Abstract
Foster care in many ways challenges the dichotomy between home and workplace, intimate care, and paid employment. Foster parents are supposed to provide love and safety to children who cannot be with their biological parents for various reasons while receiving financial rewards.
Foster care in many ways challenges the idea of parental care as care embedded in a loving relationship that should by its very nature be free of financial rewards. Using semi-structured interviews with eight foster parents, the paper analyses how the foster parents (de)construct the boundaries between the private sphere of care and what meanings they attribute to the financial reward they receive.
The paper points out that foster parenting reflects an established gender order, within which care appears as an activity intrinsically linked with the gender identity of women. However, the identity of foster parents has simultaneously been constructed also in terms of a professional identity that permeates the sphere of paid work.
Foster parents construct their care both as a labour of love and full-time employment. They actively deconstruct the opposition between love/care and paid work and articulate care as a value that should be financially evaluated.