Sociological Ambivalence: Relationships between Birth Parents and Foster Parents

Abstract

Inspired by Merton and Barber’s sociological theory on ambivalence, this article analyses ‘co-parenting’ between foster parents and birth parents as prototypes of ambivalent relationships; that is, relationships based on incompatible role requirements. This incompatibility is rooted in the conflicts between (a) the professional role of foster carers and their emotional involvement in the child in their care, and (b) the status of birth parents as ‘failed parents’ (from the perspective of the authorities) and their continuous aspirations to get their child home again. The article is based on qualitative interviews with foster parents and birth parents of children in foster care in Denmark. We show how the structural ambivalence is associated with difficulties, for both foster parents and birth parents, in translating the principle of ‘the best interest of the child’ into concrete practice in out-of-home placements.

Keywords

birth parents co-parenting foster care foster parents qualitative interviews sociological ambivalence the best interest of the child

Introduction

When children are placed in foster care homes, they are living with two families, their birth family and their foster care family. In these constellations, birth parents and foster parents¹ are brought together in co-parenting relationships. This article analyses the relationship between birth parents and foster parents – a relationship that has received little attention in previous research – in a perspective inspired by the ‘sociology of ambivalence’ (Merton, 1976; Merton and Barber, 1976). We do not focus on ambivalence as related to personal characteristics or unsolved interpersonal dilemmas between birth parents and foster parents. Rather, we regard ambivalence in these relationships as arising from normative structures and role requirements related to the social institution of foster care. We analyse conflicting norms in foster care, and conflicts between prevailing ideals and the lived realities of foster care families and birth families. The article addresses these dilemmas as they are described in qualitative interviews with foster parents and birth parents of children placed in foster care in Denmark.

Previous research on the social relationships involved in foster care has tended to focus on children living in foster care and their perception of their dual family relationships (Bengtsson and Luckow, 2019; Biehal, 2014; Christiansen et al., 2013; Holland and Crowley, 2013; Pithouse and Rees, 2015; Sen and Broadhurst, 2011; Sinclair et al., 2000). Among many other findings, this research describes the importance of contact between children in foster care and their birth parents, also showing how the frequency and regularity of contacts, and professional support for these contacts, affect how the relationship develops (Biehal, 2014; Sen and Broadhurst, 2011).

Meanwhile, less research has focused on the relationships between the birth and foster parents and their perspective on each other and their mutual roles in the children’s lives. Chateauneuf et al. (2017) explored the relationship between foster care families and birth families from the perspective of the foster carers. They found that foster carers in general consider birth parents as key players in the children’s lives, and that foster carers who recognise birth parents’ contributions, as well as accepting their limitations, succeed better in maintaining a harmonious relationship (Chateauneuf et al., 2017). In another study, Höjer (2009) analysed birth parents’ perceptions of sharing the care of their child with foster parents. She showed that birth parents often experienced co-parenting as asymmetrical, feeling inferior to foster parents and as ‘parental failures’. They also felt they had important knowledge of their children which they wanted to share with the foster parents, but that this knowledge was not always respected and used (Höjer, 2009).

To summarise: there are a considerable number of studies focusing on the children’s perspective on having two families. Fewer studies have addressed the perspectives of birth and foster parents and even fewer combine the voices of both sets of parents in the same analysis. In the small number of existing studies, focus is on the cooperation and ‘workings-out’ between the two sets of parents, and as such on the functionality of the constellation. The normative ideals described in the studies are standard expectations also in Denmark; for example, that foster carers should respect and collaborate with birth parents and that birth parents need to acknowledge the necessity of foster care (Folden et al., 2014). Yet these studies do not show how complicated it is to comply with these ideals in practice, and how they often clash with the everyday realities of the lives of both foster care and birth families. In this study we wish to draw attention to the voices of both birth parents and foster parents, and to create a space where the ambivalence and complexity in their views on each other’s roles are expressed.

Theoretical Frame: Sociology of Ambivalence

From a sociological perspective, ambivalence is part of how social relations are organised in society. In their seminal text introducing a sociology of ambivalence, Merton and Barber (1976: 5) focused on ‘the ways in which ambivalence comes to be built into the structure of social statuses and roles’. In this perspective, some statuses (and their accompanying roles) are associated with conflicting normative expectations of how people should act, think and feel. Hence, ambivalence is analysed as a phenomenon associated with incompatible, and sometimes unclear and unstable, role requirements. Merton and Barber (1976) regarded ambivalence as arising from a ‘dynamic organization of roles and counter-norms’, stressing that role-relations are often characterised by oppositional expectations: for instance, universalism vs. particularism, or self-orientation vs. other-orientation – which sometimes lead to an oscillation between very different behaviours (Merton and Barber, 1976: 18).

Analysing relationships between professionals and their clients as prototypes of ambivalent role-relations, Merton and Barber described how, for instance, a physician’s status is characterised by conspicuous role conflicts, most importantly the norm of neutrality and detachment vs. the counter-norm of affectivity and compassion. In correspondence with this, the client’s/patient’s role is also often characterised by ambivalence. On the one hand, clients are expected to trust and respect the professional; on the other, clients often feel that they do not get the help they need, that their troubles are handled in the wrong way, that they are not sufficiently informed and so on (Merton and Barber, 1976: 23). In this perspective, authority is often an agent of frustration, creating a mixture of respect, fear and frustration on the part of the client. Part of this ambivalence stems from the client’s dependence on the professional’s expertise. Professionals make decisions that may have momentous consequences for the client, and unlike customers, clients are (typically) not free to ‘take their trade elsewhere’ (Merton and Barber, 1976: 24). Another aspect of Merton and Barber’s description of ambivalent role-relations concerns time. Role-relations that are protracted and/or have a non-defined temporal extension tend to be associated with more structural ambivalence than short-lived relations (Merton and Barber, 1976: 25). In Merton and Barber’s view, ambivalence accumulates with time, and especially in relations characterised by – one-sided or reciprocal – dependence.

One of the research fields where ambivalence theory has been put to empirical use is family studies, especially research focusing on relations between adult children and their parents. In an influential article, Luescher and Pillemer (1998) proposed ambivalence as a general approach to understanding intergenerational relations among adults, defining it as a two-dimensional concept including both structural and individual levels (cognitions, emotions and motivations). Like Merton and Barber (1976), Luescher and Pillemer (1998) identified conflicting norms as core ingredients in family ambivalence, showing how norms of interdependence and mutual care compete with norms of independence and self-realisation.

Since Luescher and Pillemer’s (1998) article, several scholars have contributed to the development of a sociological understanding of ambivalence in family life (such as Connidis and McMullin, 2002; Hillcoat-Nallétamby and Phillips, 2011; Szmigin and Canning, 2015). Connidis and McMullin (2002: 559), for instance, stressed the importance of structured social relations (according to, for example, class, gender, age and ethnicity) for ambivalence, and described how ‘the contradictions and paradoxes of socially structured relations are reproduced in interpersonal relationships, including those between family members’. In a similar vein, Hillcoat-Nallétamby and Phillips (2011) criticised family researchers for regarding ambivalence as residing within the individual rather than stemming from social structures and relationships. While the manifestation of ambivalence may show at the individual level, Hillcoat-Nallétamby and Phillips (2011: 206–207) traced its genesis to the embeddedness of the individual in social environments, and to chains of interdependency between social structures, norms, social interaction and individual agency.

This article is inspired by both the original sociological literature on ambivalence (first and foremost Merton and Barber, 1976), treating relationships between professionals and clients as a prototype of ambivalent relationships (see also Järvinen, 2016), and by family research proposing ambivalence as a general approach to complex family dynamics. To our knowledge, nobody has used this perspective in foster care research, although a few studies have explored the intersection of work and family within foster care, and the ambiguities associated with parenting in the context of statutory care systems (Kirton, 2013; Riggs, 2015; Schofield et al., 2013). Foster parents occupy a status at the crossroads of the professional and the private, having to live up to both professional role requirements (neutrality, expertise) and parental role requirements (love, compassion, particularism). The birth parents of children placed in care, on their part, are structurally placed in a client position, where acceptance of and respect for the social welfare system’s decisions may conflict with experiences of failure, misunderstandings and lack of knowledge. This article investigates the striking ambivalence that characterises birth parents’ accounts on foster parents, and vice versa, foster parents’ ambivalent accounts on birth parents.

The aim of the article is twofold: it is a contribution to the research tradition on foster care families – focusing on the relationship between foster parents and birth parents which has not been much studied – but it also aims at contributing to the theoretical development of the sociological theory of ambivalence in family life. Merton and Barber (1976) stressed dependence and the (long or undecided) duration of this dependence as important factors contributing to ambivalence. In our study as well, co-parenting relationships are characterised by mutual dependence among parties who have not necessarily chosen each other, and often by uncertainty as regards the duration of the relationship (we return to these aspects later). Compared to previous research on the relationships between birth parents and foster care parents, our interviews show a darker and more complex picture of co-parenting. Most of the interviewees are aware of the norms defining good co-parenting (mutual respect, collaboration, focus on the child’s best interests), yet these ideals are only part of the picture of very demanding relationships, regulated by counter-norms as well as by the complex realities of both birth parents’ and foster care families’ lives.

Context and Methods

In Denmark the number of children placed in out-of-home care has fluctuated between 11,000 and 14,000 for the past 30–40 years, corresponding to 1–1.2 per cent of all children under 18 (Andersen and Jensen, 2016; Lausten and Jørgensen, 2017). Alongside this relative stability in the number of out-of-home placements, data from Statistics Denmark show two trends. First, reflecting an international development, there has been a growing emphasis on foster care as the preferred form of out-of-home placement in Denmark (Bryderup et al., 2017; Fernandez and Barth, 2010). Danish register data show an increase in foster care placements from 30 per cent of all out-of-home placements in 1980 to almost 65 per cent in 2017, and a corresponding decrease in institutional placements (Lausten et al., 2015; Statistics Denmark, 2017). Second, the length of time children spend in out-of-home care has increased considerably, with the average duration of placements being 34 months in 2010 as compared to 13 months in 1985 (Andersen and Jensen, 2016). An important difference between Denmark and many other countries, for example, the USA and the UK, is that adoptions of foster care children are extremely rare: according to the statistics, only 13 Danish-born children were adopted in 2016, while in the UK the number of children adopted from care was 4690 (Boddy, 2019).

According to Danish law, the primary function of foster care is to offer the child a safe and caring environment with close and stable relationships to adults (Children’s Reform, 2011: §46). Instructions from the municipality of Copenhagen state that foster care children should be ‘included in the family on equal terms with the family’s other children’, and foster care families should regard this inclusion ‘as potentially for life’ (Centre for Foster Care, 2018). Foster parents are paid remunerations to cover their costs and the time they could otherwise have spent working outside the home. These remunerations are set by evaluating, for example, the scope of the caring task, the level of contact with the biological family and the foster parents’ qualifications (Kjeldsen and Kjeldsen, 2010).

As regards birth parents, the law stresses the importance of them being present in the child’s life:

Support shall be provided in the best interests of the child or young person and shall be designed to ensure continuity in childhood and youth [. . .] for instance by supporting the child’s or young person’s family relations and other network. (Consolidation Act on Social Services, 2015: §46, 1)

The law also stipulates: ‘When possible, the difficulties of the child or young person shall be resolved in consultation and cooperation with his/her family’ (Consolidation Act on Social Services, 2015: §46, 3). Furthermore, birth parents are appointed a support person with the aim to best assist them in resolving their problems and to help them to provide the best care for the child, ‘on its return to the home, if applicable, or in their contact with the child during the period of placement’ (Consolidation Act on Social Services, 2015: §54, 2). In general, the emphasis on well-functioning relationships between the children and their birth families supports the policy objective, that the children should move back home whenever this is assessed as being in their best interest (Children’s Reform, 2011).

In terms of socio-economic status, there are marked differences between birth families and foster care families. Birth parents of children in out-of-home care tend to have low levels of education, incomes far below average, limited labour market participation and (not unexpectedly) a large prevalence of registered social problems (e.g. criminality, substance use problems) (Andersen and Jensen, 2016). Furthermore, single parents are strongly overrepresented among the birth parents (Andersen and Jensen, 2016). In contrast, the majority of foster care families consist of two parents, who are relatively well educated, typically within pedagogy, health care or social work. Also, foster care parents are often older (45+) than birth parents, with considerable labour market experience, a stable economy, good housing conditions and experience of (private and/or public) child care (National Social Appeals Board, 2017). All in all, the co-parenting we analyse in this article takes place between two groups of people who are very differently placed in terms of social position and resources.

The study draws on in-depth qualitative interviews from an ethnographic study of everyday life in foster care families (Luckow, 2019). The present article is centred on 15 interviews with birth parents² and 16 interviews in total with eight foster care couples who were interviewed twice.

The foster parents were contacted through the municipality of Copenhagen. Information about the study was sent to all foster care families connected to Copenhagen municipality, and interested families were asked to contact the researchers. Participation was voluntary and it was stressed that no identifiable information would be traceable to the specific foster care families by their employer, the municipality. The criterion for recruitment was that the families should be ‘regular foster care families’; that is, with no prior (family or other) relations to the child before the placement. An additional criterion was that the foster care families had a minimum of six months of experience from one or several foster care placements. Eight foster care couples, who all consisted of a female and a male foster parent, were included. The families had between five and 13 years of foster care experience and all had undertaken more than one placement. In two families both parents were full-time foster carers, in three families the wife was a full-time foster carer, in two families the husband was a full-time foster carer, while in one family both partners worked full-time outside the home. The couples ranged from having one to three children in care at the time of the interviews, and the children’s ages varied from infant to 15 years old.

The birth parents were contacted through more informal channels. The project was presented in different non-governmental organisation (NGO) fora, for instance an organisation for parents with children in out-of-home care, and a number of closed Facebook groups were approached. Of the 15 interviews with birth parents, 10 were with mothers, three were with fathers, while in two interviews both birth parents participated. Most parents were living on social security, a few held jobs, typically temporary and/or part-time (although information about this was not systematic in the interviews) and all had their own place to live.

For the birth parents, the interview guide focused on the period and the factors leading to the placement, the parent’s current role in the child’s life, the parent’s relationships with the foster parents and professionals, as well as prospects for the future. The interviews lasted between one and one-and-a-half hours. For the foster parents, the interview guide covered themes such as their background, motivations for becoming foster parents, experiences from prior placements and present everyday life with the child/children currently in their care, as well as their relations with birth parents and social welfare professionals. These interviews generally lasted from one-and-a-half hours to two hours. All 31 interviews were audio-recorded and later fully transcribed. The quotes used in this article have been strictly anonymised: participants are presented under pseudonyms and all information that could be traced back to individuals has been changed or omitted.

The two authors of this article coded the interviews independently (initial sentence-by-sentence coding). For the present analysis we focused on the parts of the interviews where birth parents and foster parents talked about each other: conceptions of their own role, each other’s roles, co-parental relationships, possibilities and challenges in co-parenting and so on. We then compared our codes and decided to tune in on the phenomenon of ambivalence in the interviews, due to the overwhelming frequency of accounts indicating contradictions, ambiguities and role conflicts in co-parenting. Working abductively, we used sociological theory on ambivalence to inspire our further analysis (Charmaz, 2006; Järvinen, 2020). Merton and Barber’s (1976) writings about conflicting role requirements helped us identify two dimensions of relational incompatibilities in the interviews. The first concerned foster care parents as neutral professionals vs. emotionally involved (co-)parents; the second concerned birth parents as representing both interrupted (‘failed’) and continuous parenthood. We then re-read all interviews, gathering the accounts representing (or contradicting) this understanding of role ambivalence, and compared our respective samples of quotes. We picked the accounts we both regarded as representative (and illustrative) of the interviews, also focusing on the role played by time (especially indeterminate periods of out-of-home placements), and dependence in the interview accounts.

We now turn to the interviews with birth parents and foster parents respectively, analysing how they view each other’s role in the children’s life. The interviews may be comprehended as accounts involving ‘multiple voices’ and ‘rationales’ (see, for instance, Frank, 2012; Järvinen, 2000, 2001) and as accounts reflecting ‘uncanny’ experiences (cf. Jeyasingham’s, 2018 analysis of indistinct and indeterminate occurrences described by research participants). We will show how participants use a mixture of logics, among them: rationales from the law and regulations defining good co-parenting, and rationales describing emotionally involved parenthood. We will also show how both categories of parents struggle to ‘hold their own’ in the interviews, meaning that they seek to sustain the value of their own identity in response to the questions asked and the themes discussed (Frank, 2012; Järvinen, 2000, 2001, 2020). Accounts about parenting and family life are not morally neutral, but regulated by strong societal norms, not the least the imperative that the needs of children should always take precedence over the needs of adults (see McCarthy et al., 2000; May, 2008; Smart and Neale, 1999). In the words of McCarthy et al. (2000: 785), ‘family lives are an area where people’s moral identities are crucially at stake’. This is the case in our study as well, where both birth parents and foster parents tend to signal that they do their utmost to live up to their (foster) parental responsibilities. In this sense, the accounts we present below are not just tales about ambivalent relationships, but also moral tales about parenthood.

Ambivalent Relationships

Birth Parents Describing Foster Parents

Birth parents’ accounts on foster care families were permeated with ambivalence, centred on two main themes. First, the ambivalence of birth parents concerned the double role of foster parents as being both professional ‘helpers’ and caring/loving (co-)parents, who in their parental role were often experienced as a threat by birth parents. Second, birth parents struggled with their own contradictory role expectations. On the one hand they were positioned (by law and by all involved parties in the foster care system) and experienced by themselves as being central to their children’s well-being – as discussed above, a good relationship with the birth parents is described as important for foster care children’s development. On the other hand, the whole institution of foster care positions birth parents as ‘unsuccessful’ parents, with the placement of their children in foster care being the evidence of this. In the following, we show how this structural ambivalence manifests itself in the interviews with birth parents. Later, we will also show how this ambivalence is related to birth parents’ conceptions of foster care parents being more privileged than they are, both in terms of resources (see section above about the societal positions of birth parents and foster parents), and in having the whole foster care institution ‘on their side’.

From the perspective of the interviewed birth parents, the professional part of the foster care parents’ role was typically not a problem. They mentioned specific skills among foster parents (e.g. nursery experience, school teaching, youth work) in an appreciative way, as something that could benefit their children. Yet birth parents also wanted foster parents to love their children, and treat them like their own. The standpoint of all the interviewed birth parents was that affectionate family relationships are better than detached relationships, and that it is in the children’s best interest if they are treated equally with the foster care family’s own children. However, foster parents should not become ‘real parents’ for their foster care children. Although loving them and caring for them, they should never intrude on the position occupied by birth parents.

Our first example is Louise (21 years old) and David (29) who had a one-and-a-half-year-old boy, removed from home when he was six weeks old. Both parents described a history of mental health problems and criminality, and both had grown up in foster care families and at youth institutions. Louise and David said the following about their son’s foster care family:

They give our boy a fantastic home, and the most wonderful loving care [. . .] All in all, we have been very lucky.

Yes, but I also worry, and I think every parent in our situation would worry about what will happen. . ..

There is this attachment now.

They started attaching themselves to our boy. This means that it will get more and more difficult for us to get him home again. They see him as their child too – luckily, I should add.

They should see him as their child, right [. . .] But the thing is that it hurts when our son calls her [foster care mother] ‘mum’. He calls us both mum now, and that’s hard.

Like the clients in Merton and Barber’s (1976) analysis of sociological ambivalence, Louise and David felt powerless and badly informed by the authorities, and they also thought they had lost the rights to their son: ‘he is state property now’, as Louise put it. They said they did not know why he was removed from them in the first place. There were psychiatric diagnoses and tests of parental capabilities, and the couple’s interaction with their newborn son was observed at a family institution, but Louise and David did not agree with the test results. They saw the ‘failures of the system’ as an important reason for their difficulties in building a close relationship with their son, and for their disadvantage as compared to the foster parents. David explained:

You put a small baby in a family where there is tranquillity and love. No wonder he will come to feel that these are my parents. Whereas here with us, he only saw sorrow and despair because we were thrown around by the authorities.

Emma (23) also felt she had to compete with her child’s foster care family when it came to preserving and developing her parental role. Her five-year-old daughter was placed in foster care when she was one-and-a-half. At the time of the interview, Emma was fighting for the right to have more access to her daughter, whom she only saw for two hours per month. Like Louise and David, she both praised and criticised her child’s foster parents:

They love my daughter dearly, and that’s altogether positive because then I know that she gets all the love she needs. But they have also started to have feelings of ownership over her [. . .] and that’s where I feel that a gulf is developing between her and me.

Emma was of the opinion that the foster parents held her daughter’s mental health problems (signs of autism) against her, in the sense that they found the daughter’s meetings with Emma to be stressful and upsetting for her. Emma said this was ‘nonsense’ and that she thought there was another explanation: ‘I can see this from their point of view, they feel she’s their child now. And I’m the irritating give-her-back-to-me mother intruding into their sphere.’ Yet Emma was not sure she wanted her daughter to come back and live with her permanently, because her daughter had a good life with her foster parents. This was also because they had socio-economic resources Emma did not have:

When I visited her the first time – you should see this place: a beautiful, large country house, a big garden, sheep and chickens and a dog and a cat and you name it, a playground and beautiful green surroundings. The first thing I thought was ‘well, yes, this is exactly what I have always wanted to give her’.

Other birth parents also talked about their own lack of resources as compared to those of the foster parents. Rebecca (23) and Kim (27) had a two-year-old son placed in foster care when he was newborn. Kim said this about the foster care family:

They are very well-off, I would say between middle and upper-class people. And what are we? I’m living on social security, haven’t had a job for years [. . .] So when our son comes home one day it will be to a 75-square-metre flat compared to their maybe 200-square-metre villa with a huge garden. Now that will be a turnaround [. . .] I am not saying he should be placed in a social welfare family, I am just saying that all these material things will leave a void in him if he comes home to us.

When the interviewees talked about resources, they were not just referring to economic assets. Some birth parents also said that the foster parents, due to their educational backgrounds and practical experiences, were much better at ‘handling the system’ than they were. Several birth parents had pending cases about custody or increased access to their children with the authorities, and lack of information, ‘mistreatment’ by welfare professionals, ‘unfair decisions’ and a general mistrust of the system were common themes in the interviews. Like the clients described by Merton and Barber (1976: 26–28), our interviewees were concerned with troubles of profound significance (not least their relationship to their children), and involved in a contingent situation where the professionals’ decisions could have enormous consequences. Such relationships are, in Merton and Barber’s view, bound to (among other things) create feelings of uncertainty, helplessness and sometimes downright hostility towards the professionals involved.

In many cases, the interviewed birth parents saw the foster parents as ‘part of the system’. One example was Marian (40) who said she understood that her two children (both placed in foster care eight years ago) had problems, as described by social workers and therapists, but could not accept that ‘they think my kids have these problems because of me’. Marian talked about one of the meetings where her case was discussed in this way:

My family counsellor sat here [shows] and the social worker and the foster care mother and the psychologist sat in a row, and then there was me, little mouse, alone at the opposite side. I sat facing these four bitches telling me I wasn’t a good enough mother.

Over the years when her children had been in family care, Marian experienced that the foster care family and the authorities had increasingly come to collaborate in a way that excluded her: ‘It’s all about “how can we keep mum out of this as much as possible without her noticing that she is kept out”.’ In order to achieve this, she said they ‘tell me what I want to hear, for instance that the birth mother is so important’, nevertheless doing all they can to ‘prevent me from seeing my children, because they claim my kids cannot cope with me and I am bad for them’.

Foster Parents Describing Birth Parents

The ambivalence of foster parents concerned the same contradictory role requirements as those in the interviews with birth parents, but now described from the opposite point of view. As regards the role of birth parents, all interviewed foster parents were aware of the standard expectations concerning foster care, stressing the importance of the children’s knowledge of their biological heritage and of a continuous relationship with the birth parents. Foster parents typically described birth parents in a respectful way, showing an understanding for their often difficult life circumstances. They focused on their own responsibility in assisting and encouraging the children in maintaining and developing the relationship with their parents. Yet the contacts between foster care children and their birth parents were also regarded as challenging, and in many interviews a direct clash was described between these contacts and the adherence to the principle of ‘the children’s best interests’.

Birgit (46) and Christopher (47) had a five-year-old boy, Theo, in their care who had lived with them since he was newborn. From the beginning of the placement, there had been supervised contact between Theo and his birth parents at a visitation facility. Birgit recalled memories from when Theo was a few months old: ‘I drove him to these meetings every week and he screamed when we returned. He was completely out of it because of the visitation.’ After an incident where the birth mother ‘lost her temper’ and ‘everything ended in chaos’, the visitations were paused for a while by the authorities, and ‘in those weeks Theo just grew, he gained weight and became calm’. When the meetings started again – at long intervals due to the mother’s problems – the foster parents began to question for whose sake the contact was to be upheld: ‘I felt like, this is simply not in Theo’s interest. You had to hand him over to some strangers he didn’t know at all and who didn’t know how to relate to him’ (Birgit); ‘He couldn’t remember them from time to time, and it always ended with him screaming – it was a kind of abuse, I think’ (Christopher). With time, the visitations brought new challenges. The birth mother was highly inconsistent in showing up, which made Theo distressed. Birgit explained: ‘Every time he asked me “Do you think mum will come today?” and I could only answer “I really don’t know”, and Theo said “Do you think it has something to do with me?”’ Birgit and Christopher said they felt split between their aim to protect Theo and the demand that he continued seeing his mother: ‘It’s our responsibility to make sure the contact between them holds, but when I think about it – being a child in a family where the adults disappear every now and then when they cannot handle it. That’s unbearable’ (Birgit).

In parallel with this, Birgit and Christopher described their own role conflicts – in the sense of being both parents and professional carers – in relation to Theo. On the one hand they regarded him as their child:

He wasn’t born to us but he belongs to us and is loved by us as much as our other children, right [. . .] He calls us mum and dad and he will inherit from us one day like the others. If you are part of the family, you are part of the family. (Christopher)

On the other hand, they were aware of the fact that they needed to act as professionals:

You have no legal rights as a foster care family. You may lose him with a month’s notice although you have had him for 10 years [. . .] You cannot go into this with the expectations of being a normal family. You have to think of yourself as something else [. . .] We shouldn’t ask what is best for us or for his biological family. We should always see ourselves as Theo’s representatives and ask what is best for him. (Christopher)

Several of the foster parents struggled with the question ‘for whose sake’ the contact with birth parents was kept up. Linda (48) and Peter (52) had two girls, Lilly (four) and Johanna (11), in their care, both of whose parents had severe substance use problems. Peter said:

According to the legislation it is the children’s needs that are important. But this has nothing to do with their needs [. . .] We would never subject Lilly to harm but we do that every week because we are told to do so. . . for the sake of the parents. She reacts anything from a few hours to two days after going to a visitation. And that’s hard to witness, because we know what it does to her. We are the ones putting her to bed afterwards, we are the ones getting up in the night when she calls and asks us the question she always asks: ‘Will you look after me?’ And [we say] ‘yes, always!’ (Peter)

Being the children’s everyday (co-)parents with feelings involved and also the ones who as professionals took the children to visitations and witnessed how they were affected made Linda and Peter feel like accomplices in the birth parents’ negative impact (as they saw it) on the children’s lives. At the time of the interview, Lilly’s birth father had started the process to get her home in his custody. Linda said:

We have to live with this ticking timebomb of him getting Lilly home. One may think that we should just let him do it, why should we care [. . .] But we have had her since she was little, and we are human beings too, you know.

A dilemma mentioned by several foster parents was what information they should give the children about their birth parents’ problems. In general, children in foster care receive limited information about their parents’ situation. This is due to privacy policies in the social welfare system, but also because the authorities – and the foster parents – want to protect the children from acquiring full insight into their parents’ problems. In line with this, foster parents said they always emphasised the birth parents’ resources rather than their problems and told the children their parents do the best they can for them. However, many foster parents also mentioned that the children (especially older ones) needed an explanation as to why they could not live with their birth family. As things were now, they said, many children tended to get an unrealistic picture of the conditions of their birth parents. For instance, Laura (53) thought that her 11-year-old foster care daughter was given a ‘wrong impression’ when all her time together with her birth family was spent on going to amusement parks, restaurants, the cinema and other activities organised by the social authorities: ‘She loses sense of why she is placed out-of-home. . . and then it’s up to me to be the evil one who continuously corrects her perception of things.’ Thus, the foster parents felt it was difficult to adjust the children’s perceptions of their birth family to reality (as they perceived it) in a way that was both honest and respectful of the parents.

These difficulties were further compounded by the fact that many foster parents did not feel the birth parents reciprocated the consideration. One example of this was Susan (58) and Willy (61), who at the time of the study had three foster care children living with them. Susan and Willy talked about the importance of ‘staying professional’ and never criticising the birth parents, although they ‘let down the children over and over again’ (by disappearing for weeks and leaving their children worried, forgetting birthdays, etc.). Susan and Willy also found this difficult because they knew the birth parents often criticised them in front of the children. Susan said: ‘We are not allowed to tell the truth about them [. . .] but we are always criticised by mum or whoever is at home, because they are a bit envious.’ She continued: ‘We are used to being spoken badly about [. . .] but sometimes you think to yourself: “argh, I can’t stand this anymore”.’ Later in the interview Susan again explained how she needed to ‘act professional’, and not as a hurt parent: ‘It is just so important that the children feel that we like their parents just as they are’ and Willy joined in: ‘even though you might not like them, you just have to say you do’.

Discussion

Researchers have increasingly stressed that we should embrace ambivalence in qualitative interviews. We should respect the polyphonic and open-ended character of interviewees’ accounts and avoid simplifying them and treating them as definite and unambiguous (Frank, 2010, 2012; Sandberg et al., 2015). Interview accounts represent a negotiation of viewpoints, which are often fragmented, with individual parts of an interview contrasting each other (Frank, 2010; Järvinen, 2000; Sandberg et al., 2015). In this sense, ambivalence is to be expected in all qualitative interviews, if only we as researchers are attentive enough to notice it. Merton and Barber (1976), however, did not analyse people’s multifaceted experiences in general. They focused on role-relationships that were ‘prototypes’ of ambivalence, arguing, like we have done in this article, that some statuses contain larger measures of incompatibilities in their social definitions than others (Connidis and McMullin, 2002; Hillcoat-Nallétamby and Phillips, 2011; Järvinen, 2016; Merton and Barber, 1976). In this perspective, the normative expectations of attitudes, beliefs and behaviours assigned to some statuses – here, those of foster parents and birth parents of children placed in care – are bound to manifest themselves in contradictory relationships.

In our study, both foster parents and birth parents seemed to ‘speak in multiple voices’ (Frank, 2012: 34), mixing and alternating between different rationales related to the phenomenon of co-parenting. Codes of the law and accompanying instructions – stressing rational, pragmatic collaboration – were often referred to, but these accounts were challenged by strongly emotional accounts pertinent to close relationships (love of the child, fear of losing him/her, feelings of being let down by the authorities).

Both groups of parents tended to use the principle ‘in the best interest of the child’ when describing their own and each other’s roles. Birth parents stressed how a strong, continuous relationship with their children was decisive for the children’s welfare, simultaneously claiming that foster parents (with their ‘feelings of ownership’) and the authorities obstructed the maintenance of this relationship. They talked about foster parents being unwilling to share their children’s everyday experiences, foster parents making wrong decisions (related to, for example, school issues and spare-time activities) and foster parents who lacked flexibility when it came to arranging visitations. Foster parents in turn tended to stress the negative effects of the meetings between children and birth parents, (often) arguing that continued contact was more for the sake of the parents than the children. They also described how the contacts with birth parents affected their whole family life: birth parents calling in the middle of the night, birth parents attempting to hinder family holiday travels, birth parents cancelling appointments over and over again and insisting on visiting them on ill-timed occasions (for instance, New Year’s Eve). Despite such incidents, which were all described as stressful for the children, foster parents said they did their best to support the relationship to birth parents. In this sense, foster parents ‘held their own’ by means of their accounts (Frank, 2012: 33), presenting themselves as professional co-parents living up to the demands of the law. Similarly, birth parents said they did their utmost to accommodate and that they were ‘willing to pocket a lot of insults’ (as one interviewee put it) if only they knew it was in the best interests of their children. In this way, both foster parents and birth parents signalled that they were responsible adults, doing their best to comply with the demands of the foster care system, even if this meant forsaking their own needs.

Merton and Barber (1976) did not see ambivalent relationships as a negative phenomenon. They described professionals (e.g. physicians) as alternating between instrumental impersonality and compassionate concern because of the openness of their role: ‘This alternation of subroles evolves as a social device for helping people in designated statuses [. . .] to fulfil their functions’ (Merton and Barber, 1976: 18). As regards the role of clients/patients, Merton and Barber were more pessimistic. In contrast to the professionals, clients/patients seemed trapped in a negative form of role ambivalence where distrust, resentment and anxiety challenged rather than contributed constructively to their meetings with professionals (Merton and Barber, 1976: 21ff). In accordance with this, the interviewed birth parents in our study – occupying a prototypical client role – tended to feel exposed and misunderstood, and they often questioned the motivations of both the authorities and the foster parents. Some of them regarded foster parents as being ‘part of the system’, and as powerful agents who ‘reign over their children’s lives’ and ‘have a final say in all matters’ (quotes from interviews). Foster parents, however, can only partly be compared to the professionals in Merton and Barber’s analysis. The impression emerging from the interviews was that many foster parents felt vulnerable, and in a certain sense to be ‘clients’ themselves, experiencing anxiousness, insecurity, helplessness (see also Riggs, 2015 for a discussion of the foster carer’s position in relation to the child protection system). This was particularly visible in their accounts about the unpredictable duration of the foster care relationship, a question where they felt utterly dependent on the authorities, and one that could distress them as much as it did the birth parents.

Merton and Barber (1976) stressed the importance of time – relationships of long or unspecified duration – for sociological ambivalence. As already mentioned, co-parenting in Danish foster care has two characteristics relevant for the question of time. First, Danish law stresses the importance of stability in out-of-home care. In accordance with this, the average length of out-of-home placements has continuously increased in the last decades (see methods section). Second, Danish foster care policy puts a lot of emphasis on a continued relationship between birth parents and their children in foster care. Comparing Denmark to other countries (e.g. its Nordic neighbours), researchers have described a ‘birth family focus’ as a historic characteristic of Danish child welfare services (Bryderup et al., 2017) and have shown how Danish placement policies, more than those in other countries, have tended to pay homage to the rights of birth parents. This combination of long foster care placements and continuous maintenance/support of birth family relationships means that Danish foster care is indeed based on ‘co-parenting’ relationships. Danish foster carers are considered (co-)parents and not just ‘carers’ – cf. the terminology foster care mother (plejemor) and foster care father (plejefar) in Danish compared to the term foster carers in, for example the UK and the USA.

Ambivalence comprehended as contradictory emotions – as ambivalence is often approached in psychology – cannot capture the challenges that our interviewees struggled with in their respective roles. It was not contradictory feelings (say, mutual respect vs. envy and resentment) per se that were the most noticeable characteristics of the co-parenting relationships in our study (see Connidis and McMullin, 2002; Coser, 1966; Hillcoat-Nallétamby and Phillips, 2011 on sociological ambivalence). It was challenges related to a broad spectrum of heterogeneous social commitments and difficult-to-combine role expectations regarding co-parenting, many of them reflecting the unsolved dilemma of how the principle of ‘the best interest of the child’ should be operationalised in practice. It was also a historical Danish ‘birth family focus’ defining family reunion as the ultimate goal for out-of-home care in combination with continuously growing lengths of foster care placements that filled our interviews with ambivalence.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: the second author’s work was supported by a grant from Trygfonden, Denmark.

ORCID iD

Stine Tankred Luckow

Notes

Margaretha Järvinen is professor in sociology at the University of Copenhagen. She has for many years worked with research on social problems: for example, alcohol and drug addiction, homelessness, prostitution and children growing up in families with alcohol problems. She has also published books and articles on youth research, qualitative methods, symbolic interactionism and clients’ meetings with different types of human service organisations.

Stine Tankred Luckow is a researcher at VIVE – The Danish National Center for Social Science Research. She recently finished her PhD-dissertation at the department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. In her dissertation she explored everyday life in foster care families and the intertwining of private and public domains in foster care. Her interests lie primarily in the areas of family sociology, vulnerable families, children and youth and the placement of children and youth in statutory care.

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