This Norwegian study examines how unaccompanied refugee minors in foster care (re)create a sense of home over time, identifying security, familiarity, and autonomy as key intertwined aspects. It underscores the dynamic role of past experiences, present circumstances, and future aspirations, emphasizing the need for foster parents and child welfare workers to support cultural, relational, and personal continuity.

In Norway, legislation requires consideration of a child’s culture in all phases of child welfare work. Through a quantitative content analysis of 285 child welfare expert assessment reports, the authors explored experts’ utilisation of a cultural perspective, comparing reports concerning immigrant and non-immigrant background children.

An analysis of 14 national foster care policies across six European countries found that while most acknowledge children’s cultural, ethnic, religious, and linguistic backgrounds, they provide little concrete guidance on ensuring relational and cultural continuity—particularly for children with migrant backgrounds. The study highlights four policy patterns, including prioritizing adult over peer relationships, emphasizing parental contact over extended family or transnational ties, assuming Western cultural norms, and struggling to balance immediate care needs with maintaining cultural and relational connections.

This study addresses children’s right to family life when placed in public care and questions how the Child Welfare Service and the Child Welfare Tribunal understand and facilitate this right within a Norwegian context.

Norwegian youth in out-of-home care move three times as frequently as their peers. Such placement instability is linked to negative outcomes in terms of social attachment, well-being, educational achievements, health, and future opportunities. Norway implemented a new child welfare service reform in 2022 that increased the municipalities responsibilities for out-of-home care. This study evaluates how the implemented measures affect the number of moves within out-of-home care in Trøndelag county. Norway.

This article explores how the monitoring of foster homes in Norway is experienced by children and youths who have been exposed to what they consider abusive behaviour by foster parents. Using a thematic narrative theoretical framework, the article shows that a common narrative in the youths’ accounts is a story of mistrust towards social workers and monitoring officers, which relates to a general mistrust towards the child welfare service.

This article aims to build knowledge, from a life-course perspective, of foster carers’ views of the transition from care to adulthood for young people with mental health problems by interviewing carers from foster homes in Norway and Sweden.

In this chapter in the book "Child Welfare and the Value of Family Privacy", the author discusses moderate alternatives to address problems of the family by enhancing the presence of state agencies in family life. The author asks if organising families as foster homes is less morally objectionable than raising children in families by examining the child welfare system in Norway.

This chapter in the book "Child Welfare and the Value of Family Privacy" addresses aims and challenges in the processes of including children and youth in foster families and suggests a solution inspired by anthropological literature. The author argues that the ‘best interests of the child’ are closely tied to staying in a stable foster home, which emerged in interviews with children in the Norwegian Child Welfare Services (CWS) and foster parents.

In this article, the focus is on youth with minority backgrounds living in majority foster homes and their views on cultural continuity. What is important for these young people when developing their identity in foster homes? The study is based on qualitative interviews with nine adolescents from minority
backgrounds who live in majority foster homes, which are homes in which one or both foster parents have ethnic Norwegian backgrounds. The analysis was conducted using a hermeneutic phenomenology methodology and shows that youth do not necessarily want cultural continuity in the sense of living in a culturally “matched” foster home.