ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses children’s participation in Swedish out-of-home care and, in particular, how authorities responsible for monitoring care deal with participation. Many countries have increased monitoring to ensure good quality of services, but the actual possibilities to impact children’s participation from the outside are not evident. In this chapter, local supervision of foster care and state inspections of residential care serve as empirical examples. The chapter discusses the different preconditions for participation between foster and residential care settings and the possibilities of monitoring activities to impact informal (i.e., everyday issues such as choice of meals, leisure activities and relationships) and formal (i.e., placement issues such as choice of social workers and case conferences) participation. The chapter shows the difficulties monitoring participation processes in foster and residential care, but that the approaches and attitudes of social workers and inspectors matter when it comes to promoting children’s participation.
