Negotiating Family Life in Foster Care: Child Welfare Managers’ Constructions of Family Life and Temporality in Norway

Temporary foster placements and recent European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and Supreme Court decisions on Article 8 raise questions about how child welfare services (CWS) balance reunification goals and children’s need for stability. This study examines how CWS managers conceptualise the right to family life and mobilise these constructions when negotiating temporality and contact. Drawing on a social constructivist perspective and critical discursive psychology (CDP), I analysed 19 semi-structured interviews with 15 managers from across Norway using a three-step CDP procedure. Four interpretative repertoires emerged: an expanded rights repertoire that broadens notions of family and child participation; a legal guidance repertoire that treats ECtHR and Supreme Court rulings as resources legitimising reunification; a juridical pressure repertoire describing how legal expectations constrain professional judgement and can lead to increased contact despite welfare concerns; and a temporality and stability repertoire that emphasises tensions between presumptions of temporariness and attachment-based arguments for permanence. The findings suggest that legal texts function as negotiable discursive resources that both empower and constrain practice, creating ethical and practical dilemmas for managers.