Intimacy among relative strangers: Practices of touch and bodily care in new foster care relationships

When children move into a new foster care family, they and the foster carers are initially strangers to one another. Without knowing one another’s history, experiences and practices, foster carers and children are expected to get settled quite quickly in the intimate setting that makes up family life. In these early days of a new placement, bodily intimacy is brought to the forefront; how the foster carers manage bodily care and go about touch without any ‘embodied knowledge’ of the child. This study draws on in-depth interviews with eight foster care couples and explores how foster carers construct practices around bodily care and touch in new foster care relationships. Findings of the study showed that in some cases (babies) the foster carers felt it was ‘natural’ and relatively straightforward to care for the child in an intimate and bodily sense. However, most often the foster carers experienced that either they or the children had felt discomfort, often lead by a lack of embodied knowledge and around reading and understanding one another’s bodily signals. The study emphasizes how children’s prior trajectories around negative, positive or absent touch are imperative for the dynamics of bodily care practices in new foster care relationships. Children may express their embodied experiences very differently, and foster carers, also having embodied biographies, can enact bodily practices in a more or less negotiable manner, adjusted to the child.

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Triangulations of “Motherly Love”: Negotiated Intimacies among Migrant Domestic Workers, Mothers, and Children

Journal of Family Issues ◽

10.1177/0192513x21993858 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 0192513X2199385

Author(s):

Iris Hoiting

Keyword(s):

Young People ◽

Domestic Workers ◽

Care Work ◽

Men And Women ◽

Gender Expectations ◽

Mothers And Children ◽

Care Relationships ◽

Relational Contexts ◽

Depth Interviews ◽

Migrant Domestic Workers

Persistent economic inequality between men and women, combined with differences in gender expectations and growing inequalities among women globally, has resulted in families “outsourcing” childcare by employing migrant domestic workers (MDWs). While studies have addressed the intimacy and complexity of “mothering” in such contexts, the agentic position of child-recipients of such care have seldom been explored. This article increases our understanding of care-relationships by examining their triangularity among children, MDWs, and mothers in Hong Kong. Drawing on in-depth interviews with young people who grew up with MDWs, alongside interviews with MDWs themselves, this article describes processes through which care work transforms into what Lynch describes as “love labor” in these relational contexts. In these contexts, commodified care from MDWs can develop, through a process of mutual trilateral negotiations, into intimate love-laboring relationships that, in turn, reflect larger dynamics of familial transformation that are endemic to “global cities.”

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Preserving and memorialising relationships: exploring young people’s experiences of foster care through the lens of social capital

Adoption & Fostering ◽

10.1177/0308575918773032 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 42 (2) ◽

pp. 176-188 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Justin Rogers

Keyword(s):

Social Capital ◽

Social Networks ◽

Foster Care ◽

Young People ◽

Qualitative Methods ◽

Family Life ◽

Growing Up ◽

Policy And Practice ◽

The Uk ◽

Gain Access

This article presents findings from research into how young people growing up in foster care in the UK manage the relationships in their social networks and gain access to social capital. It is a concept that highlights the value of relationships and is relevant to young people in care as they have usually experienced disruptions to their social and family life. Qualitative methods were used and the findings show that despite experiencing disruption to their social networks, the young people demonstrated that they were able to maintain access to their social capital. They achieved this in two ways. Firstly, they preserved their relationships, often through what can be seen as ordinary practices but in the extraordinary context of being in foster care. Secondly, they engaged in creative practices of memorialisation to preserve relationships that had ended or had been significantly impaired due to their experience of separation and movement. The article highlights implications for policy and practice, including the need to recognise the value of young people’s personal possessions. Furthermore, it stresses the need to support them to maintain their relationships across their networks as this facilitates their access to social capital.

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Family Law and Social Change: Judicial Views of Joint Custody, 1998–2011

Law & Social Inquiry ◽

10.1111/lsi.12103 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 40 (03) ◽

pp. 723-745 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Julie E. Artis ◽

Andrew V. Krebs

Keyword(s):

Social Change ◽

Family Life ◽

Political Party ◽

Family Law ◽

Party Affiliation ◽

Joint Custody ◽

Lower Court ◽

Rapid Changes ◽

Political Party Affiliation ◽

Depth Interviews

Rapid changes in family life over the last forty years have led to substantial alterations in family law policy; specifically, most states now endorse joint custody arrangements for divorcing families. However, we know little about how lower court judges have embraced or resisted this change. We conducted in‐depth interviews with judges in twenty‐five Indiana jurisdictions in 1998 and 2011. Our findings suggest that judges' views of joint custody dramatically changed. Judges in Wave II indicated a strong preference for joint custody—a theme that was relatively absent in Wave I. The observed change in judicial preferences did not seem to be related to judicial replacement, gender, age, or political party affiliation. Although our conclusions are exploratory, we speculate that shifts in judicial views may be related to changing public mores of parenthood and, relatedly, Indiana's adoption of Parenting Time Guidelines in 2001.

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Youth in Foster Care Relationships with Biological, Foster, and Adoptive Families

Handbook of Foster Youth ◽

10.4324/9781351168243-11 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 190-207

Author(s):

Armeda Stevenson Wojciak ◽

Nathan A. Hough

Keyword(s):

Foster Care ◽

Adoptive Families ◽

Care Relationships ◽

Youth In Foster Care

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Intensive Family Observations: A Methodological Guide

Sociological Methods & Research ◽

10.1177/0049124120914949 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 004912412091494

Author(s):

Annette Lareau ◽

Aliya Hamid Rao

Keyword(s):

Family Life ◽

Participant Observation ◽

Family Processes ◽

Valuable Data ◽

Ethnographic Studies ◽

The Family ◽

Private Spaces ◽

Depth Interviews ◽

Fixed Period

There is a dearth of methodological guidance on how to conduct participant observation in private spaces such as family homes. Yet, participant observations can provide deep and valuable data about family processes. This article draws on two ethnographic studies of family life in which researchers conduct in-depth interviews, recruit families, and ultimately enter the family as a quasi-stranger for daily observations lasting a fixed period (e.g., three weeks). We term this approach “intensive family observations.” Here, we provide concrete methodological advice for this method, beginning with guidelines for recruitment and gaining consent. We also discuss logistics of conducting family observation (e.g., scheduling, spatial positionality in the home, role in the field, among other issues). We elaborate on the key challenges, specifically issues of intrusion, power, and positionality. Last, we reflect on how this method provides opportunities for accurately capturing deeply intimate moments as well as unexpected insights.

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Topical questions of the substitute family care in the Czech Republic with a special attention to the process of foster families preparation

SHS Web of Conferences ◽

10.1051/shsconf/20185103002 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 51 ◽

pp. 03002

Author(s):

Iva Junova ◽

Gabriela Slaninova

Keyword(s):

Czech Republic ◽

Foster Care ◽

Family Life ◽

Family Care ◽

Professional Preparation ◽

The Czech Republic ◽

Foster Families ◽

Natural Family ◽

The Social

Authors deal with the substitute family care in the Czech Republic. Attention is concentrated on a conception of the substitute family care as a form of a children care in that children are raised by “substitute” parents in an ambience that is very similar to a natural family life. In the Czech Republic, the substitute family care is always preferred to an institutional upbringing. The aim of the article is to describe the system of the substitute family care in the Czech Republic and to introduce a foster care as one of the institutes of the substitute family care. Authors paid attention to a foster care and to a temporary foster care in the context of a professional preparation of foster families. The professionally led preparation in the Czech Republic is legally regulated by performing some law provisions of the social and legal children protection.

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Coordination Points: A Hidden Factor in Reconciling Work and Family Life

Journal of Social Policy ◽

10.1017/s0047279404008281 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 34 (1) ◽

pp. 99-119 ◽

Cited By ~ 37

Author(s):

CHRISTINE SKINNER

Keyword(s):

Family Life ◽

Maternal Employment ◽

Qualitative Data ◽

Work And Family ◽

Early Years ◽

Working Parents ◽

Policy Makers ◽

Fully Integrated ◽

Per Se ◽

Depth Interviews

Despite improvements in childcare provision since the implementation of the National Childcare Strategy in England in 1998, little is known about the practicalities of managing childcare and employment from a parental perspective. It is not recognised that dependent children have to be physically transported from home to the place of care-education, and if transported by the parent the latter usually also has to travel to their workplace in a different location. This article discusses the complexity involved in coordinating these events, the barriers posed to maternal employment, and the strategies used by working parents to overcome the difficulties. It presents an analysis of qualitative data from in-depth interviews with 40 mothers in a middle-sized city in England. The analysis exposes the additional work involved in temporally, spatially and physically coordinating childcare, education and work. It indicates that early education related to children's ages might have a greater influence on coordination difficulties, and therefore maternal employment, than the numbers of children in a family per se. The article argues that policy makers need to have a greater regard for the time and space dimensions attached to coordination, the coordination support provided by fathers and others (as opposed to childcare), transport issues and the need for fully integrated early years provision in all neighbourhoods.

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