Social workers’ constructions of parents to children in foster care

Abstract

Parents of children in out-of-home care receive little support from social services. Drawing on qualitative data collected in the project ‘Parent at a distance’, in which social services in seven municipalities in Sweden aimed to improve support to parents whose children are placed in foster care, this paper explores social workers’ discourses about parents to children in care. The analysis is based on focus group data in which a total of 52 social workers reflected on parents to children in care and how they can be supported by social services. The concept of interpretive repertoires was used to analyse how social workers in interaction construct parents and their support needs. The identified repertoires of change, acceptance, permanency, biology and non-biology may contribute to the understanding of why so few parents receive support, even though legislation stipulates that placements should be temporary. The paper concluded that discourses may shape support practices and thus it is crucial that social workers reflect on and develop their awareness about their constructions of parents and their role for children in out-of-home care.

Introduction

A decision to place a child in foster care is usually preceded by interventions by social services with parents, and the removal of children from parents is seen as a last resort. Even so, social workers should assess what kind of support parents need after the child has been placed in care in order to improve their parenting capacity. According to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, parents are responsible for the upbringing and development of the child. Support to parents is therefore considered to be in the best interest of the child, and states are urged to provide parents with appropriate assistance (UNCRC, 1989 Article 18 and 24). However, parents with children in foster care in Sweden do not receive enough support (SOU, 2015: 71). This paper builds on data from the research project Parent at a distance in which social services in seven municipalities in Sweden intended to improve support to parents whose children are placed in foster care. The aim of this paper is to explore how support practices are shaped by social workers’ talk about the parents. Specifically, we investigate the interpretive repertoires in use by social workers and whether these repertoires legitimise social work action and support.

A decision to place a child in care is preceded by an assessment of parent capability according to the BBIC model (Children’s Needs in Focus), sanctioned by The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare (NBHW, 2018). The assessment should also consider factors related to the child’s environment as well as the child’s developmental needs. Furthermore, assessment of parent capability shall be conducted every time the care decision is reconsidered, at least every six months. Previous research reveals that systematic assessments tend to better illuminate the child’s needs and environmental aspects, while parent’s capacity is not assessed as well (Gustavsson and Ångman, 2012; Matscheck and Eklundh, 2015). Thus, it seems more difficult for social workers to assess parenting capability, both prior to a care decision but also when foster care is reconsidered. There are ambiguities concerning parents’ obligations both before and after care decisions, as parenthood in general is surrounded by normative, and sometimes vague and contradictory assumptions (Sparrman et al., 2016). When children are placed in foster care, these ambiguities increase. Foster care can be described as a ‘three-part’ parenthood, shared by parents, social workers and care-givers (Skoog et al, 2015). However, it is not clear what social services expect from parents to children in foster care in terms of engagement and how responsibilities should be shared. A study on mothers to children in foster care found that the mothers considered birth motherhood as authentic, holding a unique, emotional and life-long bond with their children (Weitz and Karlsson, 2020). We can also see that policies and discourses about parenting and families grant legal and cultural priority to biological ties in family relationships (Lenke, 2009). However, current sociological theory argue that family and parenthood should be viewed as socially constructed relationships rather than closed entities based on biological bonds (Morgan, 2011). From this perspective, parenting consists of different practices, defined as such by various actors, and can be performed irrespective of genetical connection.

Systems of child and family welfare – The Swedish context

Child and Family welfare in Sweden is usually recognized by its family service orientation (Freymond and Cameron, 2007). Child protection is part of the municipal welfare services, organized at the local level in 290 municipalities (Grell et al., 2017). Many parents in the child welfare system are clients with complex needs, and are provided with services from different units within the municipal welfare services.Voluntariness is the guiding principle when children are placed in out-of-home care, but the risk of compulsory intervention is a reality for many families (Cocozza and Hort, 2011). About three out of four out-of-home placements are voluntary (NBHW, 2019). Placements according to the Social Services Act (SSA, 2001: 453) are carried out with the parent’s consent, while placements according to the Care of Young Persons Act (LVU, 1990: 52) takes place without the child’s or parent’s consent. Both SSA and LVU declare that care decisions should be reconsidered every 6 months. Even though foster care placements are regarded as temporary, many placements last for several years.

Since 2013, the Social Services Act demands that an appointed social worker is responsible for staying in regular contact with children in placement. Parents are not appointed a social worker and it has been recognized that parents are not receiving the support that they are entitled to (SOU 2015: 71).

Research on support to birth parents in child welfare

Scholars from various European countries have examined how parents of children in foster care perceive social welfare services and support. Parents report feelings of loss, shame, guilt, anger, and stigma after the removal of the child. They require support from social services to cope with their situation and to be reunited with their children (Bouma et al., 2020; Buckley et al., 2011; Peterson, 2018; Höjer, 2009; Schofield et al., 2011, 2012). Studies show that parents to children in care go through different phaseswhich require different kinds of support (Balsells et al., 2015; Strength and Lietz, 2011). Acceptance, insight and understanding are depicted as necessary stages to reach in order for change to come about.

However, negative experiences and lack of support from social services are widely reported. Parents experience that their views are not taken into consideration (Boutanquoi et al., 2020) and that social workers base their interventions on lies and untruths due to poor investigations (Bouma et al., 2020). In order to improve practices, scholars stress that social workers need improved competences in “key social work skills” such as emphatic communication (Forrester, 2008). For example, motivational interviewing is depicted as one technique that can have a positive impact on outcomes for families in child and family social work.

Other scholars focus on social workers’ ability to work in partnership with parents, stressing that parents struggle to understand why their children have been placed in care, and feel disempowered by Child Protection Services (Syrstad and Slettebø, 2020). Findings from research and development projects have suggested that traditional casework is not sufficient to meet the needs of parents who involuntarily have children placed in care and that working in partnership with parents is preferable (Slettebø, 2013). Despite a new rhetoric of child protection as based on consensus, transparency and service user engagement, practices are less inclined to develop in this direction (Buckley et al., 2011). As pointed out by Bouma et al. (2020), working in partnership with parents within child protection is a complicated task, as there might be tensions between children’s and parents’ interests.

The current study hopes to shed more light on why so little is done for parents with children in care, in spite of research evidence and policies that stress the importance of partnerships, dialogue, and appropriate support.

Method

Data collection

The findings in this article are based on seven focus groups with a total of 52 social workers from different parts of social services. The focus group study is part of a larger research project, Parent at a distance, which also includes a questionnaire to social workers and individual interviews with parents. The project is a collaboration between researchers and social services in seven municipalities in Sweden. The municipalities are of varied size and have somewhat different organizational structures. The results from the questionnaire and the individual interviews will be presented elsewhere (Josephson et al., 2021). Results from the questionnaire showed that parents receive none or little support from social services. In the focus groups we asked for social workers’ accounts of why so little support is provided. Focus groups are suitable to answer our research questions since they allow for insight into interactional processes within a group of social workers, where coherence as well as divergence become visible.

Each municipality had the mandate to decide which social workers should participate in the focus group. An inclusion criterion was that the social workers should work directly or indirectly with parents whose children are placed in foster or residential care. The 52 participants, ranging in the age from 24 to 66 years old, were employed as child protective investigators, counsellors, appointed social workers for children, social workers responsible for foster homes and managers. Their work experiences were ranging from 1 to 34 years (10 years in average). The gender distribution among participants echo that 89% of social service workers in Sweden are women (The Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions, 2019). Only three participants were men and 49 were women.

The focus groups that were held at social service offices took about two hours. The first 45 min were devoted to going through results from the questionnaire, and the remaining part was devoted to interaction between the participants. The focus group interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim.

Analysis

This article explores the ways social workers, in interaction, describe parents whose children are in foster care. The analysis is guided by discourse psychology and the concept interpretive repertoire, defined by Potter and Wetherell (1987: 149) as follows: “Interpretive repertoires are recurrently used systems of terms used for characterizing and evaluating actions, events and other phenomena. A repertoire is constituted through a limited range of terms used in particular stylistic and grammatical constructions”. In this paper, interpretive repertoire is used to identify variable patterns in social workers’ talk and how they construct parents to children in foster care. We identified interpretive repertoires as cluster of words in which social workers construct parents. Further, we interpreted meanings associated with parenthood and the removal of children into care. The interpretive repertoires were identified through the empirical material, by how social workers argued and accounted for their actions. Initially, the transcripts were read a number of times, with a focus on what was said and how it was said (Gubrium and Holstein, 1997). First, an open coding (Saldaña, 2021) was performed, where meaningful units were given names and codes, such as chronic, improvement, abuse, disability, insight, trust, support etc. The second step was to categorize the codes and name the repertoires. According to Potter and Wetherell (1987), this form of coding and categorizing is necessary to structure in the material.

Concrete examples from the discourse literature guided the analysis, for example Barker and Rossi (2011), but also Potter (1996) and Gee’s (2011) terminology was used. The identified repertoires were analysed in depth by charting meaningful units in relation to following theoretical concepts (examples from the permanency repertoire in brackets): assertive modifier (a word that emphasizes the content of the statement; ‘those parents are so difficult’), vocabulary (the use of certain terms within a context; ‘they have mental health problems, abuse and maybe intellectual disabilities’) , extremization (justifying a position; ‘in almost all of these cases, the children cannot have any contact with their parents’), local coherence relations (logical relations between clauses;‘they don’t have the capacity to develop….they do not understand that themselves’), mitigator (expressing a possible doubt; ‘some parents might be able to change, but probably not’,), modality (commitment to clauses; ‘we need to improve our practices’) and normalisation (describing something as normal; ‘very often, these parents are not interested in the support we can offer’).

A primary analysis was organized by one of the authors with an initial interpretation of the material and identification of interpretive repertoires. The other authors checked this interpretation, and the analysis and interpretations are result of joint agreement.

Ethical considerations

Ethical guidelines provided by The Swedish Research Council (SRC, 2011) have been followed. The study was given ethical approval by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority, (dnr 2019-01357). All participants in the focus groups were informed and gave their written consent to participate in the study. The extracts from the different focus groups are coded by number, to protect participants from being identified. All interviews and the analysis were conducted in Swedish, and the quotations presented in this paper have been translated into English.

Limitations

Because the selection of focus group participants was out of our control, the sample might be biased, for example individuals who wish to present a positive image of social services support to parents with children in care. However, our impression was that the discussions included critical reflection and as well as justifying accounts of why parents are not offered enough support. Another limitation is that we only have examined seven out of 290 municipalities in Sweden. Yet, the variation in our sample regarding size and organization, strengthens the external validity of the findings.

Findings

The analysis of the focus group discussions identified five interpretive repertoires that the social workers made use of and moved between when they talked about parents to children in foster care: Change repertoire, Acceptance repertoire, Permanency repertoire, Biology repertoire, and Non-biology repertoire. Sometimes the social workers’ constructions of parents were overlapping and their constructions did not always fit simply into repertoires. The focus group extracts reported below illustrate differences between the repertoires.

Change repertoire

The change repertoire includes words and expressions such as improvement, insight, trust, support, effort, deal with. Parenting capability is talked about as something that can be improved. The change repertoire acknowledges two change agents: the parent and the social worker. Social workers are described as catalysts, who can help parents to gain insight, but who should also encourage and trust parents’ capacity. However, it is uncertain who has the main responsibility for change: the social worker or the parent?

A: Anyway, she has made incredible achievements, if you compare with what it looked like when the child was taken into care. But I was not part of that, I have only worked here for a year. But she has also been very keen to seek help. So, she realized that, and that she needed to give up her addiction.

B: Mmmm

A: But she has completely stopped using drugs, and she has been clean, and you know, yeah, she has completely changed her life, basically. But I think about what I have done for her, is that I have listened to her and seen her achievements and supported her. And I have trusted her that it is okay to increase her contact with the child, and that has worked out really well too. (fg2)

The social workers above praises the parent being able to ‘completely change her life’, with some professional aid by active listening and support, but it is clear that the parent’s efforts are central. Some social workers argued that there are parents who do not want to change, while others question this opinion, indicating that social workers need to develop their work with involuntary clients.

A: Parents do not want to receive support

B: Do not want to, or cannot? That is the question. Because I think that if we develop our work, we can motivate. (fg6).

The extract above is an example of how the repertoires were formed in interaction between participants. In this example, the discussion was left with an ‘open ending’ as the participants did not come to a joint conclusion about the preconditions for change.

The change repertoire often presumes that it is indisputable and evident what parents need to change, for example stop abusing alcohol and drugs. In our data, we did not recognize any discussions where social workers explicitly questioned the decision to place a child in foster care. But since parenthood is surrounded by norms, and sometimes vague assumptions about what constitutes ‘good parenthood’ (Sparrman et al., 2016), it can be difficult for parents to know what to change and what to display in order to pass as ‘good-enough’.

A: It can be pretty unclear for the parents what they have to change, because when the assessment is written and the care plan is ready, it can be difficult for them to read and understand ‘what needs to happen in my home for the children to come home?’

B: You pinpoint something very important here, about formulating realistic and clear objectives./…/It is kind of difficult to be distinct and clear towards the parents, to say that ‘this is what you have to accomplish and this is what we need to work on, and we are going to do it like this’. (fg7)

In this extract, we see how participants help each other to formulate and determine the subject matter, implying that they need to develop their communications with parents in order to achieve a starting point for change.

Furthermore, the change repertoire frames social workers as needing to listen to children’s wishes and experiences, and that parental change should be guided by the child’s opinion.

In this case where we have a family counsellor, the thing is that the girl does not want to see her father, or she didn’t in the beginning. And we have worked a lot with what she has told us, what she feels and how she experiences things, also inbetween the occasions when she sees her father. So, I have had contact with the (foster)mother. And then we could tell the father that, ‘the girl reacts to what you do and what you say like this’. And then, he has been able to change a little. So now, things have developed very quickly, and now she wants to see her father (fg3).

This quote reveals how local coherence relations can be structured within this repertoire: starting with (1) the child’s perception, (2) a social worker who listens, (3) can reformulate the child’s wishes, (4) mediates the message to the parent, (5) works with the parents, and (6) a parent who wants to change and is motivated.

Acceptance repertoire

The acceptance repertoire is connected to words and expressions such as support, accept, good parenting at a distance, chronic, powerlessness. The acceptance repertoire assumes that the child cannot return to the parents, but in order to become a ‘good-enough-parent’ from a distance, parents need to accept that the child is placed in foster care and accept deficiencies in their parenting.

Interviewer: You say that parents do not get the support they need, what do you think the parents need?

A: Well, I would say that it is about understanding why the child is in foster care. It’s like, in every meeting with the parents you end up in this discussion about why the child is in foster care.

B: Yes, always, every meeting.

C: Always…and you don’t have time to motivate the parents to receive support. We inform and try to make them understand and accept the placement. (fg3).

This extract shows how social workers interactions strengthened the repertoire, drawing on extremizations as ‘always’ and ‘every meeting’.

Some social workers acknowledged that acceptance is achieved in interaction and as a result of explicit support directed to the parents. The social workers argued that they had to improve their support strategies in order to help parents accept the situation.

A: You can see that the parent is not able to transform into a parent that gets their children back, but they still need…they feel bad about the situation and need someone they can call once a week, or meet occasionally.

B: But, isn’t it about helping the parents to reach acceptance?

C: Yes

A: Or about, partly about reducing anxiety and distress, but also to accept that, this is the way it is. (fg1)

In this extract the participants express different opinions, but they seek coherence, conveying to each other that it might be possible to combine opinions by using the expressions ‘partly about’, ‘but also’. However, later in the same focus group, acceptance is problematized, and some participants argued that acceptance could also be classified as ‘giving up’, both from social worker’s and parent’s perspectives.

A: When some time has passed for these children in care, I would not say that it is chronic, but it is almost that the parents’ situation becomes chronic. They have accepted the way things are now, and time passes, ‘this is how we do it’, and then, it becomes difficult to get through with a message about change.

B: So, you accept the situation, or do you mean that it is an effect of powerlessness, ‘we don’t have any prospects’?

A: It could be like that too, definitively. (fg1)

When social workers accept that a parent will not change, they might allow for parents to be absent in their children's lives.

Permanency repertoire

Formally, there is no such thing as permanent placements in Sweden. All placements in foster care are considered every six months. Nevertheless, we label this repertoire as ‘permanency repertoire’ since social workers talk about cases where they ‘know’ that the children never will return to their parents. Codes such as disabilities, difficult, ‘do not have the ability’, ‘continuity for children’, and ‘nothing to work on’ were connected to the permanency repertoire. The repertoire assumes that deficient parenthood is a constant position.

A: I think that some cases, when we take children into care straight from the maternity ward, they might have children who are already in foster care, and so.

B: But how transparent are we about it?

A: They have nothing they can change, so to speak. It is a disability that really hindersthem.

C: But I think that we try to be open about it, with the risks and what we see, but then it is the legal aspects that we have to consider the placement every six months.

B: But isn’t it a bit precarious to say that, that it’s?

A: Yes I see that.

B: permanent. Because the other day a child asked me ‘will I ever move back home’/…/and I said to him that ‘I cannot answer that, because I don’t know’. And that is what we should say, right, even to parents? Even though we might think that it is very unlikely.

C: Yes, you realize that, that it is very unlikely they will return. (fg1)

The phrasing ‘they have nothing they can change’ illuminates that this repertoire is opposite to the change repertoire. On the other hand, as seen in B’s question above, social workers might not talk openly to parents about the perceived incapability to change.

In our data, the permanency repertoire is used in particular when social workers talk about parents with severe mental illness and intellectual disabilities. However, these parents aretalked about with empathy, acknowledging that parents might have good intentions and want to take care of their children.

A: When it comes to the mother, I think that the mother somewhere, somewhere deep inside knows that she can’t handle it.

B: Yes, I think that is the case.

A: She wants so much, she loves her child. She wants to, but, well. There is so much shame as well. (fg4)

The permanency repertoiredoes not describe parents as subjects with the possibility to improve. When social workers have decided that the parent’s deficiency is of permanent nature, they do not see any need to provide parents with adequate supervision or support in order to reach change. However, the permanency repertoire allows for some hesitation and uncertainty, acknowledging difficulties to identify which parents are incapable to progress in their parenting.

Then we have this three-year-rule too, that we shall consider a custody transfer when the child has been in the foster home for three years. It implies that when you’re moving closer towards that three-year threshold, and start to think about custody transfer, then you don’t put a lot of effort to strengthen the parent’s capacity. (fg4)

The quote above articulates complex and ambiguous processes connected to children in care; children’s need of predictability and continuity versus parent’s potential for resuming care of their children. The quote indicates that in some cases, it might not be evident from the beginning of a placement whether or not the parents can improve their capabilities. When a child has been placed in the same foster home for three years, the local social welfare committee will consider whether the custody of the child should be transferred to the foster parents (SSA, 2001: 453). Even though the situation of the parents might change in the future, for example, by developing improved parenting skills, becoming sober, or having a more settled life, it is considered better for the child to remain in an environment where they are established. However, previous research has shown that social workers have difficulties with assessing a parent's capacity in a transparent way (Gustavsson and Ångman, 2012; Matscheck and Eklundh, 2015). Thus, as shown in the quote above, the permanency repertoire can be considered dubious, as there are no guarantees that the parents' support needs have been assessed over time, or that parents have been offered the help they need.

Biology repertoire

The biology repertoire includes words and expressions as ‘parents are important’, normal behaviour, strong bonds, own parenthood. Biological parenthood is associated with strong bonds between parent and child, in line with research that stresses biological parents’ significance for children in foster care (Hollin and Larkin, 2011; Weitz and Karlsson, 2020).

A: But the parents’ right to their children is still very, very strong. Stronger than the child’s perspective, at least for small children.

B: But isn’t it like this, I mean even if you have been in foster care for the most part of your life, you seek contact with your biological parents, you never really let them go, even if they think that the foster home is their family. I think most want to return, or at least have this contact.

C: You have to remember that it really demands motivation work, that you push on the fact that they are very important for their children. (fg3)

This quote reveals potential conflicts between parents’ rights and children’s rights, as seen in A’s statement, indicating that parents’ rights are stronger than children’s. However, participant B argues that children also experience this bond, and take action to be reunited. Finally, participant C indicates that the bond can be weakened when children are removed, and this is why social workers need to work with the parent to maintain the bond. Thus, the participants do not agree on the mechanisms surrounding biological bonds, but they acknowledge that biological parenthood has an exclusive position. Nevertheless, in our data we also saw that this repertoire problematizes strong bonds, and social workers viewed them as triggers to care breakdown. There were several examples of children who had run away from their foster carers to be reunited with their parents, even in cases where social workers argued that the home environment was harmful to the child or young person.

Adistinguishing element of the biological repertoire is that it contains frequent references to the social worker’s own parenthood, and how they would react if their children would have been removed.

A: If social services and the police entered my home and took my children away, I would probably throw things at the police officer and the social worker. Or, I do not know how I would have handled it, but probably I would have become completely mad.

B: I always think that these parents, they understand just as little as would do, if they came into my house and took my children away./…/So, I would probably reside in the reception at the social services office and stay there until I got my children back. I think I would. Because this is a parent reaction, it shows commitment (fg2).

Removing a child is described as an anomaly, a break with the ‘natural order’. Participants reflected on how they would react if they were excluded from their child’s life, not knowing what the child likes or dislikes, or how to comfort the child.

And to accept that it is someone else the child is addressing in the first place, I had not managed it, I think. So, it’s pretty hard (fg 4).

Thus, when social workers used the biology repertoire they drew on their own parenthood, and how important they are for their children. In the focus groups, the biology repertoire was used in combination with the permanency, change, and acceptance repertoires.

Non-biology repertoire

In our material we could identify what we called a non-biology repertoire, whichconstructs parenthood as a relational activity. The non-biology repertoire was employed more often when social workers talked about older children, who seem to be more involved in decisions regarding care in foster homes and contact with parents. The non-biology repertoire opens for a wider definition of parenthood and recognizes foster children’s right to contact with significant people from their original environment. The repertoire is mainly used when social workers talk about cases where parents are deemed to be incapable of fostering and developing their parenting. A local coherence structure in this repertoire is that (1) parents are incapable, (2) children in foster care are lonely, and (3) social workers need to widen children’s social networks, not the least in the future as young adults, when they leave care.

A: We have talked a little about, how we can develop our network building round children in foster care.

B. Very important.

A: Usually the focus is on parents and children and maybe grandparents, but you could find many other important adults who you could engage.

C: Maybe parents to the child’s friends?

B: Exactly!

A: The meetings could take place in our apartment for contact cases.

B: I thought so too.

A: But to involve them.

D: These other important persons.

B: And working with the network, inviting more people (fg6).

In the extract above, we can see signs of engagement and that they boost each other for action and new perspectives. The non-biology perspective could be argued as necessary in order to ensure children and young people’s well-being. This repertoire opens up for a more fluid view of parenthood in line with contemporary sociological theories of family practices (Morgan, 2011) where parenthood is described as practices related to caring and being involved in the child’s life.

A: I have two such cases where it is not the biological father but where both children call this man the father.

B: I think you can be a father, if you are present, even if you are not a biological father. He can be even more significant for the child/…/as you said before, we might forget him, since he is not biologically, not custodian, so we do not talk to him in the same way, but that man is a father figure in their original home, and he is still important to the child, I think.

A-The focus must always be the child (fg 5).

Furthermore, as seen in the extract above, the non-biology repertoire brings in a manifest child perspective as the question about who is a parent, or “parent figure” should be determined by the child. Therefore, social workers stress that they need to interact with children and listen to what children have to say. The social workers reveal that listening to children is about developing techniques where children’s perceptions can be explored, for example by letting children and parents draw network maps.

I also think that sometimes it differs quite a lot from what the child draws on the map and what the parents draw/…/And that's also a little interesting, how can we work with this material and this information? (fg5).

There might be conflicting interests between children and parents about who the child has close relationships with. Once again, the quote points at ‘social-worker-action’, that social workers have to act on information they receive in interactions with parents, but also with children.

Conclusions

Our findings confirmed results from previous international studies that indicate that support to parents to children in foster care is surrounded by vague and less structured support practices, despite legislation and UN Conventions that stress the importance of supporting parents. Our analysis revealed that social workers have access to a number of interpretive repertories when they talk about parents with children in care. The different repertoires allow for certain ways of talking about parents, but more importantly, the repertoirescan warrant, legitimise, or hinder, social workers’ actions and support practices. Thus, we argue that there can be a relationship between the different repertoires and practices, but not necessarily and always.

The identified repertoires were used in all seven focus groups. The overarching sense in the permanency repertoire is that these parents are ‘beyond rescue’ and that it is better for the children to stay in the foster home, and thus time spent supporting the parents is viewed as a poor investment.The acceptance repertoire, on the other hand, requires action from the social worker. However, acceptance as a concept is not clearly defined in the data. Sometimes, acceptance is talked about as an aim in itself, building on the assumption that the situation for children and foster carers settles down when parents accept that a child is and will be placed in foster care. Others see acceptance as a first necessary step for parents to improve their parenting capability. A third interpretation is that acceptance hinders change since the parents lose hope of ever being reunited with their children.The change repertoire require actions, both from social workers and parents, but it is not clear how support should be accomplished or who bears the responsibility. It is implied that change is only possible for a certain group of motivated parents, but motivational work seems to be less prioritized.

The various repertoires used by social workers illuminate that social workers have ambiguous expectations on parents to children in care, and that the assessment of capacities might be impeded by categories as “drug abuser” or “intellectually disabled”. Neither is it clear how responsibilities should be shared between parents, foster carers and social workers. The “three-part-parenting model” (Skoog et al., 2015) appear as a theoretical construction, rather than a social work practice.

We also concluded that support toparents with children in care is obstructed by a tension between parents’ and children’s rights, especially visible in the non-biology and the biology repertoires. The non-biology repertoire has a more profound child perspective, focusing actions directed to the child’s social network, while the biology repertoire problematizes parents’ rights and bonds to children. According to the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child, support to parents should be regarded as being in the best interest of the child. However, professionals always need to consider the individual case and ensure that the best interests of the child is guaranteed. In our data, this seems to cause uncertainty among the social workers on how to proceed. Support in order to achieve reunification of the child with the parent/s was not talked about explicitly in any of the focus groups and not included in the repertoires. This might be interpreted as an effect of a child-centred child welfare service, and that social workers want to ensure that children’s health and wellbeing is not jeopardised. Nevertheless, when parents are believed to be beyond change or improvement, social services are less inclined to offer support.

The findings in our study shed light on how practices can be shaped by the ways social workers talk about parents of children in care. In all repertoires it is evident that support practices are surrounded by uncertainty and social workers questioned if they have done enough. Social workers expressed ambiguity about how to support parents but also how to assess parents’ capacity for change. Social workers repertoires produce a varied picture of parents to children in foster care, including parents with long-term disabilities as well as parents with more temporary difficulties. Working in partnership with parents, as suggested by Syrstad and Slettebö (2020), could be one way forward, as it aids continuous and joint valuation of parents’ support needs, which can benefit both parents and their children.