När det inte längre brister i omsorgen : En diskursstudie gällande tillräcklig föräldraförmåga vid bedömning om LVU-vårdens upphörande

Sammanfattning: Swedish authorities have the responsibility to protect children from bad caring. In the Swedish welfare system it is possible to take a child out of its original home when there is a suspicion about a child being maltreated. The Swedish law regarding The Compulsory Care of Young Persons Act, LVU, legalize this intervention. When using this intervention, the parents of the child are not seen as giving the child a ”good enough” care. The expression ”good enough”, or ”tillräcklig föräldraförmåga” is well known and used throughout the social care system, even though there is no actual definition of what ”good enough”-parenting entails. Instead it is up to the social worker who is in charge of the investigation of a child’s wellbeing to make the decision if the”good enough”-parenting exist in every individually case. In this study ten court orders have been viewed with the purpose of finding, and examine, a discourse of ”good enough”-parenting. In these specific court cases the parents have requested to be reunited with their children who have previously been removed from their home under the law). In search of this discourse, we found that the complexity of finding a definition of what is seen as ”good enough”, are harder than we expected. Even though the authorities in Sweden have the same law to build upon, the result of the ten court orders shows that the investigators have a big capacity to self-interpret what is ”good enough”. The outcome of the investigations that eventually end up in court have all distinguished a different definition of what is ”good enough”. This results in different kinds of determinations for something that is supposed to be interpreted in a similar way to preserve the rule of law. Keywords ”Good enough”-parenting, ”good enough”,  The Compulsory Care of Young Persons Act (LVU), decision making process, interpretative prerogative.   Nyckelord Tillräcklig föräldraförmåga, tillräcklig, lagen med särskilda bestämmelser om vård av unga, LVU, beslutsprocess, tolkningsföreträde.