Att erkänna barn i familjehem- en kvalitativ studie där barns röster lyfts fram

Sammanfattning: The aim of the study was to examine what makes children in foster care experience participation in matters concerning themselves and their view on valuable relationships with birth family, social workers and foster family. To accomplish this we applied Axel Honneth's theory of recognition on four autobiographies written by adults who lived in foster homes in Sweden during their childhood. On those we made a qualitative content analysis. Recognition theory is divided into three parts, love, rights and solidarity, which allowed us to analyze the different phenomena we saw in the empiric and in previous research. It gave us an opportunity to understand in what way children in foster care can be recognized or not and what it can mean for these children. The main finding of our study was that children's participation is lacking and the importance of their relationships is overlooked, which indicates that children are not seen as rights holders. In some cases, we have found children whose categorical rights have been met, but it was extremely rare for children's individual rights to be met. Furthermore we identified a possibility that recognition and good relationships from foster parents can have a compensatory effect on the lack of recognition from social workers and/or birth parents. In cases where there was an ongoing harmful contact with birth parents, the compensatory effect was not enough to ensure the child's mental health.