The different roles of follow-up – Department of Social Work

Family home parents’ experiences of the social service’s follow-up

Family care means that society takes on extensive responsibility for children who are in vulnerable life situations and with often difficult childhood experiences behind them. With a placement, the social service entrusts the family home parents with the task of providing for the children’s everyday existence, while the social service is ultimately responsible for the quality of the care.”

This is the starting point for a new article in Social Sciences journal.

But how do you take responsibility for care that you do not perform yourself?

One can see family home placement as a hybrid that is at the intersection between family and welfare efforts, two different arenas with different conditions of action. This means that the standards for care are not completely clear. On the one hand, family home care is a layman’s mission with the aim of giving the children as normal a growing up environment as possible, but on the other hand, it is also a public mission with statutory requirements on what the care should look like.

To allow these sides to meet, the social service works with follow-up. However, what the follow-up looks like varies greatly, shows a study by David Pålssons, researcher at the Department of Social Work, Stockholm University. He has interviewed eighteen family homes and draws the following conclusions from these interviews:

Family home follow-up can differ from family to family, but also within the same family over time. Some of the families feel that the follow-up is too short and that they wish for more contact and support.
There is a lack of consensus on how follow-up should be carried out. Follow-up can be considered and implemented as a verifying and sympathetic role, where the family’s privacy is respected. However, follow-up can also be about assisting and instructing, where the family homes are rather regarded as a welfare service that must maintain a certain standard.
There are inherent difficulties in monitoring day-to-day care in family homes. According to the study, unannounced visits are rare and social services do not appear to have a structured control over the children’s existence.

During the autumn of 2023, a government inquiry has submitted proposals on which quality requirements should be set for family homes and which supporting measures the social services should contribute with. It therefore remains to be seen whether the municipalities’ family home follow-up will be more closely regulated.

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