Childhood in Kinship Care

A Longitudinal Investigation

Jeanette Skoglund, Renee Thørnblad, Amy Holtan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000589870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Kinship foster care involves placing children who cannot live at home in foster care with other members of their family or close network. This book sheds light on different aspects of kinship care development and practice.

Using a 20-year longitudinal research study from Norway, this book shows the historical development of kinship care in Norway, research on kinship care, and how family life and relations are negotiated and lived in the span between private and public sphere. It includes the perspectives of the children, their parents and their relatives who have functioned as foster parents. Recognising that kinship care is complex, and needs to be understood and studied from different perspectives, the book describes, analyses and discusses a number of subjects: kinship care in a child welfare historical context, families who are part of kinship care and their perspectives, the formal frameworks around kinship care, and research approaches which have dominated research into kinship care.

This book will be of interest to all scholars, students and professionals working in social work and child welfare more broadly, both in the Nordic countries and in a wider international context.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003231363-1

Kinship care as a professionalised, priority child welfare intervention

Through the ages relatives have often taken care of children who for various reasons could not be looked after by their parents and who therefore needed a home. Kinship foster care, on the other hand, as an intervention and category in the child welfare services (CWS), is a relatively new phenomenon. There are several terms for growing up in foster care with relatives, both nationally and internationally. In Sweden, kinship foster care is known as släktinghem (‘kinship home’), in Denmark as slægtspleje (‘family care’), and in Norway as slektsfosterhjem (‘kinship foster care’) and fosterhjem i familie og nettverk (foster care in family and network). In English-speaking countries, such as the USA, the UK and Australia, it is known as kinship foster care, family and friends care and kith and kin care. In this book, kinship care will refer to kinship foster care placements, and non-kinship care will refer to traditional foster care placements.

The understanding of the suitability of relatives as foster parents in CWS has changed over time. With the growth of the welfare states and the entry of various professions into the field of child welfare, especially from the 1970s, interventions and services for children who were unable to grow up with their birth parents became professionalised. This emerging specialisation of child welfare resulted in relatives frequently being regarded as inadequate caregivers for such children (Moldestad, 1996; Vinnerljung, 1996; Winokur, Holtan, & Valentine, 2009). In the Nordic countries however, as well as in other Western countries (Winokur, Holtan, & Batchelder, 2014; Sundt, 2012) there has been a change in this respect, and relatives have gradually gained a more positive status in the professional child welfare field. In Norway, new regulations on foster care came into force in 2004, marking a turning point in governmental attitudes and policy towards relatives as foster parents. Section 4 of the regulations states that “the child welfare services shall always consider whether someone in the child’s family or immediate network can be chosen as a foster home”. In 2018, the duty of municipal authorities to look for a foster home in the child’s family and immediate network was included in the Child Welfare Act (Section 4–22). At the end of 2020, 3,239 children and young people aged 0–22 lived in kinship and close network foster care in Norway. That constituted 32.5 percent of all children in foster homes (SSB, 2021).¹

The inclusion of kinship care in CWS may be seen as an expansion of the field of child welfare. When a foster family is formalised in this way, the children are ascribed client status in the services and their caregivers are defined as foster parents. The family members become subject to official approval, financing and control in line with non-kinship foster families. As a child welfare intervention, kinship care follows the terminology, procedures and legal authority of the CWS. In practical terms, however, the criteria used by the CWS are to some extent different when approving kinship care, in that the importance of relationships may compensate for qualities which normally are more strongly emphasised in the approval of non-kinship foster homes.

Why a book on kinship care?

The institutionalisation and prioritisation of kinship care as an intervention implies an increased need for knowledge about the phenomenon, for decision-makers at various levels, practitioners, researchers and others working directly or indirectly with kinship care. Only a few decades ago, kinship placement was an unexplored research field. Not until the early 1990s did kinship care appear as a research topic, initially in the USA. Research contributions from the Nordic countries were few in this period.

Faced with this lack of knowledge, Amy Holtan embarked on her doctoral research on kinship care in 1998. Her interest in the topic stemmed from her time as an expert member on the county social welfare board, where, when dealing with a case, she was confronted with her own attitude, as well as that of the CWS, of preferring to avoid foster placements within the child’s own family. The case in question resulted in the children’s services ruling against kinship placement, giving very generalised reasons for their decision. In the preface of her doctoral thesis (2002) she wrote:

It was not clear what the child welfare services had based their decision on, and the woman’s [the grandmother’s] proposal was not followed up with a thorough investigation by the child welfare services. I began to search the literature in order to find out whether the practice of the child welfare services had a base in research. I could find no such documentation. I therefore want to investigate the field further, in order to acquire research-based knowledge on kinship foster care.

What began as a single study (1998–2002) on the social integration of children in kinship care was later extended to become a research project with the aim of following up the same children, their parents and grandparents over time. The research project, also known as “Outcomes and Experience of Foster Care”,² has resulted in a further two doctoral theses, carried out by the other two authors of this book: Renee Thørnblad (2011) and Jeanette Skoglund (2018).

During the course of the 20 years of the project we have published a number of scientific research articles on various aspects of kinship care in both national and international journals. Some other Norwegian, Swedish and Danish researchers also contributed to the acquisition of knowledge during this period. Kinship care is, in other words, no longer an uninvestigated topic in the Nordic countries. This Nordic research is, however, largely inaccessible to the English-speaking world, and for that reason we decided to have our book translated into English. The book was originally published in Norwegian in 2020, when it was the first textbook to deal with kinship care in the Nordic countries. The book is based on our doctoral theses and scientific articles, but here they have been further developed.

Objectives and theoretical frameworks

The aim of this book is to shine a light on kinship care as a phenomenon. An important starting point is that kinship care is complex and needs to be understood and studied from different perspectives in order to gain a deeper understanding of this phenomenon and what it involves. In the book we do it by describing, analysing and discussing a number of subjects: kinship care in a child welfare historical context, the families who are part of kinship care and the perspectives of the involved parties, the formal frameworks within which kinship care is practised and the research approaches which have dominated research into kinship care. Theoretical perspectives are important, not only to explain social circumstances or understand contexts, but also to explore and understand kinship care in new ways.

A large proportion of the kinship care research is based on theory from psychology and social work. The theoretical perspectives we use in the book are taken from social science in general and sociology in particular. The sociological contributions we draw on range from theoretical ideas developed to explain how we can understand contemporary society, to concepts illustrating contemporary family life, parenthood and relationships. Altogether, these various theoretical contributions constitute our tools for describing, investigating and discussing kinship care and the social reality in which the phenomenon exists.

The book is written for students and professions of child welfare and social work, both in the Nordic countries and in a wider international context. The book also has relevance beyond the field of child welfare, since research on kinship care touches on areas such as childhood, kinship, family, parenthood and welfare in general. This makes the book relevant also for social scientists and others working in the fields of family and family welfare.

Data from three time points

The data we use in this book are taken from our research project “Outcomes and Experience of Foster Care”, a national study with a longitudinal design.³ Data for the original selection were collected for the first time in 1999/2000 (T1) and consisted of a group of children aged between 4 and 12 (born between 1986 and 1995). The children were in the custody of the CWS and had lived in foster homes (kinship care and non-kinship care) for a minimum of one year. The second data collection was carried out in 2007/2008 (T2). The children had grown up into teenagers and young adults. The final data collection was carried out in 2014/2015, when the “children” were between 19 and 29 years old (see Table 1.1). The research project is one of two in the Nordic countries which study the experiences and impact of kinship care over time.⁴

Table 1.1 Research project data from three studies

The research project “Outcomes and Experience of Foster Care”
Informants	T1 1999/2000				T2 2006/2008					T3 2014/2015
CBCL/PSI^5	Survey	Interview		CBCL/ASR	Survey	Interview			Survey	Interview
Children			X		X	X	X		X	X
Birth parents			X
Foster parents	X	X	X		X	X

Today we take the need for research using children and young people as informants for granted. However, when this project was at the planning stage towards the end of the 1990s, children were rarely used as informants in child welfare research. There were vociferous opinions, including among sociologists, that children should be protected and that interviewing them might be too much of a burden. Until the end of the 1990s, the sources of child welfare research and research into children in foster care had in the main been represented by adults. A report on child welfare research, 1997–2001, emphasised the following:

It seems natural that a renewed research effort to a greater extent is directed towards the experiences and perspectives of clients, and how the services of the welfare state through the child welfare services actually work for people who are affected by the law.

(The Research Council of Norway, 1997)

Our project originates from this period. The task was to study the social integration of children, with particular emphasis on the child’s experience of family and belonging. The project was based on the understanding that an official care order is an intervention of great significance in the life of disadvantaged children and their families. As mentioned above, very little research on kinship care, and with children as informants, had been carried out in the Nordic countries. The children therefore became the primary interview objects throughout the whole study. We followed them at three time points, until the oldest were approaching the age of 30. Other informants were foster parents and birth parents. The study had two samples, children in kinship and non-kinship foster homes.

Characteristics of the Kinship families in the research project

The four major characteristics of the kinship foster families in our project are set out...