Introduction

Across the world, many children who cannot continue living with their biological parents are placed into foster care. Female foster carers or foster mothers play a particularly important role in this context. Despite the increase in non-traditional forms of parenthood and participation of fathers in the child's upbringing, mothers, including foster mothers, are still ascribed a central role in relation to child and family care. The mother's central role is both self-ascribed as well as imposed upon them. This chapter discusses the importance and structures of foster care in Germany, and presents the tensions and difficulties that foster parents and foster mothers experience in their various role identities as ‘carers’ and ‘parents’ (Schofield et al, 2013).

In this chapter, I reconstruct two multi-perspective cases of foster mothers who experienced premature and unplanned breakdown of their foster motherhood. These cases are reconstructions of stories of Ms Baggins and Ms Meyer from Germany. The reconstructions include their own perspectives on the foster care case, the perspectives of the supervising social workers, and the perspectives of their foster sons – all of whom were individually interviewed and told their own version of the breakdown of foster care. In the next step, both cases are analysed from the mothers’ perspective. All names used are pseudonyms.

The experience of foster motherhood breakdown is then discussed, focusing on how this experience seriously affected the identities of both foster mothers, and how their experiences reveal central characteristics of a (foster) mother's role. Finally, the question is posed as to whether the observed characteristics of a foster mother's role shape the general image of motherhood in Germany. This puts into question whether mothers can simultaneously uphold modern expectations of being emancipated and selfdetermined, pursuing career and labour market participation, and meet the societal expectations of good motherhood at the same time.

Foster care, foster carers, foster parents, foster mothers: roles, ambiguities and ideas

Foster carers and foster parents

The aim of the first part of the chapter is to contextualise what will be discussed further regarding foster mothers. This part provides a brief introduction to the context of foster care in Germany and Europe, and the particularities, stress factors and challenges of the foster parent role, as well as its ambiguity, lying between a carer role and a parenting role.