning disability (Andersson, 1992, 1999b). The interview with the foster parents (both foster parents in eight families and only the foster mother in 13 families) covered a number of topics, including how it came about that they became foster parents and their family situations and work experiences.

Why Did They Become Foster Parents? In her survey study of foster families taking care of foster children from Stockholm, Wåhlander (1990) distinguished two groups: those who were foster parents according to deliberate choice and those who, without actively seeking it, became foster parents for a certain child, previously known to them. In my small scale interview study, all of the foster families, except for a few relatives, had actively sought to be


foster parents. However, when going back to how they first started to take care of a foster child, four different motives or reasons could be distinguished. 1

Five children came to foster families whom they already knew because of kinship. The three grandmothers and the two maternal aunts felt a responsibility for this particular child, although the involvement as a foster family was not selfevident from the beginning. Perhaps one of the grandmothers would have said ‘no’ if she had anticipated the long-term fostering responsibility of the girl, and she was glad not to have been asked to take care of her brother, too, who was placed in another foster home. One boy had a previous placement in another foster home, at which the grandparents had bad experiences, and when a second placement was later considered, they actively sought to take care of their grandson. However, the grandmother did not know what she would have answered if she had been asked to take care of his little brother, too, who was placed in another foster home. One girl was placed twice in a foster home, but when her aunt saw many shortcomings in that foster home, she and her family actively sought to take care of the girl instead. In these five cases the foster parents had no previous experiences of taking care of foster children but had children of their own. Later on, one of the aunts became a ‘traditional’ foster parent, too, taking care of an unrelated foster child. These five 10–11 year-old children came to their current foster families at different ages, three of them before they were three years old and two of them when they were seven or eight.

2

Five children were placed in families who wanted to take care of a child. They had no children of their own at the time or wanted a sister or brother for their only child. Two couples later had children of their own, too, but were childless when deciding to take care of a foster child. A few couples had gone through investigations for childlessness and had tried artificial insemination. These five foster families started with a motive similar to adoption, although they agreed that long-term foster care could not be anticipated and that contacts with the natural parents should be encouraged. Three of the couples had no previous experience with foster children. All five children came to these foster families before they were three years old.

3

Six of the children in the study came to foster parents who had had foster children for some years. They had ‘always’ been taking care of children, their own as well as other children. Some of them mentioned their experiences from a large family during the years when they were growing up. Some of the foster mothers had been child-minders or had worked at an institution for children or young people and used to take children with them home. When they started to be foster parents it suited their family and work situations. They had small children of their own or children entering school and could afford to be at home more when they took care of one or two foster children, too. The alternatives in the labour market were not very attractive for the foster mothers in this group, so they finished their employed work or reduced it to part-time work when they became foster parents. They liked being with children, and being with their own as well as foster children was more meaningful and interesting work for them


than their employed work. All of them had been taking care of foster children before the 10–11 year-old child in the study came to them and all of them had one (or two) more foster children at the same time. The ages of the foster children varied; two of the children in the study were placed in the family before the age of three, and three between five and seven years of age. At the time of the interview, the foster parents’ own children were older, but they kept on taking care of foster children as a way of life. 4

Six of the children in the study came to foster parents who also mentioned large families during the years when they were growing up and who liked the experience of ‘always’ having children and young people around them. However, they did not become foster parents until their own children were grown-up. They had a lot of space in the house, and the atmosphere at home was perceived as empty and quiet when their children had left home. They had been thinking of foster children for a while and announced their interest to the social services when their family and work situation provided a suitable opportunity. In two cases, the foster parents had bought a bigger farm and did not have to combine farming and employed work outside the home any longer, with the husband taking care of the farming and the wife taking care of foster children. One family did not have the time needed until the family business went bankrupt. One foster mother had friends who had foster children, and for a long time they had tried to persuade her that she was very suitable to take care of foster children. She made up her mind when her own children left home and there was space enough for foster children as well as for taking care of the book-keeping of the family business at home. One foster family had some work at home, for example dogbreeding, suitable for combining with taking care of foster children, especially since the husband had an early retirement pension. When the children in the study came to these families, they had already had foster children for some years and had three (or four) foster children at the same time. Only one of the six 10– 11 year-old children in this category was under five when placed in the family, and three of them were above seven.

The Family Situation Most of the foster parents had two or more children of their own (two of the families had adopted children from abroad). Only by way of exception were they younger than the foster child in the study, and in more than half of the foster families they had grown-up—although most of them were close to the family and were important family members for the foster child (Andersson, 1998b). Compared to the Swedish study by Wåhlander (1990) and the Norwegian study by Havik (1996), there were proportionally fewer childless parents and parents with dependent children and more parents with adult children. In this respect there was no difference with related families, except for one aunt with children younger as well as older than the foster child. In relatives’ care it was more common to have only one foster child—four out of six families with one


foster child were relatives. In the other foster families, it was as common to have two foster children (eight families) as three or, by way of exception, four (seven families). It should be noted that six of the children in the study had a sister or a brother—by way of exception, two—in the same foster home. (Ten of them had siblings in another foster home.) In eight of the foster homes the child in the study was the first foster child (of which five were relatives). All of the other foster parents had earlier experiences with fostering. How many foster children they had before was related to how many years they had been taking care of foster children—half of them had taken care of foster children for a few years or 10 years at most, and half of them had been foster parents for more than 10 years, and in some cases up to 20 years. There was a foster mother and a foster father in all families, except two, in which the foster mother had kept the foster child after divorce. In two families the foster mother had divorced during the time when the foster child lived in the family, but at the time of the interview there was a new man in the family. In the other seventeen families the foster child in question had lived with the same foster parents all of the time spent in the foster home, although four of the couples had earlier marriages behind them. Even if this is a small study, it can be noticed that a good quarter of the foster families were reconstituted families. There are no studies about the frequency of foster family breakdowns due to divorce or the frequency of reconstituted families, where a foster mother and a foster father with children from earlier marriage, choose to take care of one or more foster children together. However, it does not seem self-evident any longer that foster parents are more ‘stable’ couples and divorce more rarely than couples with children in general. Looking at statistics about 10–12 year-old children in Sweden (31 December 1997), 71 per cent are living with both natural parents, 22 per cent with single parents and 6 per cent with reconstituted families (Barnombudsmannen, 1998).

The Work Situation In half of the foster homes (eleven), the foster mother was at home full-time— although in only two of these families were the biological children young enough to live at home. In half of the foster families (ten), the foster mother was employed outside the home—all of them part-time except for one foster mother, who was employed full-time as a social worker. Four of the latter families had children of their own living at home. If the foster mother was not employed outside the home, she was more likely to have more than one foster child, and the six foster children in the study living with siblings were in these homes. If the foster mother was employed outside the home, she was more likely to have only one foster child, and the six homes with just one foster child were in this group. The professional background for the foster mothers did not differ very much whether they were at home full-time or had part-time employment. There were, however, no cleaners or factory workers among the employed mothers. For those at home, previous work in the family business was more common, but they had been responsible for the clerical work, as were also two of the mothers still employed, although in bigger firms.


There was a child minder and two or three in nursing and health care professions in each group. Farming and dog-breeding careers are found in both groups of foster mothers. In each group, one foster mother was an educated social worker. There was a father in 19 of the 21 foster homes. In two cases the father had fairly recently moved into the family, and I had not asked the foster mother about him. Three foster fathers were at home full-time and took an active part in fostering, one of them having taken early retirement and one registered as long-term sick. The other 14 foster fathers had full-time work. One was a teacher, one worked in the advertising business, five worked in shifts in the manufacturing industry or in a printing shop (two of them as foremen), five had a family business (farming, food sales, car firm), one was a security officer and one was a rod-worker. Even if I did not explicitly ask about education, probably only two female social workers and one male teacher had a university or college education (because they had work which required such qualifications). These three foster parents were to be found in the category of foster families who became foster parents because of childlessness. In Sweden 85.7 per cent of women with children under 17 years of age are, part-time or full-time, in the labour force (Statistical Yearbook of Sweden 1995). In this respect foster mothers differ from mothers in general, but in this study even fewer foster mothers than in other studies were employed. Perhaps the lower proportion of employed foster mothers is due to the fact that the children came from areas outside metropolitan areas, compared to Wåhlander’s (1990) study of children from the city of Stockholm and to Vinterhed’s (1985) study of children from the city of Malmo¨. Perhaps it has been more common in Sweden lately to see foster care as an alternative to employed work—especially for women with short-term education, few attractive alternatives on the labour market and with experiences of, as well as an interest in, taking care of children. As in other studies it can be shown here that foster care usually is a female project (Ho¨jer, 1997). It is also shown that foster children are usually moved from a town to a more rural area. Only three of the children in the study lived in a town (two of whom lived with relatives). In the countryside it is more common for families to have bigger houses and also to earn their living close to home or in a way that is more suitable for combining with the care of foster children. I did not ask explicitly how much the foster parents earned for taking care of foster children, but even if the foster parents had economic motives or would not take care of the child without payment, they were disturbed by the view that they do it for money. The home municipalities of the children pay a compensation for expenses and a remuneration for the work. The sums vary, but the state recommendation for the work part is (from 1 January 1999) for a 0–12 year-old foster child about 3,000 SEK per month, which is about a quarter of low-paid work such as in home-help services.

Conclusion and Discussion Among the 21 foster families in the study, four different but roughly equally frequent reasons or motives for taking care of foster children could be distinguished: relatives


who felt responsibility for a certain child; couples who wanted children and did not think they could have children of their own; families where the mother wanted to be at home taking care of biological as well as foster children instead of having unskilled employed work outside the home; and parents with grown-up children who wanted to fill the ‘empty nest’ by becoming foster parents—perhaps combined with a family business at home or close to home. It is confirmed in this study that a changing society and changing family patterns do not seem to have influenced foster families as much as families in general (Bebbington and Miles, 1990). They still live in the countryside to a large extent. They are Swedish heterosexual couples, most likely belonging to the Swedish state church (separating from the state in 2000), without being very active members. There is an over-representation of women who are at home with the children fulltime or are only employed part-time. The division between the tasks of men and women are in many cases obviously traditional. The level of formal education is comparatively low, but practical experience with children and large families is extensive. Most of the foster families had children of their own, and it seems to be more usual in this small-scale study than in other studies for foster parents to have grown-up children. It is questionable whether or not foster parents are more stable couples and less likely to divorce than couples with children of that age in general. In this study eight of the couples had gone through a divorce, although it was many years ago for some of them, and had children from an earlier relationship. There are no studies about the frequency of reconstituted families, in which a foster mother and a foster father, with children from earlier marriages, take care of foster children together. Perhaps it is, as some of them said, not so big a step to take care of a foster child, when you are used to having an open home for ‘my’ children and ‘your’ children and, in addition, have experienced—and overcome—problems yourself. The knowledge of the importance for the foster child of keeping in contact with his or her natural family was implemented by the foster parents in this study to a greater extent than in earlier studies (Andersson, 1999a). This was true also for those foster parents who expected the foster child to grow up in their family (Andersson, 1999b). Perhaps this is due to the age of the children, in that it could be argued that 10–11 year-olds may have a less complicated relationship to their natural parents than small children and adolescents. Perhaps it is due to the ‘professionalization’ of foster care, where foster parents are better informed and more experienced than before and, as a consequence, see contacts with the child’s natural family as part of their work. Although this article is not concerned about the problems of the children, foster parents recalled extensive problems from time to time, especially with some of the boys, about difficulties in handling them and about not getting enough help and support from social workers. In the foster homes in the study, I met warmth and generosity and an active interest in the foster children, as well as in (most of) their natural parents. Foster parents had solved many problems in an impressive way. Certainly, there are curative forces in the ‘traditional’ family, but how should foster parents, not used to seeking professional help or supervision and without formal education of their own to lean on, manage all of the problems they are faced with? There is much evidence


that social workers fail to give support and encouragement in their everyday fostering work, often reducing the number of visits in the foster home to the statutory visits twice a year (Andersson, 1995, 1998c). It will be necessary to acquire more systematic and accumulated knowledge about the parents and families who are involved in foster care of children and young people in order to be able to adjust help, support and supervision to their needs. If not, it is difficult to know what to do in the ongoing efforts to improve foster care and reduce breakdowns of care. There is good cause for further, more focused studies of foster care and it’s elements of old patterns and new prerequisites. Accepted: March 2000

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