Becoming an adoptive parent is not always easy. There are positive and negative factors affecting the parent?s experience. The aim of this study is to examine being an adoptive parent to an internationally adopted child based on association, parenthood and ethnic belonging. Frame of interpretation consists of attachment and separations, parenthood and family and ethnic origin and belonging.

The primary purpose of this essay is to study and describe what single adoptive mothers believe to be significant motives when considering adoption. This essay also describes how single adoptive mothers experience parenthood in relation to their expectations. The theoretical perspectives applied to analyse the empirical data are existentialism, the identity making process, and social constructionism. The method of this study is qualitative based on seven interviews. The material has been analysed by condensed meaning units and themes with a phenomenological approach.

The aim of this study was to describe how the best interest of the child can be constructed in investigations concerning permission for international adopt, where adequate parenthood is investigated. Qualitative research interviews were used as method. Seven investigators from six different sections of the city of Stockholm were interviewed. The information was analysed on the basis of a sociological approach to law and social constructionism.The result showed that adequate parenthood is a condition in the interest of the child. Adequate parenthood is specified as the parent?s qualities and possibility to care for an adopted child.

This thesis has focused on the construction of homosexual parenthood in Swedish law and preparatory work. The purpose was to describe the norms about legal parenthood and examine if and how homosexual parenthood was included in the normative parenthood. The study was jurisprudential and based on methods such as sociology with a juridical focus and critical discourse analysis of the juridical texts. The theoretical framework was the critical discourse analysis as well as a queer perspective, both influenced by social constructionism and a poststructional theory. The conclusion of the study is that parenthood is described from what is presumably best for the child, which is two parents of different sexes and biological origin.

The purpose of my study was to examine adoptive parents' experiences of adopting children older than three years of age. I wanted to look into what kind of information, help and support every adoptive parent had received. I also wanted to examine if the adoptive parents worried about anything concerning the children's emotional needs and in what way the adoptive parents prepared themselves for this, before the adoption. I asked the adoptive parents about their knowledge regarding the children's experiences from the time before the adoption and how things had been going since the children came to Sweden. To achieve my purpose I interviewed six adoptive parents from five families, with a total of eleven internationally adopted older children.The research findings of my study showed that a risk exists for older adopted children to suffer emotionally because of earlier experiences.

To investigate adoptions are part of the social worker's duties. The aim of our study was to examine some adoptive parents, to internationally adopted children, experience of adopting, the time before the adoption, the adoption process, and the time after the adoption. The study is based on qualitative interviews with seven adoptive parents. Theoretical frameworks that have been used are a phenomenological perspective, the dramaturgical perspective of Goffman and the theory of rites of passage.The result of our study shows that the adoptive parents have tried ?everything? to be-come parents in a biological way before they came to the decision to adopt.

The aim of this study was to examine how adoptive parents related to parenting and how they related to their children?s biological origin. Issues that were used were how adoptive parents described their own parenting, how they described their own thoughts about their children eventually wanting to search their biological origin and how adoptive parents described the child´s country of birth attitudes towards adoptees wishes to search their biological origin. The method used was qualitative research interviews. The theory that was used for analyzing the collected data was attachment theory.

The Swedish legislation (Socialtjänstlagen, SoL 5 kap 1§ 6 st.) state that the social welfare committee is particularly responsible for those children whom are in need of support and help after an adoption or custody matter has been decided. "Adoption - but at what price?" SOU 2003:49 is a state report with the purpose to investigate different aspects around international adoptions, which brings up and discusses what supports there is for adoptive families in Sweden. With this background and a special attention towards adoptive children's health conditions when arriving to their new country we decided to study the subject adoption. By interviewing different professionals and volunteers that work with adoptive families in Sweden the aim with this study was to acknowledge how they look upon the support the Swedish community offers for adoptive parents and also how they consider the knowledge about adoption among those who in their line of work can meet adoptive children is.

To be able to adopt, the future adoptive parents must participate in parental education and have a home investigation done. The home investigation is extensive and great demands are made on the parents. The purpose with this study was to get an insight and understanding in the parents? thoughts and feelings about the demands and expectations that are made on them during an international adoption. To answer this, we used these questions: Which demands and expectations are made on the future adoptive parents by the home investigator and the parental educator? How do the future adoptive parents experience the demands and expectations that are made on them before an adoption? Does the apprehension about the demands and expectations differ between the future adoptive parents and the home investigator contrary the parental educator? We used a qualitative method, interviewing four couples of parents, one home investigator and one parental educator.

Child health care in Sweden is today automatically informed of newborns in the district and itis therefore natural for the maternal and child health nurses to contact and invite the new family to the child welfare clinic. So far the social services in the studied county have not reported new adoptive families to the child welfare clinics; instead the families have to contact the clinic themselves. The aim of this study was to investigate how social services inform the child welfare clinics of new adoptive families. The aim was also to investigate how and when the maternal and child health nurse thinks that contact should be established and what information/knowledge she feels a need of in contact with new adoptive families. The study has a qualitative design and interviews have been conducted with social workers, a representative of an adoption agency and maternal and child health nurses working in child welfare clinics.

The social policy defines what is social problems. There is no clear scientific explanation to why children fare badly and unity in what constitutes a bad parenthood that leads to deficiency of care (Sundell&Egelund 2000). The society's values are fickle and influences what to be defined as social problems. In the prevailing period, the discourse produces the social norm (Claezon 2004).The aim with this study was to examine which children that fare badly and attitudes about it the good and the insufficient parenthood between 1921-1923 and 1997-2007. The survey was a qualitative file study in witch we studied child welfare.

The aim in the study is to search for a deeper understanding of how parents experience a neurological diagnose of the child and how this affects the parenthood. Parenthood was seen in a systemtheoretical perspective as a social construction. The narrative method was used in two lifestory parentinterviews. The analysis was made from parenthood. The result formed stories about parenthood with children having neuropsyciatric functional disability who even came to be a woman?s struggle.

The aim of this study is to widen our knowledge about the basic idea about having an open preschool for adopted children as understood by parents of adopted children and a preschool teacher. Sweden has a large number of international adoptions, in an international comparison among the highest numbers of adoptions per capita. Interviews were carried out with seven adoptive parents and one preschool teacher teaching at a special preschool for adopted children. It was found that adoptive parents had no particular problems with placing their children in an "ordinary" preschool. However, they choose to place the children in an open preschool solely for adopted children because of the possibility of sharing similar experiences as parents and children as well.

The aim of the thesis is twofold: the first aim is to identify a number of reproductive logics that are used to construct Swedish regulation of embryo donation for reproductive use as either ethical or unethical in the governmental ? and medical discussions ? and to examine how these logics are interconnected with notions of gender and parenthood. The second aim is to identify a number of tensions that arise in the application of the governmental ethical logic on the embryo and embryo donation and discuss how these tensions can be solved with a feminist material approach. I argue that the terminology used to distinguish between genetic, biological, social and legal parenthood in my material is insufficient for understanding the value of the embryo outside its pre-human status. I therefore argue for an embryonic feminist bioethics that is attentive to the embryos post-human status, and for a reformulation of the parenthood terminology in line with what I call ?reproductive ties?..

The purpose of this essay was to examine how childless homosexuals (men and women) were looking at family formation and parenthood. The essential questions were how the homosexuals felt about their own parenthood in the future and about different family constellations. We also wanted to examine how they experienced reactions from the society and what they thought about the current Swedish laws in force of adoption and insemination.We have chosen to work with a qualitative method and interviewed nine childless homosexual men and women in the age between 21 - 39 years to get some answers about the questions above.The main result from the interviews was that the homosexuals had the same thoughts like any other future parent but with a more complicated engagement. Even though they some times felt a resistance in the society against homosexual parenthood it was not a thing that would stop them from getting children..