Work, Care, Family Life, and More: The Layered Framings of Swedish Foster Care

Being a foster parent is not a profession and does not provide a salary—a placed child is supposed to be given a life in a regular family. However, foster parents receive fees and reimbursements, and they may be offered supervision and professional training. Researchers often emphasize the mixed nature of foster care, balancing between work and family, but it is less common to examine how foster parents themselves analyze their position. This article uses Erving Goffman’s frame analysis to explore how foster parents in Sweden interweave seemingly incongruent frames to organize their experiences. The study is based on qualitative interviews with 40 foster parents, and is part of a project in which social services employees and consulting companies have also been interviewed. Foster parents may indeed frame their mission as work, thereby arguing for the legitimacy of payments and better conditions, but they may simultaneously frame it differently: as family life, as a lifestyle, as care work, as hard work, or as civic engagement. Additionally, placed teenagers with diagnoses and special needs further complicate the picture. The article shows that (a) there are more frames to be handled than formal work vs. family in today’s social world of foster care, and (b) when related to everyday life, the frames at issue are not defined as mutually exclusive.