Navigating Family Relationships and a Sense of Home in Foster Care: The Experiences of Children With Migration Backgrounds

ABSTRACT Establishing a sense of belonging and home in foster care can be demanding for children, as placement involves discontinuities such as ruptures with family and networks. For children with migration backgrounds, this can include adapting to new languages, traditions, religious and cultural practices. In this study, we shed light on how children with migration backgrounds in foster care experience and navigate contact with their birth family and how their birth family relationships support and hinder their sense of home. Seven children and young people in foster care in Norway shared their experiences through interviews and photo elicitation. Reflexive thematic analysis and a theoretical framework of home were used to unpack how participants talked about relationships with birth family across the foster care trajectory. We present two main themes: (1) contact as complex social processes through the life course, illustrating how the participants navigated local and transnational family relationships governed by the CWS; (2) doing family: everyday life practices, showing how the participants created coherence and a sense of home by incorporating family into everyday life and utilizing their heritage language. We argue that recognizing children's various relationships and family practices is essential for supporting their home‐making process in foster care.