Children, who grow up in families, where their parents have decided to take care of a foster child on a commission of the social welfare services, are not often given the possibility to tell about their experience of having foster siblings, in research and other studies. The aim of this study was to give biological children, in these families, a chance to tell their narratives of growing up with foster siblings, creating opportunities for families, who might have plans to take care of foster children in the future. They can get a picture of how it could be for the family´s own children. The biological children got the opportunity to tell their narrative stories including the relationships in their families and how they were looking forward into their own future and family life. The used theory takes part in systemic thinking, looking at the family as an organization and how identities are created in relationships and in communication.

The purpose of this study is to explore the relations between foster parents and their foster children, what kind of motivation there is behind their involvement in foster children, how they experience the commission and what good parenting mean to them. The study is including eight foster parents. They have experience of both long and short placement of foster children. The results show that all these foster families have at least one child that they have a good relationship with. It is important to know that those children either have spent many years in foster families or arrived to foster families when they were very young or as infants.

The educational underachievement of children in Foster care has been known for a long time. This study aimed to compile and analyze the current knowledge about interventions, intended to improve foster children?s school achievements. The method used was a systematically undertaken narrative review. Despite a comprehensive searching strategy, only ten relevant studies were found, indicating that little has been done to improve the educational outcomes for children in public care.

Placing children in Foster care is today considered the best alternative for children unable to stay in their biological environment. A nuclear family consisting of a father, a mother and a child is the most common family structure within Foster care today. The purpose of this thesis is to gain insight on the family norms that control the Foster care system. It's a qualitative study based on interviews with six professional social workers within the field of Foster care. This method gave us empirical material, that was later analyzed from two main theories and one theoretical concept.

The purpose of this study is to highlight the situation for youths leaving Foster care and entering adult life. The study examines the services provided by the social service in the Stockholm area when a youth is leaving Foster care, and if a recent change in the legislation has had any impact on the operating procedures of the social service. The study includes interviews with youths who recently left Foster care, as well as information collected from social service offices through a survey, supplemented by interviews with practicing social workers. All the assembled data have been analyzed using Ecological Systems theory with focus on the child perspective and the term significant others. The study shows that the respondent youth have trouble identifying the formal ending with social services, as well as the support they received or were offered.

New family stuctures are constantly emerging in society. Are these changes mirrored in Foster care practice? The aim of this study was to explore to what extent homosexual families are represented when a child is given a foster home. The nuclear family has throughout history been assured a stable position both in society as well as in the Foster care practice. During the last ten years a homosexual relationship has been legaly accepted through different amendents and it has also been more integrated and accepted in society.

This essay is about what considerations foster home secretary may face in their profession and how they use themselves as a tool. We were interested in the family home secretaries as a profession and we found that this area is relatively unexplored. The essay is based on semi-structured interviews with ten family home secretaries from seven different municipalities. To interpret our results, we used Mead's theory of "Mind, Self and Society". Our paper shows that family secretaries are faced with a variety of considerations in the selection of foster homes.

The purpose of this study was to give a picture of how some adults, who earlier was placed in foster homecare, experience that their childhood have affected them during their life. I also wanted to see how the relationship to the biological family has been and developed during the placement. The study has also purposed to receive a deeper knowledge of how it could be to grow up in Foster care. To make the purpose of this study complete I chose to use qualitative interviews as a research method. Four adults who earlier were placed in foster homecare have participated in this study.

The educational underachievement of children in Foster care has been known for a long time. This study aimed to compile and analyze the current knowledge about interventions, intended to improve foster children?s school achievements. The method used was a systematically undertaken narrative review. Despite a comprehensive searching strategy, only ten relevant studies were found, indicating that little has been done to improve the educational outcomes for children in public care.

The purpose of this study was to examine how the social services are applying the sections of the law concerning custody transfer within Foster care. More specifically the aim was to find out what circumstances are underlying the social services decision to go through with a custody transfer within the Foster care, and to find out which difficulties and possibilities the law offers when it comes to this process. The study was based on interviews with six respondents, within the social services, who have great experiences working with these issues. The study concluded that there are several factors which affects the decision whether to implement at custody transfer or not, and some of these are the child?s attachment, the child?s fundamental needs and consent from the involving parties in the case.

A large number of children and teenagers are placed in Foster care for various reasons. Social services have a responsibility to follow up youths and ensure that they have the same opportunity for positive development as other young people. A qualitative study was conducted with an abductive perspective by gathering material from social workers in this particular field. The research design of this study is an interview study. The theoretical premise was Bronfenbrenners ecosystem theory and Maslows hierarchy of needs theory.

Children are said to be the future of our society. Hence, how we take care of our children is a cause of concern. This is evident in much of the social work that is carried out in Sweden. One of the times when we find children to be the most vulnerable is when they, for different reasons, are separated from their biological families and placed in Foster care. Based on the fact that Sweden over the last century has experienced an increased immigration intake we wanted to take a closer look on how this change of the population dynamics has influenced Foster care in the country.

This qualitative study is about motivation and experience of support among non-kinship fosterparents in a child welfare agency (NGO), in Paraguay. The empirical data where collectedthrough out six semi-structured qualitative interviews, with totally eight foster parentsparticipating. The aim of the study was to describe and analyze what motivates foster parentsand how they experience support from their formal and informal network. Further theobjective was to investigate how support (may) affect motivation and enable good Foster care.Theoretical concepts such as solidarity, intrinsic and extrinsic motivations as well as socialsupport where used to analyze the data.The results show that there are many different motives and motivations (intrinsic andextrinsic) that correlate in the decision to become and continue to be a foster parent. Amongthem social involvement, the wish to make a difference in a child?s life, have something tooffer as a family and personal satisfaction seems to be the most frequent reasons.

The focus of this thesis is on what is considered to be a suitable foster home. For the study to be carried out an application had to be made to get access to the foster home assessments in a medium-sized municipality in Sweden. With the support of attachment theory and theory of standards different categories have been picked out and analyzed in foster home assessements that have been approved. The conclusion to what is considered to be a suitable foster home is a complex issue, as there are many factors that are interacting. Social workers seem to focus on the importance of a family?s ability to provide some kind of stability and security for a child who is considered to be placed within their home.

The aim of this study is to describe and understand the reasons to why people choose to become foster parents. By using the theory of action we wanted to investigate their intentions rather than their motives. The questions we wanted to answer where: How do the foster parents describe their reasons for becoming a foster home? What reasons do they give fore keeping on being foster parents? How do they comprehend their task and the fulfilling of it? The study was performed by utilizing qualitative interviews with five foster parents, four women and one man. In the analysis we used the theory of action as a theoretical perspective.