ABSTRACT
Drawing on discourse analysis of interviews with child welfare experts, the chapter focuses on representations of birth parents of children in alternative care. The research questions are: what kind of discourses do child welfare experts use when talking about the birth parents and their parenthood? How do these experts view the role of the birth parents in the lives of these children? In spite of recent policy changes, children placed into alternative care are still conceptualised as ‘social orphans’, which emphasises the total absence of birth parents and the finality of the placement. In the empirical data, a persistent discourse of hopelessness, which gives little space for the birth parents’ ability to change or to have a meaningful role in the life of their children, is challenged by calls for more support for and cooperation with birth parents to enable family reunification. While there seems to be a growing will to work with birth parents, insufficient skills and methods to realise this still remain a problem. The results of this study suggest that representations of birth parents of children in the child welfare system are changing, and that they still need to change to enable the effective development of family support services.
