Entering foster care: Foster children's accounts* 1 (original) (raw)

This paper examines children's accounts of the events leading up to their entry into foster care. Using C. Wright Mills' concept of vocabularies of motives, these accounts are treated as rationales with which informants explain deviant living arrangements to representatives of the dominant culture. The paper distinguishes between accounts which describe how informants were drawn into foster care unwillingly and those in which they reported that they or their parents chose to use foster care to solve family problems. In the latter set of accounts, informants described how family members used foster care to reinforce a traditional family division of labor. Fathers relied on foster care because they co&d not take responsibility for housework and childcare; mothers for help in controlling and disciplining their children, and teenagers for assistance in expanding their opportunities and their freedom from parental control. These accounts reveal more about shared assumptions and understandings surrounding the concept of "normal" family relations than they do about the "real reasons" for the status of foster children.