Children as “care givers”, social workers “blind spot”

This paper aims to describe the social workers relationship / contact to the foster parents' own children in a foster home. The aim is also to understand a social workers perspective on foster parents' own children in the foster home. We wanted to find out how social workers relationship/contact to the foster parents own children looks like, which has shown to differ between municipality to municipality. The study has shown that the perspective on the own children in the family, differs from municipality to municipality and that the own children’s meaning for the foster home as a social contribution, has a varied meaning amongst social workers. Based on several theories and concepts we have analyzed our result we got from the interviews, we found out that social workers looks at and works differently with foster parents own children. We found out that social workers perspective on foster parent’s own children is, that they are a very important resource and they participate in the fostering of the foster child. It also became clear in our result that a paradox appears in social workers work when although they don’t have any regulated documents on how to work with the foster parent’s own children, they still experience that they are restricted in their work by the organization they work under