In my master's thesis I focused on exploring the perspective of foster parents, touching on a number of themes. At the beginning, in the theoretical part, I introduced the notion of family and fostering, with a particular focus on the motives or reasons that led foster parents to decide to start the fostering process. Since in the context of fostering families regularly enter into a process of cooperation with others, I have identified and explored the cooperation that takes place with the social work centre and the child's family of origin. I then looked at the positive and negative aspects of fostering and finally compared the situation of biological and foster children in the lives of foster parents, touching on attachment. In the empirical part, I present the findings of the qualitative research I have carried out. The research was based on semi-structured interviews with foster parents in Slovenia, all of whom were female and aged between 38 and 65. I found that the interviewees equated fostering with the notions of child care, safety, love, acceptance and home, with the vast majority seeing fostering as an option for parenthood. The most common reason given by interviewees for their decision to foster was the need to help their children, a small proportion of whom had experienced an inability to conceive, which had led to their decision to foster. Interviewees cite contact with biological parents and cooperation with professionals in the field of fostering as a major challenge in the area of fostering. When it comes to relationships and cooperation with the child's family of origin, interviewees expressed divided opinions. Some said that the birth families are very unresponsive, while others pointed to a very correct, friendly and successful relationship. The most common positive aspect of fostering that was mentioned was helping the children and giving love to the child, which in the end leads to a huge personal growth of the child. The negative aspects mentioned by the interviewees were mainly the view of foster children in the environment and the lack of appreciation of fostering, again the contact with the child's family of origin and the worries and stressful situations that often result from the relationship with the professional staff at the social work centre. The interviewees equate their role with that of a mother, saying that they do not differentiate between children. The presence of attachment between the interviewees and the children is strong, which they say is inevitable and necessary for the proper functioning of the family. The results of the survey can be a good opportunity to inform about the perspective of foster parents in Slovenia in society at large, and also provide an opportunity for further research on the topic of fostering. For the social work profession and similar professions, the survey provides a number of findings that can contribute to further understanding of the perspective of foster parents and provide insights into the functioning of foster care.
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