ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how foster children in France navigate between two potentially competing socialization agents: their birth parents – often from marginalized social backgrounds – and their foster families, selected for their socially legitimate educational practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in SOS children’s villages and foster families, the author explores how children learn to position themselves socially according to the legitimacy they attribute to their caregivers. Children are socialized to attribute legal and symbolic authority to their birth parents (as the “real” family), while foster families often provide more structured and institutionally approved caregiving. Children are therefore caught between two hierarchies: the moral and legal primacy of their parents, and the institutional legitimacy of caregivers. Over time, some learn to disqualify one or the other, depending on their experiences. The chapter argues that a child’s social position is not just inherited or passively absorbed through proximity but actively shaped through their relational position to adults – whether recognized as “parental” or not. Legitimacy depends on social class, parental status, and daily caregiving. Ultimately, the chapter suggests that class belonging and social reproduction hinge on whether, how, and under what conditions a child can (or cannot) become the “child of” someone.
