Foster care and the professionalisation of parenting
Foster care and the professionalisation of parenting

Summary/Abstract: A number of works dealing with the sociology of childhood talk about the recent trend in European policies to shift from the state to the parents and families and general the responsibility for the child's health, education and welfare. This increase in private parental responsibility has been accompanied by an amplification of parental supervision by experts, taking the form of a professionalisation of parents as carers and educators, achieved by defining the parents as partners to the specialists in various domains connected to child welfare, as well as by promoting parent participation, collaboration between parents and various types of specialists in schools and social and legal services. The process of professionalizing the parents as educator occurs in the general context of promoting the children's rights included in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and their dissemination as ideology by the institutions involved in child welfare. This approach, seeing the parent/children relationship in terms of parental competence, reaches its peak with the advent of the profession of parent, which in Romania has the name of "professional foster carer" ("asistent maternal profesionist"). This article explores the characteristics of this particular, professional, type of parenting, which represents an important form of intervention in the domain of child protection in Romania.

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