ABSTRACT
With the 1964 Social Care Act, what remained of the legal responsibility for maintenance and care between family members came to an end in Norway. From that time, the legal obligation was limited to parental responsibility for their children, and the duty of a married couple to support each other. This means, for example, that neither grandparents nor aunts and uncles have a formal responsibility for their grandchildren, nieces and nephews, neither financially nor in any other way. When grandparents, aunts and uncles become foster parents for a child in their own family, they nevertheless take on a responsibility which may last for several years. In this chapter we describe who takes on such a responsibility, what their family relationships to the child are and how we can understand why precisely these family members commit to taking the responsibility for children. We also touch on some aspects of the socio-economic situation of kinship foster parents. The topics are illustrated by our own research as well as that of others, and on theories of family and family relationships in family and welfare sociology.
