Foster Parents’ Perception about Biological Parents of Foster Children

Abstract

  This paper uses narrative interviews with five foster parents to investigate how foster parents perceived the biological parents of their foster children and how they maintained relations between the children in their care and their biological parents. Family reunion has been a concern of child and family social work, but has received little empirical evaluation by other scholars of the family as a theme of foster parent experience perception.

  Our results indicate that foster parents try to adjust themselves to the foster child’s ideal foster parent image and respect the child’s image of the biological parents regardless of whether or not the child has interchange of letters or phone calls or visits with biological parents. However, it should be noted that foster parents are able to give some positive evaluation to biological parents in cases where children have interchange of letters or phone calls or visits with biological parents.

  If foster parents cannot give any positive evaluation to, or bring up children in cooperation with the biological parents, foster parents require to reevaluate themselves, for example to perceive themselves as being foster parents rather than see parenting as a business.

Finally, we discuss the implications of this study.