The meaning and making of childhoods in kinship care – young adults’ narratives

ABSTRACT

This article draws on interviews with 26 young adults (15 women and 11 men, aged 19–29) who grew up in long-term kinship care in Norway, and explore how they portray their childhoods. Our starting point is that the foster child status provide cultural and public narratives, images and positions for the young adults to employ when interpreting childhood experiences. The question we ask is how this status is made relevant in the production of childhood narratives. Doing this, we seek to gain insights into how the formal aspect of kinship care can influence on childhood understandings. Based on how childhood experiences are (re)constructed and how the young adults position themselves and their foster parents in their narratives, we have constructed four ways of portraying childhoods in kinship care, as: normal, supported, struggling and neglected. The article clarifies the criteria for constructing the different types of childhood, and discusses how the foster child status is made relevant in each type.

KEYWORDS:

• Kinship care
• childhood
• foster child
• narratives
• clientisation
• normality

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